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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Snow-Image, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Snow-Image
+       and Other Twice-Told Tales
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: May, 1996 [eBook #513]
+[Most recently updated: May 22, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Charles Keller and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SNOW-IMAGE ***
+
+
+
+
+The Snow-Image
+
+and Other Twice-Told Tales
+
+by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+Contents
+
+ PREFACE
+ The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle
+ The Great Stone Face
+ Main Street
+ Ethan Brand
+ A Bell’s Biography
+ Sylph Etherege
+ The Canterbury Pilgrims
+ Old News
+ The Man of Adamant: An Apologue
+ The Devil in Manuscript
+ John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving
+ Old Ticonderoga: A Picture of The Past
+ The Wives of The Dead
+ Little Daffydowndilly
+ My Kinsman, Major Molineux
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+TO HORATIO BRIDGE, ESQ., U. S. N.
+
+MY DEAR BRIDGE:—Some of the more crabbed of my critics, I understand,
+have pronounced your friend egotistical, indiscreet, and even
+impertinent, on account of the Prefaces and Introductions with which,
+on several occasions, he has seen fit to pave the reader’s way into the
+interior edifice of a book. In the justice of this censure I do not
+exactly concur, for the reasons, on the one hand, that the public
+generally has negatived the idea of undue freedom on the author’s part,
+by evincing, it seems to me, rather more interest in those aforesaid
+Introductions than in the stories which followed; and that, on the
+other hand, with whatever appearance of confidential intimacy, I have
+been especially careful to make no disclosures respecting myself which
+the most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and
+which I was not perfectly willing that my worst enemy should know. I
+might further justify myself, on the plea that, ever since my youth, I
+have been addressing a very limited circle of friendly readers, without
+much danger of being overheard by the public at large; and that the
+habits thus acquired might pardonably continue, although strangers may
+have begun to mingle with my audience.
+
+But the charge, I am bold to say, is not a reasonable one, in any view
+which we can fairly take of it. There is no harm, but, on the contrary,
+good, in arraying some of the ordinary facts of life in a slightly
+idealized and artistic guise. I have taken facts which relate to
+myself, because they chance to be nearest at hand, and likewise are my
+own property. And, as for egotism, a person, who has been burrowing, to
+his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature, for the
+purposes of psychological romance,—and who pursues his researches in
+that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as
+by the light of observation,—will smile at incurring such an imputation
+in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits, his
+abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the
+surface. These things hide the man, instead of displaying him. You must
+make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of
+his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his
+essential traits.
+
+Be all this as it may, there can be no question as to the propriety of
+my inscribing this volume of earlier and later sketches to you, and
+pausing here, a few moments, to speak of them, as friend speaks to
+friend; still being cautious, however, that the public and the critics
+shall overhear nothing which we care about concealing. On you, if on no
+other person, I am entitled to rely, to sustain the position of my
+Dedicatee. If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an
+author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but, while
+we were lads together at a country college,—gathering blueberries, in
+study-hours, under those tall academic pines; or watching the great
+logs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or
+shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the
+summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy little stream
+which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the
+forest,—though you and I will never cast a line in it again,—two idle
+lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a
+hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the
+worse for us,—still it was your prognostic of your friend’s destiny,
+that he was to be a writer of fiction.
+
+And a fiction-monger, in due season, he became. But was there ever such
+a weary delay in obtaining the slightest recognition from the public,
+as in my case? I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under
+enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew
+to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared
+possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity. And there,
+perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment, with the moss on the
+imprisoning tree-trunks, and the yellow leaves of more than a score of
+autumns piled above me, if it had not been for you. For it was through
+your interposition—and that, moreover, unknown to himself—that your
+early friend was brought before the public, somewhat more prominently
+than theretofore, in the first volume of Twice-told Tales. Not a
+publisher in America, I presume, would have thought well enough of my
+forgotten or never-noticed stories to risk the expense of print and
+paper; nor do I say this with any purpose of casting odium on the
+respectable fraternity of booksellers, for their blindness to my
+wonderful merit. To confess the truth, I doubted of the public
+recognition quite as much as they could do. So much the more generous
+was your confidence; and knowing, as I do, that it was founded on old
+friendship rather than cold criticism, I value it only the more for
+that.
+
+So, now, when I turn back upon my path, lighted by a transitory gleam
+of public favor, to pick up a few articles which were left out of my
+former collections, I take pleasure in making them the memorial of our
+very long and unbroken connection. Some of these sketches were among
+the earliest that I wrote, and, after lying for years in manuscript,
+they at last skulked into the Annuals or Magazines, and have hidden
+themselves there ever since. Others were the productions of a later
+period; others, again, were written recently. The comparison of these
+various trifles—the indices of intellectual condition at far separate
+epochs—affects me with a singular complexity of regrets. I am disposed
+to quarrel with the earlier sketches, both because a mature judgment
+discerns so many faults, and still more because they come so nearly up
+to the standard of the best that I can achieve now. The ripened
+autumnal fruit tastes but little better than the early windfalls. It
+would, indeed, be mortifying to believe that the summer-time of life
+has passed away, without any greater progress and improvement than is
+indicated here. But—at least, so I would fain hope—these things are
+scarcely to be depended upon, as measures of the intellectual and moral
+man. In youth, men are apt to write more wisely than they really know
+or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing
+and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.
+The truth that was only in the fancy then may have since become a
+substance in the mind and heart.
+
+I have nothing further, I think, to say; unless it be that the public
+need not dread my again trespassing on its kindness, with any more of
+these musty and mouse-nibbled leaves of old periodicals, transformed,
+by the magic arts of my friendly publishers, into a new book. These are
+the last. Or, if a few still remain, they are either such as no
+paternal partiality could induce the author to think worth preserving,
+or else they have got into some very dark and dusty hiding-place, quite
+out of my own remembrance and whence no researches can avail to unearth
+them. So there let them rest.
+
+                        Very sincerely yours,
+                                                   N. H.
+
+
+LENOX, November 1, 1851.
+
+
+
+
+THE SNOW-IMAGE:
+A CHILDISH MIRACLE
+
+
+One afternoon of a cold winter’s day, when the sun shone forth with
+chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of
+their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder
+child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest
+disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and
+other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her
+brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the
+ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody
+think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father of these two
+children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is important to say, was an
+excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of man, a dealer in
+hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is called the
+common-sense view of all matters that came under his consideration.
+With a heart about as tender as other people’s, he had a head as hard
+and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron
+pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother’s
+character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of
+unworldly beauty,—a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had
+survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid
+the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.
+
+So, Violet and Peony, as I began with saying, besought their mother to
+let them run out and play in the new snow; for, though it had looked so
+dreary and dismal, drifting downward out of the gray sky, it had a very
+cheerful aspect, now that the sun was shining on it. The children dwelt
+in a city, and had no wider play-place than a little garden before the
+house, divided by a white fence from the street, and with a pear-tree
+and two or three plum-trees overshadowing it, and some rose-bushes just
+in front of the parlor-windows. The trees and shrubs, however, were now
+leafless, and their twigs were enveloped in the light snow, which thus
+made a kind of wintry foliage, with here and there a pendent icicle for
+the fruit.
+
+“Yes, Violet,—yes, my little Peony,” said their kind mother, “you may
+go out and play in the new snow.”
+
+Accordingly, the good lady bundled up her darlings in woollen jackets
+and wadded sacks, and put comforters round their necks, and a pair of
+striped gaiters on each little pair of legs, and worsted mittens on
+their hands, and gave them a kiss apiece, by way of a spell to keep
+away Jack Frost. Forth sallied the two children, with a
+hop-skip-and-jump, that carried them at once into the very heart of a
+huge snow-drift, whence Violet emerged like a snow-bunting, while
+little Peony floundered out with his round face in full bloom. Then
+what a merry time had they! To look at them, frolicking in the wintry
+garden, you would have thought that the dark and pitiless storm had
+been sent for no other purpose but to provide a new plaything for
+Violet and Peony; and that they themselves had been created, as the
+snow-birds were, to take delight only in the tempest, and in the white
+mantle which it spread over the earth.
+
+At last, when they had frosted one another all over with handfuls of
+snow, Violet, after laughing heartily at little Peony’s figure, was
+struck with a new idea.
+
+“You look exactly like a snow-image, Peony,” said she, “if your cheeks
+were not so red. And that puts me in mind! Let us make an image out of
+snow,—an image of a little girl,—and it shall be our sister, and shall
+run about and play with us all winter long. Won’t it be nice?”
+
+“Oh yes!” cried Peony, as plainly as he could speak, for he was but a
+little boy. “That will be nice! And mamma shall see it!”
+
+“Yes,” answered Violet; “mamma shall see the new little girl. But she
+must not make her come into the warm parlor; for, you know, our little
+snow-sister will not love the warmth.”
+
+And forthwith the children began this great business of making a
+snow-image that should run about; while their mother, who was sitting
+at the window and overheard some of their talk, could not help smiling
+at the gravity with which they set about it. They really seemed to
+imagine that there would be no difficulty whatever in creating a live
+little girl out of the snow. And, to say the truth, if miracles are
+ever to be wrought, it will be by putting our hands to the work in
+precisely such a simple and undoubting frame of mind as that in which
+Violet and Peony now undertook to perform one, without so much as
+knowing that it was a miracle. So thought the mother; and thought,
+likewise, that the new snow, just fallen from heaven, would be
+excellent material to make new beings of, if it were not so very cold.
+She gazed at the children a moment longer, delighting to watch their
+little figures,—the girl, tall for her age, graceful and agile, and so
+delicately colored that she looked like a cheerful thought more than a
+physical reality; while Peony expanded in breadth rather than height,
+and rolled along on his short and sturdy legs as substantial as an
+elephant, though not quite so big. Then the mother resumed her work.
+What it was I forget; but she was either trimming a silken bonnet for
+Violet, or darning a pair of stockings for little Peony’s short legs.
+Again, however, and again, and yet other agains, she could not help
+turning her head to the window to see how the children got on with
+their snow-image.
+
+Indeed, it was an exceedingly pleasant sight, those bright little souls
+at their task! Moreover, it was really wonderful to observe how
+knowingly and skilfully they managed the matter. Violet assumed the
+chief direction, and told Peony what to do, while, with her own
+delicate fingers, she shaped out all the nicer parts of the
+snow-figure. It seemed, in fact, not so much to be made by the
+children, as to grow up under their hands, while they were playing and
+prattling about it. Their mother was quite surprised at this; and the
+longer she looked, the more and more surprised she grew.
+
+“What remarkable children mine are!” thought she, smiling with a
+mother’s pride; and, smiling at herself, too, for being so proud of
+them. “What other children could have made anything so like a little
+girl’s figure out of snow at the first trial? Well; but now I must
+finish Peony’s new frock, for his grandfather is coming to-morrow, and
+I want the little fellow to look handsome.”
+
+So she took up the frock, and was soon as busily at work again with her
+needle as the two children with their snow-image. But still, as the
+needle travelled hither and thither through the seams of the dress, the
+mother made her toil light and happy by listening to the airy voices of
+Violet and Peony. They kept talking to one another all the time, their
+tongues being quite as active as their feet and hands. Except at
+intervals, she could not distinctly hear what was said, but had merely
+a sweet impression that they were in a most loving mood, and were
+enjoying themselves highly, and that the business of making the
+snow-image went prosperously on. Now and then, however, when Violet and
+Peony happened to raise their voices, the words were as audible as if
+they had been spoken in the very parlor where the mother sat. Oh how
+delightfully those words echoed in her heart, even though they meant
+nothing so very wise or wonderful, after all!
+
+But you must know a mother listens with her heart much more than with
+her ears; and thus she is often delighted with the trills of celestial
+music, when other people can hear nothing of the kind.
+
+“Peony, Peony!” cried Violet to her brother, who had gone to another
+part of the garden, “bring me some of that fresh snow, Peony, from the
+very farthest corner, where we have not been trampling. I want it to
+shape our little snow-sister’s bosom with. You know that part must be
+quite pure, just as it came out of the sky!”
+
+“Here it is, Violet!” answered Peony, in his bluff tone,—but a very
+sweet tone, too,—as he came floundering through the half-trodden
+drifts. “Here is the snow for her little bosom. O Violet, how
+beau-ti-ful she begins to look!”
+
+“Yes,” said Violet, thoughtfully and quietly; “our snow-sister does
+look very lovely. I did not quite know, Peony, that we could make such
+a sweet little girl as this.”
+
+The mother, as she listened, thought how fit and delightful an incident
+it would be, if fairies, or still better, if angel-children were to
+come from paradise, and play invisibly with her own darlings, and help
+them to make their snow-image, giving it the features of celestial
+babyhood! Violet and Peony would not be aware of their immortal
+playmates,—only they would see that the image grew very beautiful while
+they worked at it, and would think that they themselves had done it
+all.
+
+“My little girl and boy deserve such playmates, if mortal children ever
+did!” said the mother to herself; and then she smiled again at her own
+motherly pride.
+
+Nevertheless, the idea seized upon her imagination; and, ever and anon,
+she took a glimpse out of the window, half dreaming that she might see
+the golden-haired children of paradise sporting with her own
+golden-haired Violet and bright-cheeked Peony.
+
+Now, for a few moments, there was a busy and earnest, but indistinct
+hum of the two children’s voices, as Violet and Peony wrought together
+with one happy consent. Violet still seemed to be the guiding spirit,
+while Peony acted rather as a laborer, and brought her the snow from
+far and near. And yet the little urchin evidently had a proper
+understanding of the matter, too!
+
+“Peony, Peony!” cried Violet; for her brother was again at the other
+side of the garden. “Bring me those light wreaths of snow that have
+rested on the lower branches of the pear-tree. You can clamber on the
+snowdrift, Peony, and reach them easily. I must have them to make some
+ringlets for our snow-sister’s head!”
+
+“Here they are, Violet!” answered the little boy. “Take care you do not
+break them. Well done! Well done! How pretty!”
+
+“Does she not look sweetly?” said Violet, with a very satisfied tone;
+“and now we must have some little shining bits of ice, to make the
+brightness of her eyes. She is not finished yet. Mamma will see how
+very beautiful she is; but papa will say, ‘Tush! nonsense!—come in out
+of the cold!’”
+
+“Let us call mamma to look out,” said Peony; and then he shouted
+lustily, “Mamma! mamma!! mamma!!! Look out, and see what a nice ’ittle
+girl we are making!”
+
+The mother put down her work for an instant, and looked out of the
+window. But it so happened that the sun—for this was one of the
+shortest days of the whole year—had sunken so nearly to the edge of the
+world that his setting shine came obliquely into the lady’s eyes. So
+she was dazzled, you must understand, and could not very distinctly
+observe what was in the garden. Still, however, through all that
+bright, blinding dazzle of the sun and the new snow, she beheld a small
+white figure in the garden, that seemed to have a wonderful deal of
+human likeness about it. And she saw Violet and Peony,—indeed, she
+looked more at them than at the image,—she saw the two children still
+at work; Peony bringing fresh snow, and Violet applying it to the
+figure as scientifically as a sculptor adds clay to his model.
+Indistinctly as she discerned the snow-child, the mother thought to
+herself that never before was there a snow-figure so cunningly made,
+nor ever such a dear little girl and boy to make it.
+
+“They do everything better than other children,” said she, very
+complacently. “No wonder they make better snow-images!”
+
+She sat down again to her work, and made as much haste with it as
+possible; because twilight would soon come, and Peony’s frock was not
+yet finished, and grandfather was expected, by railroad, pretty early
+in the morning. Faster and faster, therefore, went her flying fingers.
+The children, likewise, kept busily at work in the garden, and still
+the mother listened, whenever she could catch a word. She was amused to
+observe how their little imaginations had got mixed up with what they
+were doing, and carried away by it. They seemed positively to think
+that the snow-child would run about and play with them.
+
+“What a nice playmate she will be for us, all winter long!” said
+Violet. “I hope papa will not be afraid of her giving us a cold!
+Sha’n’t you love her dearly, Peony?”
+
+“Oh yes!” cried Peony. “And I will hug her, and she shall sit down
+close by me and drink some of my warm milk!”
+
+“Oh no, Peony!” answered Violet, with grave wisdom. “That will not do
+at all. Warm milk will not be wholesome for our little snow-sister.
+Little snow people, like her, eat nothing but icicles. No, no, Peony;
+we must not give her anything warm to drink!”
+
+There was a minute or two of silence; for Peony, whose short legs were
+never weary, had gone on a pilgrimage again to the other side of the
+garden. All of a sudden, Violet cried out, loudly and joyfully,—“Look
+here, Peony! Come quickly! A light has been shining on her cheek out of
+that rose-colored cloud! and the color does not go away! Is not that
+beautiful!”
+
+“Yes; it is beau-ti-ful,” answered Peony, pronouncing the three
+syllables with deliberate accuracy. “O Violet, only look at her hair!
+It is all like gold!”
+
+“Oh certainly,” said Violet, with tranquillity, as if it were very much
+a matter of course. “That color, you know, comes from the golden
+clouds, that we see up there in the sky. She is almost finished now.
+But her lips must be made very red,—redder than her cheeks. Perhaps,
+Peony, it will make them red if we both kiss them!”
+
+Accordingly, the mother heard two smart little smacks, as if both her
+children were kissing the snow-image on its frozen mouth. But, as this
+did not seem to make the lips quite red enough, Violet next proposed
+that the snow-child should be invited to kiss Peony’s scarlet cheek.
+
+“Come, ’ittle snow-sister, kiss me!” cried Peony.
+
+“There! she has kissed you,” added Violet, “and now her lips are very
+red. And she blushed a little, too!”
+
+“Oh, what a cold kiss!” cried Peony.
+
+Just then, there came a breeze of the pure west-wind, sweeping through
+the garden and rattling the parlor-windows. It sounded so wintry cold,
+that the mother was about to tap on the window-pane with her thimbled
+finger, to summon the two children in, when they both cried out to her
+with one voice. The tone was not a tone of surprise, although they were
+evidently a good deal excited; it appeared rather as if they were very
+much rejoiced at some event that had now happened, but which they had
+been looking for, and had reckoned upon all along.
+
+“Mamma! mamma! We have finished our little snow-sister, and she is
+running about the garden with us!”
+
+“What imaginative little beings my children are!” thought the mother,
+putting the last few stitches into Peony’s frock. “And it is strange,
+too that they make me almost as much a child as they themselves are! I
+can hardly help believing, now, that the snow-image has really come to
+life!”
+
+“Dear mamma!” cried Violet, “pray look out and see what a sweet
+playmate we have!”
+
+The mother, being thus entreated, could no longer delay to look forth
+from the window. The sun was now gone out of the sky, leaving, however,
+a rich inheritance of his brightness among those purple and golden
+clouds which make the sunsets of winter so magnificent. But there was
+not the slightest gleam or dazzle, either on the window or on the snow;
+so that the good lady could look all over the garden, and see
+everything and everybody in it. And what do you think she saw there?
+Violet and Peony, of course, her own two darling children. Ah, but whom
+or what did she see besides? Why, if you will believe me, there was a
+small figure of a girl, dressed all in white, with rose-tinged cheeks
+and ringlets of golden hue, playing about the garden with the two
+children! A stranger though she was, the child seemed to be on as
+familiar terms with Violet and Peony, and they with her, as if all the
+three had been playmates during the whole of their little lives. The
+mother thought to herself that it must certainly be the daughter of one
+of the neighbors, and that, seeing Violet and Peony in the garden, the
+child had run across the street to play with them. So this kind lady
+went to the door, intending to invite the little runaway into her
+comfortable parlor; for, now that the sunshine was withdrawn, the
+atmosphere, out of doors, was already growing very cold.
+
+But, after opening the house-door, she stood an instant on the
+threshold, hesitating whether she ought to ask the child to come in, or
+whether she should even speak to her. Indeed, she almost doubted
+whether it were a real child after all, or only a light wreath of the
+new-fallen snow, blown hither and thither about the garden by the
+intensely cold west-wind. There was certainly something very singular
+in the aspect of the little stranger. Among all the children of the
+neighborhood, the lady could remember no such face, with its pure
+white, and delicate rose-color, and the golden ringlets tossing about
+the forehead and cheeks. And as for her dress, which was entirely of
+white, and fluttering in the breeze, it was such as no reasonable woman
+would put upon a little girl, when sending her out to play, in the
+depth of winter. It made this kind and careful mother shiver only to
+look at those small feet, with nothing in the world on them, except a
+very thin pair of white slippers. Nevertheless, airily as she was clad,
+the child seemed to feel not the slightest inconvenience from the cold,
+but danced so lightly over the snow that the tips of her toes left
+hardly a print in its surface; while Violet could but just keep pace
+with her, and Peony’s short legs compelled him to lag behind.
+
+Once, in the course of their play, the strange child placed herself
+between Violet and Peony, and taking a hand of each, skipped merrily
+forward, and they along with her. Almost immediately, however, Peony
+pulled away his little fist, and began to rub it as if the fingers were
+tingling with cold; while Violet also released herself, though with
+less abruptness, gravely remarking that it was better not to take hold
+of hands. The white-robed damsel said not a word, but danced about,
+just as merrily as before. If Violet and Peony did not choose to play
+with her, she could make just as good a playmate of the brisk and cold
+west-wind, which kept blowing her all about the garden, and took such
+liberties with her, that they seemed to have been friends for a long
+time. All this while, the mother stood on the threshold, wondering how
+a little girl could look so much like a flying snow-drift, or how a
+snow-drift could look so very like a little girl.
+
+She called Violet, and whispered to her.
+
+“Violet my darling, what is this child’s name?” asked she. “Does she
+live near us?”
+
+“Why, dearest mamma,” answered Violet, laughing to think that her
+mother did not comprehend so very plain an affair, “this is our little
+snow-sister whom we have just been making!”
+
+“Yes, dear mamma,” cried Peony, running to his mother, and looking up
+simply into her face. “This is our snow-image! Is it not a nice ’ittle
+child?”
+
+At this instant a flock of snow-birds came flitting through the air. As
+was very natural, they avoided Violet and Peony. But—and this looked
+strange—they flew at once to the white-robed child, fluttered eagerly
+about her head, alighted on her shoulders, and seemed to claim her as
+an old acquaintance. She, on her part, was evidently as glad to see
+these little birds, old Winter’s grandchildren, as they were to see
+her, and welcomed them by holding out both her hands. Hereupon, they
+each and all tried to alight on her two palms and ten small fingers and
+thumbs, crowding one another off, with an immense fluttering of their
+tiny wings. One dear little bird nestled tenderly in her bosom; another
+put its bill to her lips. They were as joyous, all the while, and
+seemed as much in their element, as you may have seen them when
+sporting with a snow-storm.
+
+Violet and Peony stood laughing at this pretty sight; for they enjoyed
+the merry time which their new playmate was having with these
+small-winged visitants, almost as much as if they themselves took part
+in it.
+
+“Violet,” said her mother, greatly perplexed, “tell me the truth,
+without any jest. Who is this little girl?”
+
+“My darling mamma,” answered Violet, looking seriously into her
+mother’s face, and apparently surprised that she should need any
+further explanation, “I have told you truly who she is. It is our
+little snow-image, which Peony and I have been making. Peony will tell
+you so, as well as I.”
+
+“Yes, mamma,” asseverated Peony, with much gravity in his crimson
+little phiz; “this is ’ittle snow-child. Is not she a nice one? But,
+mamma, her hand is, oh, so very cold!”
+
+While mamma still hesitated what to think and what to do, the
+street-gate was thrown open, and the father of Violet and Peony
+appeared, wrapped in a pilot-cloth sack, with a fur cap drawn down over
+his ears, and the thickest of gloves upon his hands. Mr. Lindsey was a
+middle-aged man, with a weary and yet a happy look in his wind-flushed
+and frost-pinched face, as if he had been busy all the day long, and
+was glad to get back to his quiet home. His eyes brightened at the
+sight of his wife and children, although he could not help uttering a
+word or two of surprise, at finding the whole family in the open air,
+on so bleak a day, and after sunset too. He soon perceived the little
+white stranger sporting to and fro in the garden, like a dancing
+snow-wreath, and the flock of snow-birds fluttering about her head.
+
+“Pray, what little girl may that be?” inquired this very sensible man.
+“Surely her mother must be crazy to let her go out in such bitter
+weather as it has been to-day, with only that flimsy white gown and
+those thin slippers!”
+
+“My dear husband,” said his wife, “I know no more about the little
+thing than you do. Some neighbor’s child, I suppose. Our Violet and
+Peony,” she added, laughing at herself for repeating so absurd a story,
+“insist that she is nothing but a snow-image, which they have been busy
+about in the garden, almost all the afternoon.”
+
+As she said this, the mother glanced her eyes toward the spot where the
+children’s snow-image had been made. What was her surprise, on
+perceiving that there was not the slightest trace of so much labor!—no
+image at all!—no piled up heap of snow!—nothing whatever, save the
+prints of little footsteps around a vacant space!
+
+“This is very strange!” said she.
+
+“What is strange, dear mother?” asked Violet. “Dear father, do not you
+see how it is? This is our snow-image, which Peony and I have made,
+because we wanted another playmate. Did not we, Peony?”
+
+“Yes, papa,” said crimson Peony. “This be our ’ittle snow-sister. Is
+she not beau-ti-ful? But she gave me such a cold kiss!”
+
+“Poh, nonsense, children!” cried their good, honest father, who, as we
+have already intimated, had an exceedingly common-sensible way of
+looking at matters. “Do not tell me of making live figures out of snow.
+Come, wife; this little stranger must not stay out in the bleak air a
+moment longer. We will bring her into the parlor; and you shall give
+her a supper of warm bread and milk, and make her as comfortable as you
+can. Meanwhile, I will inquire among the neighbors; or, if necessary,
+send the city-crier about the streets, to give notice of a lost child.”
+
+So saying, this honest and very kind-hearted man was going toward the
+little white damsel, with the best intentions in the world. But Violet
+and Peony, each seizing their father by the hand, earnestly besought
+him not to make her come in.
+
+“Dear father,” cried Violet, putting herself before him, “it is true
+what I have been telling you! This is our little snow-girl, and she
+cannot live any longer than while she breathes the cold west-wind. Do
+not make her come into the hot room!”
+
+“Yes, father,” shouted Peony, stamping his little foot, so mightily was
+he in earnest, “this be nothing but our ’ittle snow-child! She will not
+love the hot fire!”
+
+“Nonsense, children, nonsense, nonsense!” cried the father, half vexed,
+half laughing at what he considered their foolish obstinacy. “Run into
+the house, this moment! It is too late to play any longer, now. I must
+take care of this little girl immediately, or she will catch her
+death-a-cold!”
+
+“Husband! dear husband!” said his wife, in a low voice,—for she had
+been looking narrowly at the snow-child, and was more perplexed than
+ever,—“there is something very singular in all this. You will think me
+foolish,—but—but—may it not be that some invisible angel has been
+attracted by the simplicity and good faith with which our children set
+about their undertaking? May he not have spent an hour of his
+immortality in playing with those dear little souls? and so the result
+is what we call a miracle. No, no! Do not laugh at me; I see what a
+foolish thought it is!”
+
+“My dear wife,” replied the husband, laughing heartily, “you are as
+much a child as Violet and Peony.”
+
+And in one sense so she was, for all through life she had kept her
+heart full of childlike simplicity and faith, which was as pure and
+clear as crystal; and, looking at all matters through this transparent
+medium, she sometimes saw truths so profound that other people laughed
+at them as nonsense and absurdity.
+
+But now kind Mr. Lindsey had entered the garden, breaking away from his
+two children, who still sent their shrill voices after him, beseeching
+him to let the snow-child stay and enjoy herself in the cold west-wind.
+As he approached, the snow-birds took to flight. The little white
+damsel, also, fled backward, shaking her head, as if to say, “Pray, do
+not touch me!” and roguishly, as it appeared, leading him through the
+deepest of the snow. Once, the good man stumbled, and floundered down
+upon his face, so that, gathering himself up again, with the snow
+sticking to his rough pilot-cloth sack, he looked as white and wintry
+as a snow-image of the largest size. Some of the neighbors, meanwhile,
+seeing him from their windows, wondered what could possess poor Mr.
+Lindsey to be running about his garden in pursuit of a snow-drift,
+which the west-wind was driving hither and thither! At length, after a
+vast deal of trouble, he chased the little stranger into a corner,
+where she could not possibly escape him. His wife had been looking on,
+and, it being nearly twilight, was wonder-struck to observe how the
+snow-child gleamed and sparkled, and how she seemed to shed a glow all
+round about her; and when driven into the corner, she positively
+glistened like a star! It was a frosty kind of brightness, too, like
+that of an icicle in the moonlight. The wife thought it strange that
+good Mr. Lindsey should see nothing remarkable in the snow-child’s
+appearance.
+
+“Come, you odd little thing!” cried the honest man, seizing her by the
+hand, “I have caught you at last, and will make you comfortable in
+spite of yourself. We will put a nice warm pair of worsted stockings on
+your frozen little feet, and you shall have a good thick shawl to wrap
+yourself in. Your poor white nose, I am afraid, is actually
+frost-bitten. But we will make it all right. Come along in.”
+
+And so, with a most benevolent smile on his sagacious visage, all
+purple as it was with the cold, this very well-meaning gentleman took
+the snow-child by the hand and led her towards the house. She followed
+him, droopingly and reluctant; for all the glow and sparkle was gone
+out of her figure; and whereas just before she had resembled a bright,
+frosty, star-gemmed evening, with a crimson gleam on the cold horizon,
+she now looked as dull and languid as a thaw. As kind Mr. Lindsey led
+her up the steps of the door, Violet and Peony looked into his
+face,—their eyes full of tears, which froze before they could run down
+their cheeks,—and again entreated him not to bring their snow-image
+into the house.
+
+“Not bring her in!” exclaimed the kind-hearted man. “Why, you are
+crazy, my little Violet!—quite crazy, my small Peony! She is so cold,
+already, that her hand has almost frozen mine, in spite of my thick
+gloves. Would you have her freeze to death?”
+
+His wife, as he came up the steps, had been taking another long,
+earnest, almost awe-stricken gaze at the little white stranger. She
+hardly knew whether it was a dream or no; but she could not help
+fancying that she saw the delicate print of Violet’s fingers on the
+child’s neck. It looked just as if, while Violet was shaping out the
+image, she had given it a gentle pat with her hand, and had neglected
+to smooth the impression quite away.
+
+“After all, husband,” said the mother, recurring to her idea that the
+angels would be as much delighted to play with Violet and Peony as she
+herself was,—“after all, she does look strangely like a snow-image! I
+do believe she is made of snow!”
+
+A puff of the west-wind blew against the snow-child, and again she
+sparkled like a star.
+
+“Snow!” repeated good Mr. Lindsey, drawing the reluctant guest over his
+hospitable threshold. “No wonder she looks like snow. She is half
+frozen, poor little thing! But a good fire will put everything to
+rights!”
+
+Without further talk, and always with the same best intentions, this
+highly benevolent and common-sensible individual led the little white
+damsel—drooping, drooping, drooping, more and more out of the frosty
+air, and into his comfortable parlor. A Heidenberg stove, filled to the
+brim with intensely burning anthracite, was sending a bright gleam
+through the isinglass of its iron door, and causing the vase of water
+on its top to fume and bubble with excitement. A warm, sultry smell was
+diffused throughout the room. A thermometer on the wall farthest from
+the stove stood at eighty degrees. The parlor was hung with red
+curtains, and covered with a red carpet, and looked just as warm as it
+felt. The difference betwixt the atmosphere here and the cold, wintry
+twilight out of doors, was like stepping at once from Nova Zembla to
+the hottest part of India, or from the North Pole into an oven. Oh,
+this was a fine place for the little white stranger!
+
+The common-sensible man placed the snow-child on the hearth-rug, right
+in front of the hissing and fuming stove.
+
+“Now she will be comfortable!” cried Mr. Lindsey, rubbing his hands and
+looking about him, with the pleasantest smile you ever saw. “Make
+yourself at home, my child.”
+
+Sad, sad and drooping, looked the little white maiden, as she stood on
+the hearth-rug, with the hot blast of the stove striking through her
+like a pestilence. Once, she threw a glance wistfully toward the
+windows, and caught a glimpse, through its red curtains, of the
+snow-covered roofs, and the stars glimmering frostily, and all the
+delicious intensity of the cold night. The bleak wind rattled the
+window-panes, as if it were summoning her to come forth. But there
+stood the snow-child, drooping, before the hot stove!
+
+But the common-sensible man saw nothing amiss.
+
+“Come wife,” said he, “let her have a pair of thick stockings and a
+woollen shawl or blanket directly; and tell Dora to give her some warm
+supper as soon as the milk boils. You, Violet and Peony, amuse your
+little friend. She is out of spirits, you see, at finding herself in a
+strange place. For my part, I will go around among the neighbors, and
+find out where she belongs.”
+
+The mother, meanwhile, had gone in search of the shawl and stockings;
+for her own view of the matter, however subtle and delicate, had given
+way, as it always did, to the stubborn materialism of her husband.
+Without heeding the remonstrances of his two children, who still kept
+murmuring that their little snow-sister did not love the warmth, good
+Mr. Lindsey took his departure, shutting the parlor-door carefully
+behind him. Turning up the collar of his sack over his ears, he emerged
+from the house, and had barely reached the street-gate, when he was
+recalled by the screams of Violet and Peony, and the rapping of a
+thimbled finger against the parlor window.
+
+“Husband! husband!” cried his wife, showing her horror-stricken face
+through the window-panes. “There is no need of going for the child’s
+parents!”
+
+“We told you so, father!” screamed Violet and Peony, as he re-entered
+the parlor. “You would bring her in; and now our poor—dear-beau-ti-ful
+little snow-sister is thawed!”
+
+And their own sweet little faces were already dissolved in tears; so
+that their father, seeing what strange things occasionally happen in
+this every-day world, felt not a little anxious lest his children might
+be going to thaw too! In the utmost perplexity, he demanded an
+explanation of his wife. She could only reply, that, being summoned to
+the parlor by the cries of Violet and Peony, she found no trace of the
+little white maiden, unless it were the remains of a heap of snow,
+which, while she was gazing at it, melted quite away upon the
+hearth-rug.
+
+“And there you see all that is left of it!” added she, pointing to a
+pool of water in front of the stove.
+
+“Yes, father,” said Violet looking reproachfully at him, through her
+tears, “there is all that is left of our dear little snow-sister!”
+
+“Naughty father!” cried Peony, stamping his foot, and—I shudder to
+say—shaking his little fist at the common-sensible man. “We told you
+how it would be! What for did you bring her in?”
+
+And the Heidenberg stove, through the isinglass of its door, seemed to
+glare at good Mr. Lindsey, like a red-eyed demon, triumphing in the
+mischief which it had done!
+
+This, you will observe, was one of those rare cases, which yet will
+occasionally happen, where common-sense finds itself at fault. The
+remarkable story of the snow-image, though to that sagacious class of
+people to whom good Mr. Lindsey belongs it may seem but a childish
+affair, is, nevertheless, capable of being moralized in various
+methods, greatly for their edification. One of its lessons, for
+instance, might be, that it behooves men, and especially men of
+benevolence, to consider well what they are about, and, before acting
+on their philanthropic purposes, to be quite sure that they comprehend
+the nature and all the relations of the business in hand. What has been
+established as an element of good to one being may prove absolute
+mischief to another; even as the warmth of the parlor was proper enough
+for children of flesh and blood, like Violet and Peony,—though by no
+means very wholesome, even for them,—but involved nothing short of
+annihilation to the unfortunate snow-image.
+
+But, after all, there is no teaching anything to wise men of good Mr.
+Lindsey’s stamp. They know everything,—oh, to be sure!—everything that
+has been, and everything that is, and everything that, by any future
+possibility, can be. And, should some phenomenon of nature or
+providence transcend their system, they will not recognize it, even if
+it come to pass under their very noses.
+
+“Wife,” said Mr. Lindsey, after a fit of silence, “see what a quantity
+of snow the children have brought in on their feet! It has made quite a
+puddle here before the stove. Pray tell Dora to bring some towels and
+mop it up!”
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT STONE FACE
+
+
+One afternoon, when the sun was going down, a mother and her little boy
+sat at the door of their cottage, talking about the Great Stone Face.
+They had but to lift their eyes, and there it was plainly to be seen,
+though miles away, with the sunshine brightening all its features.
+
+And what was the Great Stone Face?
+
+Embosomed amongst a family of lofty mountains, there was a valley so
+spacious that it contained many thousand inhabitants. Some of these
+good people dwelt in log-huts, with the black forest all around them,
+on the steep and difficult hill-sides. Others had their homes in
+comfortable farm-houses, and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle
+slopes or level surfaces of the valley. Others, again, were congregated
+into populous villages, where some wild, highland rivulet, tumbling
+down from its birthplace in the upper mountain region, had been caught
+and tamed by human cunning, and compelled to turn the machinery of
+cotton-factories. The inhabitants of this valley, in short, were
+numerous, and of many modes of life. But all of them, grown people and
+children, had a kind of familiarity with the Great Stone Face, although
+some possessed the gift of distinguishing this grand natural phenomenon
+more perfectly than many of their neighbors.
+
+The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of
+majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by
+some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position
+as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the
+features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant,
+or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was
+the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose,
+with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have
+spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the
+valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too
+near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern
+only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one
+upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would
+again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a
+human face, with all its original divinity intact, did they appear;
+until, as it grew dim in the distance, with the clouds and glorified
+vapor of the mountains clustering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed
+positively to be alive.
+
+It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or womanhood with
+the Great Stone Face before their eyes, for all the features were
+noble, and the expression was at once grand and sweet, as if it were
+the glow of a vast, warm heart, that embraced all mankind in its
+affections, and had room for more. It was an education only to look at
+it. According to the belief of many people, the valley owed much of its
+fertility to this benign aspect that was continually beaming over it,
+illuminating the clouds, and infusing its tenderness into the sunshine.
+
+As we began with saying, a mother and her little boy sat at their
+cottage-door, gazing at the Great Stone Face, and talking about it. The
+child’s name was Ernest.
+
+“Mother,” said he, while the Titanic visage smiled on him, “I wish that
+it could speak, for it looks so very kindly that its voice must needs
+be pleasant. If I were to see a man with such a face, I should love him
+dearly.”
+
+“If an old prophecy should come to pass,” answered his mother, “we may
+see a man, some time or other, with exactly such a face as that.”
+
+“What prophecy do you mean, dear mother?” eagerly inquired Ernest.
+“Pray tell me about it!”
+
+So his mother told him a story that her own mother had told to her,
+when she herself was younger than little Ernest; a story, not of things
+that were past, but of what was yet to come; a story, nevertheless, so
+very old, that even the Indians, who formerly inhabited this valley,
+had heard it from their forefathers, to whom, as they affirmed, it had
+been murmured by the mountain streams, and whispered by the wind among
+the tree-tops. The purport was, that, at some future day, a child
+should be born hereabouts, who was destined to become the greatest and
+noblest personage of his time, and whose countenance, in manhood,
+should bear an exact resemblance to the Great Stone Face. Not a few
+old-fashioned people, and young ones likewise, in the ardor of their
+hopes, still cherished an enduring faith in this old prophecy. But
+others, who had seen more of the world, had watched and waited till
+they were weary, and had beheld no man with such a face, nor any man
+that proved to be much greater or nobler than his neighbors, concluded
+it to be nothing but an idle tale. At all events, the great man of the
+prophecy had not yet appeared.
+
+“O mother, dear mother!” cried Ernest, clapping his hands above his
+head, “I do hope that I shall live to see him!”
+
+His mother was an affectionate and thoughtful woman, and felt that it
+was wisest not to discourage the generous hopes of her little boy. So
+she only said to him, “Perhaps you may.”
+
+And Ernest never forgot the story that his mother told him. It was
+always in his mind, whenever he looked upon the Great Stone Face. He
+spent his childhood in the log-cottage where he was born, and was
+dutiful to his mother, and helpful to her in many things, assisting her
+much with his little hands, and more with his loving heart. In this
+manner, from a happy yet often pensive child, he grew up to be a mild,
+quiet, unobtrusive boy, and sun-browned with labor in the fields, but
+with more intelligence brightening his aspect than is seen in many lads
+who have been taught at famous schools. Yet Ernest had had no teacher,
+save only that the Great Stone Face became one to him. When the toil of
+the day was over, he would gaze at it for hours, until he began to
+imagine that those vast features recognized him, and gave him a smile
+of kindness and encouragement, responsive to his own look of
+veneration. We must not take upon us to affirm that this was a mistake,
+although the Face may have looked no more kindly at Ernest than at all
+the world besides. But the secret was that the boy’s tender and
+confiding simplicity discerned what other people could not see; and
+thus the love, which was meant for all, became his peculiar portion.
+
+About this time there went a rumor throughout the valley, that the
+great man, foretold from ages long ago, who was to bear a resemblance
+to the Great Stone Face, had appeared at last. It seems that, many
+years before, a young man had migrated from the valley and settled at a
+distant seaport, where, after getting together a little money, he had
+set up as a shopkeeper. His name—but I could never learn whether it was
+his real one, or a nickname that had grown out of his habits and
+success in life—was Gathergold. Being shrewd and active, and endowed by
+Providence with that inscrutable faculty which develops itself in what
+the world calls luck, he became an exceedingly rich merchant, and owner
+of a whole fleet of bulky-bottomed ships. All the countries of the
+globe appeared to join hands for the mere purpose of adding heap after
+heap to the mountainous accumulation of this one man’s wealth. The cold
+regions of the north, almost within the gloom and shadow of the Arctic
+Circle, sent him their tribute in the shape of furs; hot Africa sifted
+for him the golden sands of her rivers, and gathered up the ivory tusks
+of her great elephants out of the forests; the East came bringing him
+the rich shawls, and spices, and teas, and the effulgence of diamonds,
+and the gleaming purity of large pearls. The ocean, not to be
+behindhand with the earth, yielded up her mighty whales, that Mr.
+Gathergold might sell their oil, and make a profit of it. Be the
+original commodity what it might, it was gold within his grasp. It
+might be said of him, as of Midas in the fable, that whatever he
+touched with his finger immediately glistened, and grew yellow, and was
+changed at once into sterling metal, or, which suited him still better,
+into piles of coin. And, when Mr. Gathergold had become so very rich
+that it would have taken him a hundred years only to count his wealth,
+he bethought himself of his native valley, and resolved to go back
+thither, and end his days where he was born. With this purpose in view,
+he sent a skilful architect to build him such a palace as should be fit
+for a man of his vast wealth to live in.
+
+As I have said above, it had already been rumored in the valley that
+Mr. Gathergold had turned out to be the prophetic personage so long and
+vainly looked for, and that his visage was the perfect and undeniable
+similitude of the Great Stone Face. People were the more ready to
+believe that this must needs be the fact, when they beheld the splendid
+edifice that rose, as if by enchantment, on the site of his father’s
+old weatherbeaten farm-house. The exterior was of marble, so dazzlingly
+white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in
+the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his
+young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of
+transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly
+ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a
+lofty door, studded with silver knobs, and made of a kind of variegated
+wood that had been brought from beyond the sea. The windows, from the
+floor to the ceiling of each stately apartment, were composed,
+respectively, of but one enormous pane of glass, so transparently pure
+that it was said to be a finer medium than even the vacant atmosphere.
+Hardly anybody had been permitted to see the interior of this palace;
+but it was reported, and with good semblance of truth, to be far more
+gorgeous than the outside, insomuch that whatever was iron or brass in
+other houses was silver or gold in this; and Mr. Gathergold’s
+bedchamber, especially, made such a glittering appearance that no
+ordinary man would have been able to close his eyes there. But, on the
+other hand, Mr. Gathergold was now so inured to wealth, that perhaps he
+could not have closed his eyes unless where the gleam of it was certain
+to find its way beneath his eyelids.
+
+In due time, the mansion was finished; next came the upholsterers, with
+magnificent furniture; then, a whole troop of black and white servants,
+the harbingers of Mr. Gathergold, who, in his own majestic person, was
+expected to arrive at sunset. Our friend Ernest, meanwhile, had been
+deeply stirred by the idea that the great man, the noble man, the man
+of prophecy, after so many ages of delay, was at length to be made
+manifest to his native valley. He knew, boy as he was, that there were
+a thousand ways in which Mr. Gathergold, with his vast wealth, might
+transform himself into an angel of beneficence, and assume a control
+over human affairs as wide and benignant as the smile of the Great
+Stone Face. Full of faith and hope, Ernest doubted not that what the
+people said was true, and that now he was to behold the living likeness
+of those wondrous features on the mountain-side. While the boy was
+still gazing up the valley, and fancying, as he always did, that the
+Great Stone Face returned his gaze and looked kindly at him, the
+rumbling of wheels was heard, approaching swiftly along the winding
+road.
+
+“Here he comes!” cried a group of people who were assembled to witness
+the arrival. “Here comes the great Mr. Gathergold!”
+
+A carriage, drawn by four horses, dashed round the turn of the road.
+Within it, thrust partly out of the window, appeared the physiognomy of
+the old man, with a skin as yellow as if his own Midas-hand had
+transmuted it. He had a low forehead, small, sharp eyes, puckered about
+with innumerable wrinkles, and very thin lips, which he made still
+thinner by pressing them forcibly together.
+
+“The very image of the Great Stone Face!” shouted the people. “Sure
+enough, the old prophecy is true; and here we have the great man come,
+at last!”
+
+And, what greatly perplexed Ernest, they seemed actually to believe
+that here was the likeness which they spoke of. By the roadside there
+chanced to be an old beggar-woman and two little beggar-children,
+stragglers from some far-off region, who, as the carriage rolled
+onward, held out their hands and lifted up their doleful voices, most
+piteously beseeching charity. A yellow claw—the very same that had
+clawed together so much wealth—poked itself out of the coach-window,
+and dropt some copper coins upon the ground; so that, though the great
+man’s name seems to have been Gathergold, he might just as suitably
+have been nicknamed Scattercopper. Still, nevertheless, with an earnest
+shout, and evidently with as much good faith as ever, the people
+bellowed, “He is the very image of the Great Stone Face!”
+
+But Ernest turned sadly from the wrinkled shrewdness of that sordid
+visage, and gazed up the valley, where, amid a gathering mist, gilded
+by the last sunbeams, he could still distinguish those glorious
+features which had impressed themselves into his soul. Their aspect
+cheered him. What did the benign lips seem to say?
+
+“He will come! Fear not, Ernest; the man will come!”
+
+The years went on, and Ernest ceased to be a boy. He had grown to be a
+young man now. He attracted little notice from the other inhabitants of
+the valley; for they saw nothing remarkable in his way of life save
+that, when the labor of the day was over, he still loved to go apart
+and gaze and meditate upon the Great Stone Face. According to their
+idea of the matter, it was a folly, indeed, but pardonable, inasmuch as
+Ernest was industrious, kind, and neighborly, and neglected no duty for
+the sake of indulging this idle habit. They knew not that the Great
+Stone Face had become a teacher to him, and that the sentiment which
+was expressed in it would enlarge the young man’s heart, and fill it
+with wider and deeper sympathies than other hearts. They knew not that
+thence would come a better wisdom than could be learned from books, and
+a better life than could be moulded on the defaced example of other
+human lives. Neither did Ernest know that the thoughts and affections
+which came to him so naturally, in the fields and at the fireside, and
+wherever he communed with himself, were of a higher tone than those
+which all men shared with him. A simple soul,—simple as when his mother
+first taught him the old prophecy,—he beheld the marvellous features
+beaming adown the valley, and still wondered that their human
+counterpart was so long in making his appearance.
+
+By this time poor Mr. Gathergold was dead and buried; and the oddest
+part of the matter was, that his wealth, which was the body and spirit
+of his existence, had disappeared before his death, leaving nothing of
+him but a living skeleton, covered over with a wrinkled yellow skin.
+Since the melting away of his gold, it had been very generally conceded
+that there was no such striking resemblance, after all, betwixt the
+ignoble features of the ruined merchant and that majestic face upon the
+mountain-side. So the people ceased to honor him during his lifetime,
+and quietly consigned him to forgetfulness after his decease. Once in a
+while, it is true, his memory was brought up in connection with the
+magnificent palace which he had built, and which had long ago been
+turned into a hotel for the accommodation of strangers, multitudes of
+whom came, every summer, to visit that famous natural curiosity, the
+Great Stone Face. Thus, Mr. Gathergold being discredited and thrown
+into the shade, the man of prophecy was yet to come.
+
+It so happened that a native-born son of the valley, many years before,
+had enlisted as a soldier, and, after a great deal of hard fighting,
+had now become an illustrious commander. Whatever he may be called in
+history, he was known in camps and on the battle-field under the
+nickname of Old Blood-and-Thunder. This war-worn veteran being now
+infirm with age and wounds, and weary of the turmoil of a military
+life, and of the roll of the drum and the clangor of the trumpet, that
+had so long been ringing in his ears, had lately signified a purpose of
+returning to his native valley, hoping to find repose where he
+remembered to have left it. The inhabitants, his old neighbors and
+their grown-up children, were resolved to welcome the renowned warrior
+with a salute of cannon and a public dinner; and all the more
+enthusiastically, it being affirmed that now, at last, the likeness of
+the Great Stone Face had actually appeared. An aid-de-camp of Old
+Blood-and-Thunder, travelling through the valley, was said to have been
+struck with the resemblance. Moreover the schoolmates and early
+acquaintances of the general were ready to testify, on oath, that, to
+the best of their recollection, the aforesaid general had been
+exceedingly like the majestic image, even when a boy, only the idea had
+never occurred to them at that period. Great, therefore, was the
+excitement throughout the valley; and many people, who had never once
+thought of glancing at the Great Stone Face for years before, now spent
+their time in gazing at it, for the sake of knowing exactly how General
+Blood-and-Thunder looked.
+
+On the day of the great festival, Ernest, with all the other people of
+the valley, left their work, and proceeded to the spot where the sylvan
+banquet was prepared. As he approached, the loud voice of the Rev. Dr.
+Battleblast was heard, beseeching a blessing on the good things set
+before them, and on the distinguished friend of peace in whose honor
+they were assembled. The tables were arranged in a cleared space of the
+woods, shut in by the surrounding trees, except where a vista opened
+eastward, and afforded a distant view of the Great Stone Face. Over the
+general’s chair, which was a relic from the home of Washington, there
+was an arch of verdant boughs, with the laurel profusely intermixed,
+and surmounted by his country’s banner, beneath which he had won his
+victories. Our friend Ernest raised himself on his tiptoes, in hopes to
+get a glimpse of the celebrated guest; but there was a mighty crowd
+about the tables anxious to hear the toasts and speeches, and to catch
+any word that might fall from the general in reply; and a volunteer
+company, doing duty as a guard, pricked ruthlessly with their bayonets
+at any particularly quiet person among the throng. So Ernest, being of
+an unobtrusive character, was thrust quite into the background, where
+he could see no more of Old Blood-and-Thunder’s physiognomy than if it
+had been still blazing on the battle-field. To console himself, he
+turned towards the Great Stone Face, which, like a faithful and long
+remembered friend, looked back and smiled upon him through the vista of
+the forest. Meantime, however, he could overhear the remarks of various
+individuals, who were comparing the features of the hero with the face
+on the distant mountain-side.
+
+“’Tis the same face, to a hair!” cried one man, cutting a caper for
+joy.
+
+“Wonderfully like, that’s a fact!” responded another.
+
+“Like! why, I call it Old Blood-and-Thunder himself, in a monstrous
+looking-glass!” cried a third. “And why not? He’s the greatest man of
+this or any other age, beyond a doubt.”
+
+And then all three of the speakers gave a great shout, which
+communicated electricity to the crowd, and called forth a roar from a
+thousand voices, that went reverberating for miles among the mountains,
+until you might have supposed that the Great Stone Face had poured its
+thunderbreath into the cry. All these comments, and this vast
+enthusiasm, served the more to interest our friend; nor did he think of
+questioning that now, at length, the mountain-visage had found its
+human counterpart. It is true, Ernest had imagined that this
+long-looked-for personage would appear in the character of a man of
+peace, uttering wisdom, and doing good, and making people happy. But,
+taking an habitual breadth of view, with all his simplicity, he
+contended that Providence should choose its own method of blessing
+mankind, and could conceive that this great end might be effected even
+by a warrior and a bloody sword, should inscrutable wisdom see fit to
+order matters so.
+
+“The general! the general!” was now the cry. “Hush! silence! Old
+Blood-and-Thunder’s going to make a speech.”
+
+Even so; for, the cloth being removed, the general’s health had been
+drunk, amid shouts of applause, and he now stood upon his feet to thank
+the company. Ernest saw him. There he was, over the shoulders of the
+crowd, from the two glittering epaulets and embroidered collar upward,
+beneath the arch of green boughs with intertwined laurel, and the
+banner drooping as if to shade his brow! And there, too, visible in the
+same glance, through the vista of the forest, appeared the Great Stone
+Face! And was there, indeed, such a resemblance as the crowd had
+testified? Alas, Ernest could not recognize it! He beheld a war-worn
+and weatherbeaten countenance, full of energy, and expressive of an
+iron will; but the gentle wisdom, the deep, broad, tender sympathies,
+were altogether wanting in Old Blood-and-Thunder’s visage; and even if
+the Great Stone Face had assumed his look of stern command, the milder
+traits would still have tempered it.
+
+“This is not the man of prophecy,” sighed Ernest to himself, as he made
+his way out of the throng. “And must the world wait longer yet?”
+
+The mists had congregated about the distant mountain-side, and there
+were seen the grand and awful features of the Great Stone Face, awful
+but benignant, as if a mighty angel were sitting among the hills, and
+enrobing himself in a cloud-vesture of gold and purple. As he looked,
+Ernest could hardly believe but that a smile beamed over the whole
+visage, with a radiance still brightening, although without motion of
+the lips. It was probably the effect of the western sunshine, melting
+through the thinly diffused vapors that had swept between him and the
+object that he gazed at. But—as it always did—the aspect of his
+marvellous friend made Ernest as hopeful as if he had never hoped in
+vain.
+
+“Fear not, Ernest,” said his heart, even as if the Great Face were
+whispering him,—“fear not, Ernest; he will come.”
+
+More years sped swiftly and tranquilly away. Ernest still dwelt in his
+native valley, and was now a man of middle age. By imperceptible
+degrees, he had become known among the people. Now, as heretofore, he
+labored for his bread, and was the same simple-hearted man that he had
+always been. But he had thought and felt so much, he had given so many
+of the best hours of his life to unworldly hopes for some great good to
+mankind, that it seemed as though he had been talking with the angels,
+and had imbibed a portion of their wisdom unawares. It was visible in
+the calm and well-considered beneficence of his daily life, the quiet
+stream of which had made a wide green margin all along its course. Not
+a day passed by, that the world was not the better because this man,
+humble as he was, had lived. He never stepped aside from his own path,
+yet would always reach a blessing to his neighbor. Almost involuntarily
+too, he had become a preacher. The pure and high simplicity of his
+thought, which, as one of its manifestations, took shape in the good
+deeds that dropped silently from his hand, flowed also forth in speech.
+He uttered truths that wrought upon and moulded the lives of those who
+heard him. His auditors, it may be, never suspected that Ernest, their
+own neighbor and familiar friend, was more than an ordinary man; least
+of all did Ernest himself suspect it; but, inevitably as the murmur of
+a rivulet, came thoughts out of his mouth that no other human lips had
+spoken.
+
+When the people’s minds had had a little time to cool, they were ready
+enough to acknowledge their mistake in imagining a similarity between
+General Blood-and-Thunder’s truculent physiognomy and the benign visage
+on the mountain-side. But now, again, there were reports and many
+paragraphs in the newspapers, affirming that the likeness of the Great
+Stone Face had appeared upon the broad shoulders of a certain eminent
+statesman. He, like Mr. Gathergold and Old Blood-and-Thunder, was a
+native of the valley, but had left it in his early days, and taken up
+the trades of law and politics. Instead of the rich man’s wealth and
+the warrior’s sword, he had but a tongue, and it was mightier than both
+together. So wonderfully eloquent was he, that whatever he might choose
+to say, his auditors had no choice but to believe him; wrong looked
+like right, and right like wrong; for when it pleased him, he could
+make a kind of illuminated fog with his mere breath, and obscure the
+natural daylight with it. His tongue, indeed, was a magic instrument:
+sometimes it rumbled like the thunder; sometimes it warbled like the
+sweetest music. It was the blast of war, the song of peace; and it
+seemed to have a heart in it, when there was no such matter. In good
+truth, he was a wondrous man; and when his tongue had acquired him all
+other imaginable success,—when it had been heard in halls of state, and
+in the courts of princes and potentates,—after it had made him known
+all over the world, even as a voice crying from shore to shore,—it
+finally persuaded his countrymen to select him for the Presidency.
+Before this time,—indeed, as soon as he began to grow celebrated,—his
+admirers had found out the resemblance between him and the Great Stone
+Face; and so much were they struck by it, that throughout the country
+this distinguished gentleman was known by the name of Old Stony Phiz.
+The phrase was considered as giving a highly favorable aspect to his
+political prospects; for, as is likewise the case with the Popedom,
+nobody ever becomes President without taking a name other than his own.
+
+While his friends were doing their best to make him President, Old
+Stony Phiz, as he was called, set out on a visit to the valley where he
+was born. Of course, he had no other object than to shake hands with
+his fellow-citizens and neither thought nor cared about any effect
+which his progress through the country might have upon the election.
+Magnificent preparations were made to receive the illustrious
+statesman; a cavalcade of horsemen set forth to meet him at the
+boundary line of the State, and all the people left their business and
+gathered along the wayside to see him pass. Among these was Ernest.
+Though more than once disappointed, as we have seen, he had such a
+hopeful and confiding nature, that he was always ready to believe in
+whatever seemed beautiful and good. He kept his heart continually open,
+and thus was sure to catch the blessing from on high when it should
+come. So now again, as buoyantly as ever, he went forth to behold the
+likeness of the Great Stone Face.
+
+The cavalcade came prancing along the road, with a great clattering of
+hoofs and a mighty cloud of dust, which rose up so dense and high that
+the visage of the mountain-side was completely hidden from Ernest’s
+eyes. All the great men of the neighborhood were there on horseback;
+militia officers, in uniform; the member of Congress; the sheriff of
+the county; the editors of newspapers; and many a farmer, too, had
+mounted his patient steed, with his Sunday coat upon his back. It
+really was a very brilliant spectacle, especially as there were
+numerous banners flaunting over the cavalcade, on some of which were
+gorgeous portraits of the illustrious statesman and the Great Stone
+Face, smiling familiarly at one another, like two brothers. If the
+pictures were to be trusted, the mutual resemblance, it must be
+confessed, was marvellous. We must not forget to mention that there was
+a band of music, which made the echoes of the mountains ring and
+reverberate with the loud triumph of its strains; so that airy and
+soul-thrilling melodies broke out among all the heights and hollows, as
+if every nook of his native valley had found a voice, to welcome the
+distinguished guest. But the grandest effect was when the far-off
+mountain precipice flung back the music; for then the Great Stone Face
+itself seemed to be swelling the triumphant chorus, in acknowledgment
+that, at length, the man of prophecy was come.
+
+All this while the people were throwing up their hats and shouting with
+enthusiasm so contagious that the heart of Ernest kindled up, and he
+likewise threw up his hat, and shouted, as loudly as the loudest,
+“Huzza for the great man! Huzza for Old Stony Phiz!” But as yet he had
+not seen him.
+
+“Here he is, now!” cried those who stood near Ernest. “There! There!
+Look at Old Stony Phiz and then at the Old Man of the Mountain, and see
+if they are not as like as two twin-brothers!”
+
+In the midst of all this gallant array came an open barouche, drawn by
+four white horses; and in the barouche, with his massive head
+uncovered, sat the illustrious statesman, Old Stony Phiz himself.
+
+“Confess it,” said one of Ernest’s neighbors to him, “the Great Stone
+Face has met its match at last!”
+
+Now, it must be owned that, at his first glimpse of the countenance
+which was bowing and smiling from the barouche, Ernest did fancy that
+there was a resemblance between it and the old familiar face upon the
+mountain-side. The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all
+the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in
+emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model. But the sublimity
+and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that
+illuminated the mountain visage and etherealized its ponderous granite
+substance into spirit, might here be sought in vain. Something had been
+originally left out, or had departed. And therefore the marvellously
+gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his
+eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings or a man of mighty
+faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances,
+was vague and empty, because no high purpose had endowed it with
+reality.
+
+Still, Ernest’s neighbor was thrusting his elbow into his side, and
+pressing him for an answer.
+
+“Confess! confess! Is not he the very picture of your Old Man of the
+Mountain?”
+
+“No!” said Ernest bluntly, “I see little or no likeness.”
+
+“Then so much the worse for the Great Stone Face!” answered his
+neighbor; and again he set up a shout for Old Stony Phiz.
+
+But Ernest turned away, melancholy, and almost despondent: for this was
+the saddest of his disappointments, to behold a man who might have
+fulfilled the prophecy, and had not willed to do so. Meantime, the
+cavalcade, the banners, the music, and the barouches swept past him,
+with the vociferous crowd in the rear, leaving the dust to settle down,
+and the Great Stone Face to be revealed again, with the grandeur that
+it had worn for untold centuries.
+
+“Lo, here I am, Ernest!” the benign lips seemed to say. “I have waited
+longer than thou, and am not yet weary. Fear not; the man will come.”
+
+The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another’s
+heels. And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over
+the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead,
+and furrows in his cheeks. He was an aged man. But not in vain had he
+grown old: more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts
+in his mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had
+graved, and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been
+tested by the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure.
+Unsought for, undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made
+him known in the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which
+he had dwelt so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of
+cities, came from far to see and converse with Ernest; for the report
+had gone abroad that this simple husbandman had ideas unlike those of
+other men, not gained from books, but of a higher tone,—a tranquil and
+familiar majesty, as if he had been talking with the angels as his
+daily friends. Whether it were sage, statesman, or philanthropist,
+Ernest received these visitors with the gentle sincerity that had
+characterized him from boyhood, and spoke freely with them of whatever
+came uppermost, or lay deepest in his heart or their own. While they
+talked together, his face would kindle, unawares, and shine upon them,
+as with a mild evening light. Pensive with the fulness of such
+discourse, his guests took leave and went their way; and passing up the
+valley, paused to look at the Great Stone Face, imagining that they had
+seen its likeness in a human countenance, but could not remember where.
+
+While Ernest had been growing up and growing old, a bountiful
+Providence had granted a new poet to this earth. He likewise, was a
+native of the valley, but had spent the greater part of his life at a
+distance from that romantic region, pouring out his sweet music amid
+the bustle and din of cities. Often, however, did the mountains which
+had been familiar to him in his childhood lift their snowy peaks into
+the clear atmosphere of his poetry. Neither was the Great Stone Face
+forgotten, for the poet had celebrated it in an ode, which was grand
+enough to have been uttered by its own majestic lips. This man of
+genius, we may say, had come down from heaven with wonderful
+endowments. If he sang of a mountain, the eyes of all mankind beheld a
+mightier grandeur reposing on its breast, or soaring to its summit,
+than had before been seen there. If his theme were a lovely lake, a
+celestial smile had now been thrown over it, to gleam forever on its
+surface. If it were the vast old sea, even the deep immensity of its
+dread bosom seemed to swell the higher, as if moved by the emotions of
+the song. Thus the world assumed another and a better aspect from the
+hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had
+bestowed him, as the last best touch to his own handiwork. Creation was
+not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.
+
+The effect was no less high and beautiful, when his human brethren were
+the subject of his verse. The man or woman, sordid with the common dust
+of life, who crossed his daily path, and the little child who played in
+it, were glorified if he beheld them in his mood of poetic faith. He
+showed the golden links of the great chain that intertwined them with
+an angelic kindred; he brought out the hidden traits of a celestial
+birth that made them worthy of such kin. Some, indeed, there were, who
+thought to show the soundness of their judgment by affirming that all
+the beauty and dignity of the natural world existed only in the poet’s
+fancy. Let such men speak for themselves, who undoubtedly appear to
+have been spawned forth by Nature with a contemptuous bitterness; she
+having plastered them up out of her refuse stuff, after all the swine
+were made. As respects all things else, the poet’s ideal was the truest
+truth.
+
+The songs of this poet found their way to Ernest. He read them after
+his customary toil, seated on the bench before his cottage-door, where
+for such a length of time he had filled his repose with thought, by
+gazing at the Great Stone Face. And now as he read stanzas that caused
+the soul to thrill within him, he lifted his eyes to the vast
+countenance beaming on him so benignantly.
+
+“O majestic friend,” he murmured, addressing the Great Stone Face, “is
+not this man worthy to resemble thee?”
+
+The Face seemed to smile, but answered not a word.
+
+Now it happened that the poet, though he dwelt so far away, had not
+only heard of Ernest, but had meditated much upon his character, until
+he deemed nothing so desirable as to meet this man, whose untaught
+wisdom walked hand in hand with the noble simplicity of his life. One
+summer morning, therefore, he took passage by the railroad, and, in the
+decline of the afternoon, alighted from the cars at no great distance
+from Ernest’s cottage. The great hotel, which had formerly been the
+palace of Mr. Gathergold, was close at hand, but the poet, with his
+carpet-bag on his arm, inquired at once where Ernest dwelt, and was
+resolved to be accepted as his guest.
+
+Approaching the door, he there found the good old man, holding a volume
+in his hand, which alternately he read, and then, with a finger between
+the leaves, looked lovingly at the Great Stone Face.
+
+“Good evening,” said the poet. “Can you give a traveller a night’s
+lodging?”
+
+“Willingly,” answered Ernest; and then he added, smiling, “Methinks I
+never saw the Great Stone Face look so hospitably at a stranger.”
+
+The poet sat down on the bench beside him, and he and Ernest talked
+together. Often had the poet held intercourse with the wittiest and the
+wisest, but never before with a man like Ernest, whose thoughts and
+feelings gushed up with such a natural freedom, and who made great
+truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them. Angels, as had been
+so often said, seemed to have wrought with him at his labor in the
+fields; angels seemed to have sat with him by the fireside; and,
+dwelling with angels as friend with friends, he had imbibed the
+sublimity of their ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm
+of household words. So thought the poet. And Ernest, on the other hand,
+was moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out of
+his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door with
+shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive. The sympathies of these two men
+instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained
+alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music
+which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor
+distinguished his own share from the other’s. They led one another, as
+it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and
+hitherto so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so
+beautiful that they desired to be there always.
+
+As Ernest listened to the poet, he imagined that the Great Stone Face
+was bending forward to listen too. He gazed earnestly into the poet’s
+glowing eyes.
+
+“Who are you, my strangely gifted guest?” he said.
+
+The poet laid his finger on the volume that Ernest had been reading.
+
+“You have read these poems,” said he. “You know me, then,—for I wrote
+them.”
+
+Again, and still more earnestly than before, Ernest examined the poet’s
+features; then turned towards the Great Stone Face; then back, with an
+uncertain aspect, to his guest. But his countenance fell; he shook his
+head, and sighed.
+
+“Wherefore are you sad?” inquired the poet.
+
+“Because,” replied Ernest, “all through life I have awaited the
+fulfilment of a prophecy; and, when I read these poems, I hoped that it
+might be fulfilled in you.”
+
+“You hoped,” answered the poet, faintly smiling, “to find in me the
+likeness of the Great Stone Face. And you are disappointed, as formerly
+with Mr. Gathergold, and Old Blood-and-Thunder, and Old Stony Phiz.
+Yes, Ernest, it is my doom. You must add my name to the illustrious
+three, and record another failure of your hopes. For—in shame and
+sadness do I speak it, Ernest—I am not worthy to be typified by yonder
+benign and majestic image.”
+
+“And why?” asked Ernest. He pointed to the volume. “Are not those
+thoughts divine?”
+
+“They have a strain of the Divinity,” replied the poet. “You can hear
+in them the far-off echo of a heavenly song. But my life, dear Ernest,
+has not corresponded with my thought. I have had grand dreams, but they
+have been only dreams, because I have lived—and that, too, by my own
+choice—among poor and mean realities. Sometimes even—shall I dare to
+say it?—I lack faith in the grandeur, the beauty, and the goodness,
+which my own words are said to have made more evident in nature and in
+human life. Why, then, pure seeker of the good and true, shouldst thou
+hope to find me, in yonder image of the divine?”
+
+The poet spoke sadly, and his eyes were dim with tears. So, likewise,
+were those of Ernest.
+
+At the hour of sunset, as had long been his frequent custom, Ernest was
+to discourse to an assemblage of the neighboring inhabitants in the
+open air. He and the poet, arm in arm, still talking together as they
+went along, proceeded to the spot. It was a small nook among the hills,
+with a gray precipice behind, the stern front of which was relieved by
+the pleasant foliage of many creeping plants that made a tapestry for
+the naked rock, by hanging their festoons from all its rugged angles.
+At a small elevation above the ground, set in a rich framework of
+verdure, there appeared a niche, spacious enough to admit a human
+figure, with freedom for such gestures as spontaneously accompany
+earnest thought and genuine emotion. Into this natural pulpit Ernest
+ascended, and threw a look of familiar kindness around upon his
+audience. They stood, or sat, or reclined upon the grass, as seemed
+good to each, with the departing sunshine falling obliquely over them,
+and mingling its subdued cheerfulness with the solemnity of a grove of
+ancient trees, beneath and amid the boughs of which the golden rays
+were constrained to pass. In another direction was seen the Great Stone
+Face, with the same cheer, combined with the same solemnity, in its
+benignant aspect.
+
+Ernest began to speak, giving to the people of what was in his heart
+and mind. His words had power, because they accorded with his thoughts;
+and his thoughts had reality and depth, because they harmonized with
+the life which he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this
+preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life of good
+deeds and holy love was melted into them. Pearls, pure and rich, had
+been dissolved into this precious draught. The poet, as he listened,
+felt that the being and character of Ernest were a nobler strain of
+poetry than he had ever written. His eyes glistening with tears, he
+gazed reverentially at the venerable man, and said within himself that
+never was there an aspect so worthy of a prophet and a sage as that
+mild, sweet, thoughtful countenance, with the glory of white hair
+diffused about it. At a distance, but distinctly to be seen, high up in
+the golden light of the setting sun, appeared the Great Stone Face,
+with hoary mists around it, like the white hairs around the brow of
+Ernest. Its look of grand beneficence seemed to embrace the world.
+
+At that moment, in sympathy with a thought which he was about to utter,
+the face of Ernest assumed a grandeur of expression, so imbued with
+benevolence, that the poet, by an irresistible impulse, threw his arms
+aloft and shouted, “Behold! Behold! Ernest is himself the likeness of
+the Great Stone Face!”
+
+Then all the people looked, and saw that what the deep-sighted poet
+said was true. The prophecy was fulfilled. But Ernest, having finished
+what he had to say, took the poet’s arm, and walked slowly homeward,
+still hoping that some wiser and better man than himself would by and
+by appear, bearing a resemblance to the GREAT STONE FACE.
+
+
+
+
+MAIN STREET
+
+
+A respectable-looking individual makes his bow and addresses the
+public. In my daily walks along the principal street of my native town,
+it has often occurred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward,
+and the vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have passed along
+this thoroughfare during the more than two centuries of its existence,
+could be presented to the eye in a shifting panorama, it would be an
+exceedingly effective method of illustrating the march of time. Acting
+on this idea, I have contrived a certain pictorial exhibition, somewhat
+in the nature of a puppet-show, by means of which I propose to call up
+the multiform and many-colored Past before the spectator, and show him
+the ghosts of his forefathers, amid a succession of historic incidents,
+with no greater trouble than the turning of a crank. Be pleased,
+therefore, my indulgent patrons, to walk into the show-room, and take
+your seats before yonder mysterious curtain. The little wheels and
+springs of my machinery have been well oiled; a multitude of puppets
+are dressed in character, representing all varieties of fashion, from
+the Puritan cloak and jerkin to the latest Oak Hall coat; the lamps are
+trimmed, and shall brighten into noontide sunshine, or fade away in
+moonlight, or muffle their brilliancy in a November cloud, as the
+nature of the scene may require; and, in short, the exhibition is just
+ready to commence. Unless something should go wrong,—as, for instance,
+the misplacing of a picture, whereby the people and events of one
+century might be thrust into the middle of another; or the breaking of
+a wire, which would bring the course of time to a sudden
+period,—barring, I say, the casualties to which such a complicated
+piece of mechanism is liable,—I flatter myself, ladies and
+gentlemen,—that the performance will elicit your generous approbation.
+
+Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold—not,
+indeed, the Main Street—but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over
+which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.
+
+You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive
+wood,—the ever-youthful and venerably old,—verdant with new twigs, yet
+hoary, as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have
+accumulated upon its intermingled branches. The white man’s axe has
+never smitten a single tree; his footstep has never crumpled a single
+one of the withered leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have
+been harvesting beneath. Yet, see! along through the vista of impending
+boughs, there is already a faintly traced path, running nearly east and
+west, as if a prophecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen
+into the heart of the solemn old wood. Onward goes this hardly
+perceptible track, now ascending over a natural swell of land, now
+subsiding gently into a hollow; traversed here by a little streamlet,
+which glitters like a snake through the gleam of sunshine, and quickly
+hides itself among the underbrush, in its quest for the neighboring
+cove; and impeded there by the massy corpse of a giant of the forest,
+which had lived out its incalculable term of life, and been overthrown
+by mere old age, and lies buried in the new vegetation that is born of
+its decay. What footsteps can have worn this half-seen path? Hark! Do
+we not hear them now rustling softly over the leaves? We discern an
+Indian woman,—a majestic and queenly woman, or else her spectral image
+does not represent her truly,—for this is the great Squaw Sachem, whose
+rule, with that of her sons, extends from Mystic to Agawam. That red
+chief, who stalks by her side, is Wappacowet, her second husband, the
+priest and magician, whose incantations shall hereafter affright the
+pale-faced settlers with grisly phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the
+woods, at midnight. But greater would be the affright of the Indian
+necromancer, if, mirrored in the pool of water at his feet, he could
+catch a prophetic glimpse of the noonday marvels which the white man is
+destined to achieve; if he could see, as in a dream, the stone front of
+the stately hall, which will cast its shadow over this very spot; if he
+could be aware that the future edifice will contain a noble Museum,
+where, among countless curiosities of earth and sea, a few Indian
+arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials of a vanished race!
+
+No such forebodings disturb the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet. They pass
+on, beneath the tangled shade, holding high talk on matters of state
+and religion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of affairs
+will endure forever. Meanwhile, how full of its own proper life is the
+scene that lies around them! The gray squirrel runs up the trees, and
+rustles among the upper branches. Was not that the leap of a deer? And
+there is the whirr of a partridge! Methinks, too, I catch the cruel and
+stealthy eye of a wolf, as he draws back into yonder impervious density
+of underbrush. So, there, amid the murmur of boughs, go the Indian
+queen and the Indian priest; while the gloom of the broad wilderness
+impends over them, and its sombre mystery invests them as with
+something preternatural; and only momentary streaks of quivering
+sunlight, once in a great while, find their way down, and glimmer among
+the feathers in their dusky hair. Can it be that the thronged street of
+a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude,—over those soft
+heaps of the decaying tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green
+with water-moss, and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great
+trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? It
+has been a wilderness from the creation. Must it not be a wilderness
+forever?
+
+Here an acidulous-looking gentleman in blue glasses, with bows of
+Berlin steel, who has taken a seat at the extremity of the front row,
+begins, at this early stage of the exhibition, to criticise.
+
+“The whole affair is a manifest catchpenny!” observes he, scarcely
+under his breath. “The trees look more like weeds in a garden than a
+primitive forest; the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet are stiff in their
+pasteboard joints; and the squirrels, the deer, and the wolf move with
+all the grace of a child’s wooden monkey, sliding up and down a stick.”
+
+“I am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your remarks,” replies the
+showman, with a bow. “Perhaps they are just. Human art has its limits,
+and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator’s
+imagination.”
+
+“You will get no such aid from mine,” responds the critic. “I make it a
+point to see things precisely as they are. But come! go ahead! the
+stage is waiting!”
+
+The showman proceeds.
+
+Casting our eyes again over the scene, we perceive that strangers have
+found their way into the solitary place. In more than one spot, among
+the trees, an upheaved axe is glittering in the sunshine. Roger Conant,
+the first settler in Naumkeag, has built his dwelling, months ago, on
+the border of the forest-path; and at this moment he comes eastward
+through the vista of woods, with his gun over his shoulder, bringing
+home the choice portions of a deer. His stalwart figure, clad in a
+leathern jerkin and breeches of the same, strides sturdily onward, with
+such an air of physical force and energy that we might almost expect
+the very trees to stand aside, and give him room to pass. And so,
+indeed, they must; for, humble as is his name in history, Roger Conant
+still is of that class of men who do not merely find, but make, their
+place in the system of human affairs; a man of thoughtful strength, he
+has planted the germ of a city. There stands his habitation, showing in
+its rough architecture some features of the Indian wigwam, and some of
+the log-cabin, and somewhat, too, of the straw-thatched cottage in Old
+England, where this good yeoman had his birth and breeding. The
+dwelling is surrounded by a cleared space of a few acres, where Indian
+corn grows thrivingly among the stumps of the trees; while the dark
+forest hems it in, and scenes to gaze silently and solemnly, as if
+wondering at the breadth of sunshine which the white man spreads around
+him. An Indian, half hidden in the dusky shade, is gazing and wondering
+too.
+
+Within the door of the cottage you discern the wife, with her ruddy
+English cheek. She is singing, doubtless, a psalm tune, at her
+household work; or, perhaps she sighs at the remembrance of the
+cheerful gossip, and all the merry social life, of her native village
+beyond the vast and melancholy sea. Yet the next moment she laughs,
+with sympathetic glee, at the sports of her little tribe of children;
+and soon turns round, with the home-look in her face, as her husband’s
+foot is heard approaching the rough-hewn threshold. How sweet must it
+be for those who have an Eden in their hearts, like Roger Conant and
+his wife, to find a new world to project it into, as they have, instead
+of dwelling among old haunts of men, where so many household fires have
+been kindled and burnt out, that the very glow of happiness has
+something dreary in it! Not that this pair are alone in their wild
+Eden, for here comes Goodwife Massey, the young spouse of Jeffrey
+Massey, from her home hard by, with an infant at her breast. Dame
+Conant has another of like age; and it shall hereafter be one of the
+disputed points of history which of these two babies was the first
+town-born child.
+
+But see! Roger Conant has other neighbors within view. Peter Palfrey
+likewise has built himself a house, and so has Balch, and Norman, and
+Woodbury. Their dwellings, indeed,—such is the ingenious contrivance of
+this piece of pictorial mechanism,—seem to have arisen, at various
+points of the scene, even while we have been looking at it. The
+forest-track, trodden more and more by the hobnailed shoes of these
+sturdy and ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinctness which it never
+could have acquired from the light tread of a hundred times as many
+Indian moccasins. It will be a street, anon! As we observe it now, it
+goes onward from one clearing to another, here plunging into a shadowy
+strip of woods, there open to the sunshine, but everywhere showing a
+decided line, along which human interests have begun to hold their
+career. Over yonder swampy spot, two trees have been felled, and laid
+side by side to make a causeway. In another place, the axe has cleared
+away a confused intricacy of fallen trees and clustered boughs, which
+had been tossed together by a hurricane. So now the little children,
+just beginning to run alone, may trip along the path, and not often
+stumble over an impediment, unless they stray from it to gather
+wood-berries beneath the trees. And, besides the feet of grown people
+and children, there are the cloven hoofs of a small herd of cows, who
+seek their subsistence from the native grasses, and help to deepen the
+track of the future thoroughfare. Goats also browse along it, and
+nibble at the twigs that thrust themselves across the way. Not seldom,
+in its more secluded portions, where the black shadow of the forest
+strives to hide the trace of human-footsteps, stalks a gaunt wolf, on
+the watch for a kid or a young calf; or fixes his hungry gaze on the
+group of children gathering berries, and can hardly forbear to rush
+upon them. And the Indians, coming from their distant wigwams to view
+the white man’s settlement, marvel at the deep track which he makes,
+and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment that this heavy
+tread will find its way over all the land; and that the wild-woods, the
+wild wolf, and the wild Indian will alike be trampled beneath it. Even
+so shall it be. The pavements of the Main Street must be laid over the
+red man’s grave.
+
+Behold! here is a spectacle which should be ushered in by the peal of
+trumpets, if Naumkeag had ever yet heard that cheery music, and by the
+roar of cannon, echoing among the woods. A procession,—for, by its
+dignity, as marking an epoch in the history of the street, it deserves
+that name,—a procession advances along the pathway. The good ship
+Abigail has arrived from England, bringing wares and merchandise, for
+the comfort of the inhabitants, and traffic with the Indians; bringing
+passengers too, and, more important than all, a governor for the new
+settlement. Roger Conant and Peter Palfrey, with their companions, have
+been to the shore to welcome him; and now, with such honor and triumph
+as their rude way of life permits, are escorting the sea-flushed
+voyagers to their habitations. At the point where Endicott enters upon
+the scene, two venerable trees unite their branches high above his
+head; thus forming a triumphal arch of living verdure, beneath which he
+pauses, with his wife leaning on his arm, to catch the first impression
+of their new-found home. The old settlers gaze not less earnestly at
+him, than he at the hoary woods and the rough surface of the clearings.
+They like his bearded face, under the shadow of the broad-brimmed and
+steeple-crowned Puritan hat;—a visage resolute, grave, and thoughtful,
+yet apt to kindle with that glow of a cheerful spirit by which men of
+strong character are enabled to go joyfully on their proper tasks. His
+form, too, as you see it, in a doublet and hose of sad-colored cloth,
+is of a manly make, fit for toil and hardship, and fit to wield the
+heavy sword that hangs from his leathern belt. His aspect is a better
+warrant for the ruler’s office than the parchment commission which he
+bears, however fortified it may be with the broad seal of the London
+council. Peter Palfrey nods to Roger Conant. “The worshipful Court of
+Assistants have done wisely,” say they between themselves. “They have
+chosen for our governor a man out of a thousand.” Then they toss up
+their hats,—they, and all the uncouth figures of their company, most of
+whom are clad in skins, inasmuch as their old kersey and linsey-woolsey
+garments have been torn and tattered by many a long month’s wear,—they
+all toss up their hats, and salute their new governor and captain with
+a hearty English shout of welcome. We seem to hear it with our own
+ears, so perfectly is the action represented in this life-like, this
+almost magic picture!
+
+But have you observed the lady who leans upon the arm of Endicott?—-a
+rose of beauty from an English garden, now to be transplanted to a
+fresher soil. It may be that, long years—centuries indeed—after this
+fair flower shall have decayed, other flowers of the same race will
+appear in the same soil, and gladden other generations with hereditary
+beauty. Does not the vision haunt us yet? Has not Nature kept the mould
+unbroken, deeming it a pity that the idea should vanish from mortal
+sight forever, after only once assuming earthly substance? Do we not
+recognize, in that fair woman’s face, a model of features which still
+beam, at happy moments, on what was then the woodland pathway, but has
+long since grown into a busy street?
+
+“This is too ridiculous!—positively insufferable!” mutters the same
+critic who had before expressed his disapprobation. “Here is a
+pasteboard figure, such as a child would cut out of a card, with a pair
+of very dull scissors; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it
+the prototype of hereditary beauty!”
+
+“But, sir, you have not the proper point of view,” remarks the showman.
+“You sit altogether too near to get the best effect of my pictorial
+exhibition. Pray, oblige me by removing to this other bench, and I
+venture to assure you the proper light and shadow will transform the
+spectacle into quite another thing.”
+
+“Pshaw!” replies the critic; “I want no other light and shade. I have
+already told you that it is my business to see things just as they
+are.”
+
+“I would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibition,” observes
+a gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much interested,—“I
+would suggest that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor Endicott, and
+who came with him from England, left no posterity; and that,
+consequently, we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any
+specimens of feminine loveliness now extant among us.”
+
+Having nothing to allege against this genealogical objection, the
+showman points again to the scene.
+
+During this little interruption, you perceive that the Anglo-Saxon
+energy—as the phrase now goes—has been at work in the spectacle before
+us. So many chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to have
+the aspect of a village street; although everything is so inartificial
+and inceptive, that it seems as if one returning wave of the wild
+nature might overwhelm it all. But the one edifice which gives the
+pledge of permanence to this bold enterprise is seen at the central
+point of the picture. There stands the meeting-house, a small
+structure, low-roofed, without a spire, and built of rough timber,
+newly hewn, with the sap still in the logs, and here and there a strip
+of bark adhering to them. A meaner temple was never consecrated to the
+worship of the Deity. With the alternative of kneeling beneath the
+awful vault of the firmament, it is strange that men should creep into
+this pent-up nook, and expect God’s presence there. Such, at least, one
+would imagine, might be the feeling of these forest-settlers,
+accustomed, as they had been, to stand under the dim arches of vast
+cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary worship in the old
+ivy-covered churches of rural England, around which lay the bones of
+many generations of their forefathers. How could they dispense with the
+carved altar-work?—how, with the pictured windows, where the light of
+common day was hallowed by being transmitted through the glorified
+figures of saints?—how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it must have
+been, with the prayers that had gone upward for centuries?—how, with
+the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along the aisles, pervading
+the whole church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of audible
+religion? They needed nothing of all this. Their house of worship, like
+their ceremonial, was naked, simple, and severe. But the zeal of a
+recovered faith burned like a lamp within their hearts, enriching
+everything around them with its radiance; making of these new walls,
+and this narrow compass, its own cathedral; and being, in itself, that
+spiritual mystery and experience, of which sacred architecture,
+pictured windows, and the organ’s grand solemnity are remote and
+imperfect symbols. All was well, so long as their lamps were freshly
+kindled at heavenly flame. After a while, however, whether in their
+time or their children’s, these lamps began to burn more dimly, or with
+a less genuine lustre; and then it might be seen how hard, cold, and
+confined was their system,—how like an iron cage was that which they
+called Liberty.
+
+Too much of this. Look again at the picture, and observe how the
+aforesaid Anglo-Saxon energy is now trampling along the street, and
+raising a positive cloud of dust beneath its sturdy footsteps. For
+there the carpenters are building a new house, the frame of which was
+hewn and fitted in England, of English oak, and sent hither on
+shipboard; and here a blacksmith makes huge slang and clatter on his
+anvil, shaping out tools and weapons; and yonder a wheelwright, who
+boasts himself a London workman, regularly bred to his handicraft, is
+fashioning a set of wagon-wheels, the track of which shall soon be
+visible. The wild forest is shrinking back; the street has lost the
+aromatic odor of the pine-trees, and of the sweet-fern that grew
+beneath them. The tender and modest wild-flowers, those gentle children
+of savage nature that grew pale beneath the ever-brooding shade, have
+shrank away and disappeared, like stars that vanish in the breadth of
+light. Gardens are fenced in, and display pumpkin-beds and rows of
+cabbages and beans; and, though the governor and the minister both view
+them with a disapproving eye, plants of broad-leaved tobacco, which the
+cultivators are enjoined to use privily, or not at all. No wolf, for a
+year past, has been heard to bark, or known to range among the
+dwellings, except that single one, whose grisly head, with a plash of
+blood beneath it, is now affixed to the portal of the meeting-house.
+The partridge has ceased to run across the too-frequented path. Of all
+the wild life that used to throng here, only the Indians still come
+into the settlement, bringing the skins of beaver and otter, bear and
+elk, which they sell to Endicott for the wares of England. And there is
+little John Massey, the son of Jeffrey Massey and first-born of
+Naumkeag, playing beside his father’s threshold, a child of six or
+seven years old. Which is the better-grown infant,—the town or the boy?
+
+The red men have become aware that the street is no longer free to
+them, save by the sufferance and permission of the settlers. Often, to
+impress them with an awe of English power, there is a muster and
+training of the town-forces, and a stately march of the mail-clad band,
+like this which we now see advancing up the street. There they come,
+fifty of them, or more; all with their iron breastplates and steel caps
+well burnished, and glimmering bravely against the sun; their ponderous
+muskets on their shoulders, their bandaliers about their waists, their
+lighted matches in their hands, and the drum and fife playing cheerily
+before them. See! do they not step like martial men? Do they not
+manœuvre like soldiers who have seen stricken fields? And well they
+may; for this band is composed of precisely such materials as those
+with which Cromwell is preparing to beat down the strength of a
+kingdom; and his famous regiment of Ironsides might be recruited from
+just such men. In everything, at this period, New England was the
+essential spirit and flower of that which was about to become uppermost
+in the mother-country. Many a bold and wise man lost the fame which
+would have accrued to him in English history, by crossing the Atlantic
+with our forefathers. Many a valiant captain, who might have been
+foremost at Marston Moor or Naseby, exhausted his martial ardor in the
+command of a log-built fortress, like that which you observe on the
+gently rising ground at the right of the pathway,—its banner fluttering
+in the breeze, and the culverins and sakers showing their deadly
+muzzles over the rampart.
+
+A multitude of people were now thronging to New England: some, because
+the ancient and ponderous framework of Church and State threatened to
+crumble down upon their heads; others, because they despaired of such a
+downfall. Among those who came to Naumkeag were men of history and
+legend, whose feet leave a track of brightness along any pathway which
+they have trodden. You shall behold their life-like images—their
+spectres, if you choose so to call them—passing, encountering with a
+familiar nod, stopping to converse together, praying, bearing weapons,
+laboring or resting from their labors, in the Main Street. Here, now,
+comes Hugh Peters, an earnest, restless man, walking swiftly, as being
+impelled by that fiery activity of nature which shall hereafter thrust
+him into the conflict of dangerous affairs, make him the chaplain and
+counsellor of Cromwell, and finally bring him to a bloody end. He
+pauses, by the meetinghouse, to exchange a greeting with Roger
+Williams, whose face indicates, methinks, a gentler spirit, kinder and
+more expansive, than that of Peters; yet not less active for what he
+discerns to be the will of God, or the welfare of mankind. And look!
+here is a guest for Endicott, coming forth out of the forest, through
+which he has been journeying from Boston, and which, with its rude
+branches, has caught hold of his attire, and has wet his feet with its
+swamps and streams. Still there is something in his mild and venerable,
+though not aged presence—a propriety, an equilibrium, in Governor
+Winthrop’s nature—that causes the disarray of his costume to be
+unnoticed, and gives us the same impression as if he were clad in such
+rave and rich attire as we may suppose him to have worn in the Council
+Chamber of the colony. Is not this characteristic wonderfully
+perceptible in our spectral representative of his person? But what
+dignitary is this crossing from the other side to greet the governor? A
+stately personage, in a dark velvet cloak, with a hoary beard, and a
+gold chain across his breast; he has the authoritative port of one who
+has filled the highest civic station in the first of cities. Of all men
+in the world, we should least expect to meet the Lord Mayor of
+London—as Sir Richard Saltonstall has been, once and again—in a
+forest-bordered settlement of the western wilderness.
+
+Farther down the street, we see Emanuel Downing, a grave and worthy
+citizen, with his son George, a stripling who has a career before him;
+his shrewd and quick capacity and pliant conscience shall not only
+exalt him high, but secure him from a downfall. Here is another figure,
+on whose characteristic make and expressive action I will stake the
+credit of my pictorial puppet-show.
+
+Have you not already detected a quaint, sly humor in that face,—an
+eccentricity in the manner,—a certain indescribable waywardness,—all
+the marks, in short, of an original man, unmistakably impressed, yet
+kept down by a sense of clerical restraint? That is Nathaniel Ward, the
+minister of Ipswich, but better remembered as the simple cobbler of
+Agawam. He hammered his sole so faithfully, and stitched his
+upper-leather so well, that the shoe is hardly yet worn out, though
+thrown aside for some two centuries past. And next, among these
+Puritans and Roundheads, we observe the very model of a Cavalier, with
+the curling lovelock, the fantastically trimmed beard, the embroidery,
+the ornamented rapier, the gilded dagger, and all other foppishnesses
+that distinguished the wild gallants who rode headlong to their
+overthrow in the cause of King Charles. This is Morton of Merry Mount,
+who has come hither to hold a council with Endicott, but will shortly
+be his prisoner. Yonder pale, decaying figure of a white-robed woman,
+who glides slowly along the street, is the Lady Arabella, looking for
+her own grave in the virgin soil. That other female form, who seems to
+be talking—we might almost say preaching or expounding—in the centre of
+a group of profoundly attentive auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here
+comes Vane—
+
+“But, my dear sir,” interrupts the same gentleman who before questioned
+the showman’s genealogical accuracy, “allow me to observe that these
+historical personages could not possibly have met together in the Main
+Street. They might, and probably did, all visit our old town, at one
+time or another, but not simultaneously; and you have fallen into
+anachronisms that I positively shudder to think of!”
+
+“The fellow,” adds the scarcely civil critic, “has learned a bead-roll
+of historic names, whom he lugs into his pictorial puppet-show, as he
+calls it, helter-skelter, without caring whether they were
+contemporaries or not,—and sets them all by the ears together. But was
+there ever such a fund of impudence? To hear his running commentary,
+you would suppose that these miserable slips of painted pasteboard,
+with hardly the remotest outlines of the human figure, had all the
+character and expression of Michael Angelo’s pictures. Well! go on,
+sir!”
+
+“Sir, you break the illusion of the scene,” mildly remonstrates the
+showman.
+
+“Illusion! What illusion?” rejoins the critic, with a contemptuous
+snort. “On the word of a gentleman, I see nothing illusive in the
+wretchedly bedaubed sheet of canvas that forms your background, or in
+these pasteboard slips that hitch and jerk along the front. The only
+illusion, permit me to say, is in the puppet-showman’s tongue,—and that
+but a wretched one, into the bargain!”
+
+“We public men,” replies the showman, meekly, “must lay our account,
+sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism. But—merely for
+your own pleasure, sir—let me entreat you to take another point of
+view. Sit farther back, by that young lady, in whose face I have
+watched the reflection of every changing scene; only oblige me by
+sitting there; and, take my word for it, the slips of pasteboard shall
+assume spiritual life, and the bedaubed canvas become an airy and
+changeable reflex of what it purports to represent.”
+
+“I know better,” retorts the critic, settling himself in his seat, with
+sullen but self-complacent immovableness. “And, as for my own pleasure,
+I shall best consult it by remaining precisely where I am.”
+
+The showman bows, and waves his hand; and, at the signal, as if time
+and vicissitude had been awaiting his permission to move onward, the
+mimic street becomes alive again.
+
+Years have rolled over our scene, and converted the forest-track into a
+dusty thoroughfare, which, being intersected with lanes and
+cross-paths, may fairly be designated as the Main Street. On the
+ground-sites of many of the log-built sheds, into which the first
+settlers crept for shelter, houses of quaint architecture have now
+risen. These later edifices are built, as you see, in one generally
+accordant style, though with such subordinate variety as keeps the
+beholder’s curiosity excited, and causes each structure, like its
+owner’s character, to produce its own peculiar impression. Most of them
+have a huge chimney in the centre, with flues so vast that it must have
+been easy for the witches to fly out of them as they were wont to do,
+when bound on an aerial visit to the Black Man in the forest. Around
+this great chimney the wooden house clusters itself, in a whole
+community of gable-ends, each ascending into its own separate peak; the
+second story, with its lattice-windows, projecting over the first; and
+the door, which is perhaps arched, provided on the outside with an iron
+hammer, wherewith the visitor’s hand may give a thundering rat-a-tat.
+
+The timber framework of these houses, as compared with those of recent
+date, is like the skeleton of an old giant, beside the frail bones of a
+modern man of fashion. Many of them, by the vast strength and soundness
+of their oaken substance, have been preserved through a length of time
+which would have tried the stability of brick and stone; so that, in
+all the progressive decay and continual reconstruction of the street,
+to down our own days, we shall still behold these old edifices
+occupying their long-accustomed sites. For instance, on the upper
+corner of that green lane which shall hereafter be North Street, we see
+the Curwen House, newly built, with the carpenters still at work on the
+roof nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner
+stands another dwelling,—destined, at some period of its existence, to
+be the abode of an unsuccessful alchemist,—which shall likewise survive
+to our own generation, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through the
+medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now established a sort of
+kindred and hereditary acquaintance with the Main Street.
+
+Great as is the transformation produced by a short term of years, each
+single day creeps through the Puritan settlement sluggishly enough. It
+shall pass before your eyes, condensed into the space of a few moments.
+The gray light of early morning is slowly diffusing itself over the
+scene; and the bellman, whose office it is to cry the hour at the
+street-corners, rings the last peal upon his hand bell, and goes
+wearily homewards, with the owls, the bats, and other creatures of the
+night. Lattices are thrust back on their hinges, as if the town were
+opening its eyes, in the summer morning. Forth stumbles the still
+drowsy cowherd, with his horn; putting which to his lips, it emits a
+bellowing bray, impossible to be represented in the picture, but which
+reaches the pricked-up ears of every cow in the settlement, and tells
+her that the dewy pasture-hour is come. House after house awakes, and
+sends the smoke up curling from its chimney, like frosty breath from
+living nostrils; and as those white wreaths of smoke, though
+impregnated with earthy admixtures, climb skyward, so, from each
+dwelling, does the morning worship—its spiritual essence, bearing up
+its human imperfection—find its way to the heavenly Father’s throne.
+
+The breakfast-hour being passed, the inhabitants do not, as usual, go
+to their fields or workshops, but remain within doors; or perhaps walk
+the street, with a grave sobriety, yet a disengaged and unburdened
+aspect, that belongs neither to a holiday nor a Sabbath. And, indeed,
+this passing day is neither, nor is it a common week-day, although
+partaking of all the three. It is the Thursday Lecture; an institution
+which New England has long ago relinquished, and almost forgotten, yet
+which it would have been better to retain, as bearing relations to both
+the spiritual and ordinary life, and bringing each acquainted with the
+other. The tokens of its observance, however, which here meet our eyes,
+are of rather a questionable cast. It is, in one sense, a day of public
+shame; the day on which transgressors, who have made themselves liable
+to the minor severities of the Puritan law receive their reward of
+ignominy. At this very moment, this constable has bound an idle fellow
+to the whipping-post, and is giving him his deserts with a cat-o’-nine
+tails. Ever since sunrise, Daniel Fairfield has been standing on the
+steps of the meeting-house, with a halter about his neck, which he is
+condemned to wear visibly throughout his lifetime; Dorothy Talby is
+chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun
+blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting
+her hand against her husband; while, through the bars of that great
+wooden cage, in the centre of the scene, we discern either a human
+being or a wild beast, or both in one, whom this public infamy causes
+to roar, and gnash his teeth, and shake the strong oaken bars, as if he
+would break forth, and tear in pieces the little children who have been
+peeping at him. Such are the profitable sights that serve the good
+people to while away the earlier part of lecture-day. Betimes in the
+forenoon, a traveller—the first traveller that has come hitherward this
+morning—rides slowly into the street on his patient steed. He seems a
+clergyman; and, as he draws near, we recognize the minister of Lynn,
+who was pre-engaged to lecture here, and has been revolving his
+discourse, as he rode through the hoary wilderness. Behold, now, the
+whole town thronging into the meeting-house, mostly with such sombre
+visages that the sunshine becomes little better than a shadow when it
+falls upon them. There go the Thirteen Men, grim rulers of a grim
+community! There goes John Massey, the first town-born child, now a
+youth of twenty, whose eye wanders with peculiar interest towards that
+buxom damsel who comes up the steps at the same instant. There hobbles
+Goody Foster, a sour and bitter old beldam, looking as if she went to
+curse, and not to pray, and whom many of her neighbors suspect of
+taking an occasional airing on a broomstick. There, too, slinking
+shamefacedly in, you observe that same poor do-nothing and
+good-for-nothing whom we saw castigated just now at the whipping-post.
+Last of all, there goes the tithing-man, lugging in a couple of small
+boys, whom he has caught at play beneath God’s blessed sunshine, in a
+back lane. What native of Naumkeag, whose recollections go back more
+than thirty years, does not still shudder at that dark ogre of his
+infancy, who perhaps had long ceased to have an actual existence, but
+still lived in his childish belief, in a horrible idea, and in the
+nurse’s threat, as the Tidy Man!
+
+It will be hardly worth our while to wait two, or it may be three,
+turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion of the lecture.
+Therefore, by my control over light and darkness, I cause the dusk, and
+then the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth
+again the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his
+footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily
+the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears. Happy are we, if for nothing else,
+yet because we did not live in those days. In truth, when the first
+novelty and stir of spirit had subsided,—when the new settlement,
+between the forest-border and the sea, had become actually a little
+town,—its daily life must have trudged onward with hardly anything to
+diversify and enliven it, while also its rigidity could not fail to
+cause miserable distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was
+sinister to the intellect, and sinister to the heart; especially when
+one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom, and the counterfeit
+of its religious ardor, to the next; for these characteristics, as was
+inevitable, assumed the form both of hypocrisy and exaggeration, by
+being inherited from the example and precept of other human beings, and
+not from an original and spiritual source. The sons and grandchildren
+of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than
+their progenitors had been. The latter were stern, severe, intolerant,
+but not superstitious, not even fanatical; and endowed, if any men of
+that age were, with a far-seeing worldly sagacity. But it was
+impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, in heaven’s freedom,
+beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of character had
+established; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the
+unfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to
+us by our Puritan forefathers. Let us thank God for having given us
+such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less
+fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.
+
+“What is all this?” cries the critic. “A sermon? If so, it is not in
+the bill.”
+
+“Very true,” replies the showman; “and I ask pardon of the audience.”
+
+Look now at the street, and observe a strange people entering it. Their
+garments are torn and disordered, their faces haggard, their figures
+emaciated; for they have made their way hither through pathless
+deserts, suffering hunger and hardship, with no other shelter thin a
+hollow tree, the lair of a wild beast, or an Indian wigwam. Nor, in the
+most inhospitable and dangerous of such lodging-places, was there half
+the peril that awaits them in this thoroughfare of Christian men, with
+those secure dwellings and warm hearths on either side of it, and
+yonder meeting-house as the central object of the scene. These
+wanderers have received from Heaven a gift that, in all epochs of the
+world, has brought with it the penalties of mortal suffering and
+persecution, scorn, enmity, and death itself;—a gift that, thus
+terrible to its possessors, has ever been most hateful to all other
+men, since its very existence seems to threaten the overthrow of
+whatever else the toilsome ages have built up;—the gift of a new idea.
+You can discern it in them, illuminating their faces—their whole
+persons, indeed, however earthly and cloddish—with a light that
+inevitably shines through, and makes the startled community aware that
+these men are not as they themselves are,—not brethren nor neighbors of
+their thought. Forthwith, it is as if an earthquake rumbled through the
+town, making its vibrations felt at every hearthstone, and especially
+causing the spire of the meeting-house to totter. The Quakers have
+come. We are in peril! See! they trample upon our wise and
+well-established laws in the person of our chief magistrate; for
+Governor Endicott is passing, now an aged man, and dignified with long
+habits of authority,—and not one of the irreverent vagabonds has moved
+his hat. Did you note the ominous frown of the white-bearded Puritan
+governor, as he turned himself about, and, in his anger, half uplifted
+the staff that has become a needful support to his old age? Here comes
+old Mr. Norris, our venerable minister. Will they doff their hats, and
+pay reverence to him? No: their hats stick fast to their ungracious
+heads, as if they grew there; and—impious varlets that they are, and
+worse than the heathen Indians!—they eye our reverend pastor with a
+peculiar scorn, distrust, unbelief, and utter denial of his sanctified
+pretensions, of which he himself immediately becomes conscious; the
+more bitterly conscious, as he never knew nor dreamed of the like
+before.
+
+But look yonder! Can we believe our eyes? A Quaker woman, clad in
+sackcloth, and with ashes on her head, has mounted the steps of the
+meeting-house. She addresses the people in a wild, shrill voice,—wild
+and shrill it must be to suit such a figure,—which makes them tremble
+and turn pale, although they crowd open-mouthed to hear her. She is
+bold against established authority; she denounces the priest and his
+steeple-house. Many of her hearers are appalled; some weep; and others
+listen with a rapt attention, as if a living truth had now, for the
+first time, forced its way through the crust of habit, reached their
+hearts, and awakened them to life. This matter must be looked to; else
+we have brought our faith across the seas with us in vain; and it had
+been better that the old forest were still standing here, waving its
+tangled boughs and murmuring to the sky out of its desolate recesses,
+instead of this goodly street, if such blasphemies be spoken in it.
+
+So thought the old Puritans. What was their mode of action may be
+partly judged from the spectacles which now pass before your eyes.
+Joshua Buffum is standing in the pillory. Cassandra Southwick is led to
+prison. And there a woman, it is Ann Coleman,—naked from the waist
+upward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the Main
+Street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a
+whip of knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is that constable; and
+each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you see a frown
+wrinkling and twisting his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon
+his lips. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts
+his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfil the injunction of Major
+Hawthorne’s warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. There came down a
+stroke that has drawn blood! Ten such stripes are to be given in Salem,
+ten in Boston, and ten in Dedham; and, with those thirty stripes of
+blood upon her, she is to be driven into the forest. The crimson trail
+goes wavering along the Main Street; but Heaven grant that, as the rain
+of so many years has wept upon it, time after time, and washed it all
+away, so there may have been a dew of mercy, to cleanse this cruel
+blood-stain out of the record of the persecutor’s life!
+
+Pass on, thou spectral constable, and betake thee to thine own place of
+torment. Meanwhile, by the silent operation of the mechanism behind the
+scenes, a considerable space of time would seem to have lapsed over the
+street. The older dwellings now begin to look weather-beaten, through
+the effect of the many eastern storms that have moistened their
+unpainted shingles and clapboards, for not less than forty years. Such
+is the age we would assign to the town, judging by the aspect of John
+Massey, the first town-born child, whom his neighbors now call Goodman
+Massey, and whom we see yonder, a grave, almost autumnal-looking man,
+with children of his own about him. To the patriarchs of the
+settlement, no doubt, the Main Street is still but an affair of
+yesterday, hardly more antique, even if destined to be more permanent,
+than a path shovelled through the snow. But to the middle-aged and
+elderly men who came hither in childhood or early youth, it presents
+the aspect of a long and well-established work, on which they have
+expended the strength and ardor of their life. And the younger people,
+native to the street, whose earliest recollections are of creeping over
+the paternal threshold, and rolling on the grassy margin of the track,
+look at it as one of the perdurable things of our mortal state,—as old
+as the hills of the great pasture, or the headland at the harbor’s
+mouth. Their fathers and grandsires tell them how, within a few years
+past, the forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its
+tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their
+conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main Street is a street indeed,
+worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities
+beyond the sea. The old Puritans tell them of the crowds that hurry
+along Cheapside and Fleet Street and the Strand, and of the rush of
+tumultuous life at Temple Bar. They describe London Bridge, itself a
+street, with a row of houses on each side. They speak of the vast
+structure of the Tower, and the solemn grandeur of Westminster Abbey.
+The children listen, and still inquire if the streets of London are
+longer and broader than the one before their father’s door; if the
+Tower is bigger than the jail in Prison Lane; if the old Abbey will
+hold a larger congregation than our meeting-house. Nothing impresses
+them, except their own experience.
+
+It seems all a fable, too, that wolves have ever prowled here; and not
+less so, that the Squaw Sachem, and the Sagamore her son, once ruled
+over this region, and treated as sovereign potentates with the English
+settlers, then so few and storm-beaten, now so powerful. There stand
+some school-boys, you observe, in a little group around a drunken
+Indian, himself a prince of the Squaw Sachem’s lineage. He brought
+hither some beaver-skins for sale, and has already swallowed the larger
+portion of their price, in deadly draughts of firewater. Is there not a
+touch of pathos in that picture? and does it not go far towards telling
+the whole story of the vast growth and prosperity of one race, and the
+fated decay of another?—the children of the stranger making game of the
+great Squaw Sachem’s grandson!
+
+But the whole race of red men have not vanished with that wild princess
+and her posterity. This march of soldiers along the street betokens the
+breaking out of King Philip’s war; and these young men, the flower of
+Essex, are on their way to defend the villages on the Connecticut;
+where, at Bloody Brook, a terrible blow shall be smitten, and hardly
+one of that gallant band be left alive. And there, at that stately
+mansion, with its three peaks in front, and its two little peaked
+towers, one on either side of the door, we see brave Captain Gardner
+issuing forth, clad in his embroidered buff-coat, and his plumed cap
+upon his head. His trusty sword, in its steel scabbard, strikes
+clanking on the doorstep. See how the people throng to their doors and
+windows, as the cavalier rides past, reining his mettled steed so
+gallantly, and looking so like the very soul and emblem of martial
+achievement,—destined, too, to meet a warrior’s fate, at the desperate
+assault on the fortress of the Narragansetts!
+
+“The mettled steed looks like a pig,” interrupts the critic, “and
+Captain Gardner himself like the Devil, though a very tame one, and on
+a most diminutive scale.”
+
+“Sir, sir!” cries the persecuted showman, losing all patience,—for,
+indeed, he had particularly prided himself on these figures of Captain
+Gardner and his horse,—“I see that there is no hope of pleasing you.
+Pray, sir, do me the favor to take back your money, and withdraw!”
+
+“Not I!” answers the unconscionable critic. “I am just beginning to get
+interested in the matter. Come! turn your crank, and grind out a few
+more of these fooleries!”
+
+The showman rubs his brow impulsively, whisks the little rod with which
+he points out the notabilities of the scene, but, finally, with the
+inevitable acquiescence of all public servants, resumes his composure
+and goes on.
+
+Pass onward, onward, Time! Build up new houses here, and tear down thy
+works of yesterday, that have already the rusty moss upon them! Summon
+forth the minister to the abode of the young maiden, and bid him unite
+her to the joyful bridegroom! Let the youthful parents carry their
+first-born to the meeting-house, to receive the baptismal rite! Knock
+at the door, whence the sable line of the funeral is next to issue!
+Provide other successive generations of men, to trade, talk, quarrel,
+or walk in friendly intercourse along the street, as their fathers did
+before them! Do all thy daily and accustomed business, Father Time, in
+this thoroughfare, which thy footsteps, for so many years, have now
+made dusty! But here, at last, thou leadest along a procession which,
+once witnessed, shall appear no more, and be remembered only as a
+hideous dream of thine, or a frenzy of thy old brain.
+
+“Turn your crank, I say,” bellows the remorseless critic, “and grind it
+out, whatever it be, without further preface!”
+
+The showman deems it best to comply.
+
+Then, here comes the worshipful Captain Curwen, sheriff of Essex, on
+horseback, at the head of an armed guard, escorting a company of
+condemned prisoners from the jail to their place of execution on
+Gallows Hill. The witches! There is no mistaking them! The witches! As
+they approach up Prison Lane, and turn into the Main Street, let us
+watch their faces, as if we made a part of the pale crowd that presses
+so eagerly about them, yet shrinks back with such shuddering dread,
+leaving an open passage betwixt a dense throng on either side. Listen
+to what the people say.
+
+There is old George Jacobs, known hereabouts, these sixty years, as a
+man whom we thought upright in all his way of life, quiet, blameless, a
+good husband before his pious wife was summoned from the evil to come,
+and a good father to the children whom she left him. Ah! but when that
+blessed woman went to heaven, George Jacobs’s heart was empty, his
+hearth lonely, his life broken tip; his children were married, and
+betook themselves to habitations of their own; and Satan, in his
+wanderings up and down, beheld this forlorn old man, to whom life was a
+sameness and a weariness, and found the way to tempt him. So the
+miserable sinner was prevailed with to mount into the air, and career
+among the clouds; and he is proved to have been present at a
+witch-meeting as far off as Falmouth, on the very same night that his
+next neighbors saw him, with his rheumatic stoop, going in at his own
+door. There is John Willard, too; an honest man we thought him, and so
+shrewd and active in his business, so practical, so intent on every-day
+affairs, so constant at his little place of trade, where he bartered
+English goods for Indian corn and all kinds of country produce! How
+could such a man find time, or what could put it into his mind, to
+leave his proper calling, and become a wizard? It is a mystery, unless
+the Black Man tempted him with great heaps of gold. See that aged
+couple,—a sad sight, truly,—John Proctor, and his wife Elizabeth. If
+there were two old people in all the county of Essex who seemed to have
+led a true Christian life, and to be treading hopefully the little
+remnant of their earthly path, it was this very pair. Yet have we heard
+it sworn, to the satisfaction of the worshipful Chief-Justice Sewell,
+and all the court and jury, that Proctor and his wife have shown their
+withered faces at children’s bedsides, mocking, making mouths, and
+affrighting the poor little innocents in the night-time. They, or their
+spectral appearances, have stuck pins into the Afflicted Ones, and
+thrown them into deadly fainting-fits with a touch, or but a look. And,
+while we supposed the old man to be reading the Bible to his old
+wife,—she meanwhile knitting in the chimney-corner,—the pair of hoary
+reprobates have whisked up the chimney, both on one broomstick, and
+flown away to a witch-communion, far into the depths of the chill, dark
+forest. How foolish! Were it only for fear of rheumatic pains in their
+old bones, they had better have stayed at home. But away they went; and
+the laughter of their decayed, cackling voices has been heard at
+midnight, aloft in the air. Now, in the sunny noontide, as they go
+tottering to the gallows, it is the Devil’s turn to laugh.
+
+Behind these two,—who help another along, and seem to be comforting and
+encouraging each other, in a manner truly pitiful, if it were not a sin
+to pity the old witch and wizard,—behind them comes a woman, with a
+dark proud face that has been beautiful, and a figure that is still
+majestic. Do you know her? It is Martha Carrier, whom the Devil found
+in a humble cottage, and looked into her discontented heart, and saw
+pride there, and tempted her with his promise that she should be Queen
+of Hell. And now, with that lofty demeanor, she is passing to her
+kingdom, and, by her unquenchable pride, transforms this escort of
+shame into a triumphal procession, that shall attend her to the gates
+of her infernal palace, and seat her upon the fiery throne. Within this
+hour, she shall assume her royal dignity.
+
+Last of the miserable train comes a man clad in black, of small stature
+and a dark complexion, with a clerical band about his neck. Many a
+time, in the years gone by, that face has been uplifted heavenward from
+the pulpit of the East Meeting-House, when the Rev. Mr. Burroughs
+seemed to worship God. What!—he? The holy man!—the learned!—the wise!
+How has the Devil tempted him? His fellow-criminals, for the most part,
+are obtuse, uncultivated creatures, some of them scarcely half-witted
+by nature, and others greatly decayed in their intellects through age.
+They were an easy prey for the destroyer. Not so with this George
+Burroughs, as we judge by the inward light which glows through his dark
+countenance, and, we might almost say, glorifies his figure, in spite
+of the soil and haggardness of long imprisonment,—in spite of the heavy
+shadow that must fall on him, while death is walking by his side. What
+bribe could Satan offer, rich enough to tempt and overcome this mail?
+Alas! it may have been in the very strength of his high and searching
+intellect, that the Tempter found the weakness which betrayed him. He
+yearned for knowledge he went groping onward into a world of mystery;
+at first, as the witnesses have sworn, he summoned up the ghosts of his
+two dead wives, and talked with them of matters beyond the grave; and,
+when their responses failed to satisfy the intense and sinful craving
+of his spirit, he called on Satan, and was heard. Yet—to look at
+him—who, that had not known the proof, could believe him guilty? Who
+would not say, while we see him offering comfort to the weak and aged
+partners of his horrible crime,—while we hear his ejaculations of
+prayer, that seem to bubble up out of the depths of his heart, and fly
+heavenward, unawares,—while we behold a radiance brightening on his
+features as from the other world, which is but a few steps off,—who
+would not say, that, over the dusty track of the Main Street, a
+Christian saint is now going to a martyr’s death? May not the
+Arch-Fiend have been too subtle for the court and jury, and betrayed
+them—laughing in his sleeve, the while—into the awful error of pouring
+out sanctified blood as an acceptable sacrifice upon God’s altar? Ah!
+no; for listen to wise Cotton Mather, who, as he sits there on his
+horse, speaks comfortably to the perplexed multitude, and tells them
+that all has been religiously and justly done, and that Satan’s power
+shall this day receive its death-blow in New England.
+
+Heaven grant it be so!—the great scholar must be right; so lead the
+poor creatures to their death! Do you see that group of children and
+half-grown girls, and, among them, an old, hag-like Indian woman,
+Tituba by name? Those are the Afflicted Ones. Behold, at this very
+instant, a proof of Satan’s power and malice! Mercy Parris, the
+minister’s daughter, has been smitten by a flash of Martha Carrier’s
+eye, and falls down in the street, writhing with horrible spasms and
+foaming at the mouth, like the possessed one spoken of in Scripture.
+Hurry on the accursed witches to the gallows, ere they do more
+mischief!—ere they fling out their withered arms, and scatter
+pestilence by handfuls among the crowd!—ere, as their parting legacy,
+they cast a blight over the land, so that henceforth it may bear no
+fruit nor blade of grass, and be fit for nothing but a sepulchre for
+their unhallowed carcasses! So, on they go; and old George Jacobs has
+stumbled, by reason of his infirmity; but Goodman Proctor and his wife
+lean on one another, and walk at a reasonably steady pace, considering
+their age. Mr. Burroughs seems to administer counsel to Martha Carrier,
+whose face and mien, methinks, are milder and humbler than they were.
+Among the multitude, meanwhile, there is horror, fear, and distrust;
+and friend looks askance at friend, and the husband at his wife, and
+the wife at him, and even the mother at her little child; as if, in
+every creature that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an
+accuser. Never, never again, whether in this or any other shape, may
+Universal Madness riot in the Main Street!
+
+I perceive in your eyes, my indulgent spectators, the criticism which
+you are too kind to utter. These scenes, you think, are all too sombre.
+So, indeed, they are; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of
+our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread
+of rose-color or gold, and not on me, who have a tropic-love of
+sunshine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where
+to find so much. That you may believe me, I will exhibit one of the
+only class of scenes, so far as my investigation has taught me, in
+which our ancestors were wont to steep their tough old hearts in wine
+and strong drink, and indulge an outbreak of grisly jollity.
+
+Here it comes, out of the same house whence we saw brave Captain
+Gardner go forth to the wars. What! A coffin, borne on men’s shoulders,
+and six aged gentlemen as pall-bearers, and a long train of mourners,
+with black gloves and black hat-bands, and everything black, save a
+white handkerchief in each mourner’s hand, to wipe away his tears
+withal. Now, my kind patrons, you are angry with me. You were bidden to
+a bridal-dance, and find yourselves walking in a funeral procession.
+Even so; but look back through all the social customs of New England,
+in the first century of her existence, and read all her traits of
+character; and if you find one occasion, other than a funeral feast,
+where jollity was sanctioned by universal practice, I will set fire to
+my puppet-show without another word. These are the obsequies of old
+Governor Bradstreet, the patriarch and survivor of the first settlers,
+who, having intermarried with the Widow Gardner, is now resting from
+his labors, at the great age of ninety-four. The white-bearded corpse,
+which was his spirit’s earthly garniture, now lies beneath yonder
+coffin-lid. Many a cask of ale and cider is on tap, and many a draught
+of spiced wine and aqua-vitæ has been quaffed. Else why should the
+bearers stagger, as they tremulously uphold the coffin?—and the aged
+pall-bearers, too, as they strive to walk solemnly beside it?—and
+wherefore do the mourners tread on one another’s heels?—and why, if we
+may ask without offence, should the nose of the Rev. Mr. Noyes, through
+which he has just been delivering the funeral discourse, glow like a
+ruddy coal of fire? Well, well, old friends! Pass on, with your burden
+of mortality, And lay it in the tomb with jolly hearts. People should
+be permitted to enjoy themselves in their own fashion; every man to his
+taste; but New England must have been a dismal abode for the man of
+pleasure, when the only boon-companion was Death!
+
+Under cover of a mist that has settled over the scene, a few years flit
+by, and escape our notice. As the atmosphere becomes transparent, we
+perceive a decrepit grandsire, hobbling along the street. Do you
+recognize him? We saw him, first, as the baby in Goodwife Massey’s
+arms, when the primeval trees were flinging their shadow over Roger
+Conant’s cabin; we have seen him, as the boy, the youth, the man,
+bearing his humble part in all the successive scenes, and forming the
+index-figure whereby to note the age of his coeval town. And here he
+is, old Goodman Massey, taking his last walk,—often pausing,—often
+leaning over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at
+such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of
+those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and
+deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic
+infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to
+visit every settler’s door. The Main Street is still youthful; the
+coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of
+fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our local
+history, as the first town-born child.
+
+Behold here a change, wrought in the twinkling of an eye, like an
+incident in a tale of magic, even while your observation has been fixed
+upon the scene. The Main Street has vanished out of sight. In its stead
+appears a wintry waste of snow, with the sun just peeping over it, cold
+and bright, and tingeing the white expanse with the faintest and most
+ethereal rose-color. This is the Great Snow of 1717, famous for the
+mountain-drifts in which it buried the whole country. It would seem as
+if the street, the growth of which we have noted so attentively,
+following it from its first phase, as an Indian track, until it reached
+the dignity of sidewalks, were all at once obliterated, and resolved
+into a drearier pathlessness than when the forest covered it. The
+gigantic swells and billows of the snow have swept over each man’s
+metes and bounds, and annihilated all the visible distinctions of human
+property. So that now the traces of former times and hitherto
+accomplished deeds being done away, mankind should be at liberty to
+enter on new paths, and guide themselves by other laws than heretofore;
+if, indeed, the race be not extinct, and it be worth our while to go on
+with the march of life, over the cold and desolate expanse that lies
+before us. It may be, however, that matters are not so desperate as
+they appear. That vast icicle, glittering so cheerlessly in the
+sunshine, must be the spire of the meeting-house, incrusted with frozen
+sleet. Those great heaps, too, which we mistook for drifts, are houses,
+buried up to their eaves, and with their peaked roofs rounded by the
+depth of snow upon them. There, now, comes a gush of smoke from what I
+judge to be the chimney of the Ship Tavern;—and another—another—and
+another—from the chimneys of other dwellings, where fireside comfort,
+domestic peace, the sports of children, and the quietude of age are
+living yet, in spite of the frozen crust above them.
+
+But it is time to change the scene. Its dreary monotony shall not test
+your fortitude like one of our actual New England winters, which leaves
+so large a blank—so melancholy a death-spot—in lives so brief that they
+ought to be all summer-time. Here, at least, I may claim to be ruler of
+the seasons. One turn of the crank shall melt away the snow from the
+Main Street, and show the trees in their full foliage, the rose-bushes
+in bloom, and a border of green grass along the sidewalk. There! But
+what! How! The scene will not move. A wire is broken. The street
+continues buried beneath the snow, and the fate of Herculaneum and
+Pompeii has its parallel in this catastrophe.
+
+Alas! my kind and gentle audience, you know not the extent of your
+misfortune. The scenes to come were far better than the past. The
+street itself would have been more worthy of pictorial exhibition; the
+deeds of its inhabitants not less so. And how would your interest have
+deepened, as, passing out of the cold shadow of antiquity, in my long
+and weary course, I should arrive within the limits of man’s memory,
+and, leading you at last into the sunshine of the present, should give
+a reflex of the very life that is flitting past us! Your own beauty, my
+fair townswomen, would have beamed upon you, out of my scene. Not a
+gentleman that walks the street but should have beheld his own face and
+figure, his gait, the peculiar swing of his arm, and the coat that he
+put on yesterday. Then, too,—and it is what I chiefly regret,—I had
+expended a vast deal of light and brilliancy on a representation of the
+street in its whole length, from Buffum’s Corner downward, on the night
+of the grand illumination for General Taylor’s triumph. Lastly, I
+should have given the crank one other turn, and have brought out the
+future, showing you who shall walk the Main Street to-morrow, and,
+perchance, whose funeral shall pass through it!
+
+But these, like most other human purposes, lie unaccomplished; and I
+have only further to say, that any lady or gentlemen who may feel
+dissatisfied with the evening’s entertainment shall receive back the
+admission fee at the door.
+
+“Then give me mine,” cries the critic, stretching out his palm. “I said
+that your exhibition would prove a humbug, and so it has turned out.
+So, hand over my quarter!”
+
+
+
+
+ETHAN BRAND:
+A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE
+
+
+Bartram the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, begrimed with
+charcoal, sat watching his kiln at nightfall, while his little son
+played at building houses with the scattered fragments of marble, when,
+on the hill-side below them, they heard a roar of laughter, not
+mirthful, but slow, and even solemn, like a wind shaking the boughs of
+the forest.
+
+“Father, what is that?” asked the little boy, leaving his play, and
+pressing betwixt his father’s knees.
+
+“Oh, some drunken man, I suppose,” answered the lime-burner; “some
+merry fellow from the bar-room in the village, who dared not laugh loud
+enough within doors lest he should blow the roof of the house off. So
+here he is, shaking his jolly sides at the foot of Graylock.”
+
+“But, father,” said the child, more sensitive than the obtuse,
+middle-aged clown, “he does not laugh like a man that is glad. So the
+noise frightens me!”
+
+“Don’t be a fool, child!” cried his father, gruffly. “You will never
+make a man, I do believe; there is too much of your mother in you. I
+have known the rustling of a leaf startle you. Hark! Here comes the
+merry fellow now. You shall see that there is no harm in him.”
+
+Bartram and his little son, while they were talking thus, sat watching
+the same lime-kiln that had been the scene of Ethan Brand’s solitary
+and meditative life, before he began his search for the Unpardonable
+Sin. Many years, as we have seen, had now elapsed, since that
+portentous night when the IDEA was first developed. The kiln, however,
+on the mountain-side, stood unimpaired, and was in nothing changed
+since he had thrown his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its
+furnace, and melted them, as it were, into the one thought that took
+possession of his life. It was a rude, round, tower-like structure
+about twenty feet high, heavily built of rough stones, and with a
+hillock of earth heaped about the larger part of its circumference; so
+that the blocks and fragments of marble might be drawn by cart-loads,
+and thrown in at the top. There was an opening at the bottom of the
+tower, like an over-mouth, but large enough to admit a man in a
+stooping posture, and provided with a massive iron door. With the smoke
+and jets of flame issuing from the chinks and crevices of this door,
+which seemed to give admittance into the hill-side, it resembled
+nothing so much as the private entrance to the infernal regions, which
+the shepherds of the Delectable Mountains were accustomed to show to
+pilgrims.
+
+There are many such lime-kilns in that tract of country, for the
+purpose of burning the white marble which composes a large part of the
+substance of the hills. Some of them, built years ago, and long
+deserted, with weeds growing in the vacant round of the interior, which
+is open to the sky, and grass and wild-flowers rooting themselves into
+the chinks of the stones, look already like relics of antiquity, and
+may yet be overspread with the lichens of centuries to come. Others,
+where the lime-burner still feeds his daily and night-long fire, afford
+points of interest to the wanderer among the hills, who seats himself
+on a log of wood or a fragment of marble, to hold a chat with the
+solitary man. It is a lonesome, and, when the character is inclined to
+thought, may be an intensely thoughtful occupation; as it proved in the
+case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to such strange purpose, in days
+gone by, while the fire in this very kiln was burning.
+
+The man who now watched the fire was of a different order, and troubled
+himself with no thoughts save the very few that were requisite to his
+business. At frequent intervals, he flung back the clashing weight of
+the iron door, and, turning his face from the insufferable glare,
+thrust in huge logs of oak, or stirred the immense brands with a long
+pole. Within the furnace were seen the curling and riotous flames, and
+the burning marble, almost molten with the intensity of heat; while
+without, the reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy of
+the surrounding forest, and showed in the foreground a bright and ruddy
+little picture of the hut, the spring beside its door, the athletic and
+coal-begrimed figure of the lime-burner, and the half-frightened child,
+shrinking into the protection of his father’s shadow. And when, again,
+the iron door was closed, then reappeared the tender light of the
+half-full moon, which vainly strove to trace out the indistinct shapes
+of the neighboring mountains; and, in the upper sky, there was a
+flitting congregation of clouds, still faintly tinged with the rosy
+sunset, though thus far down into the valley the sunshine had vanished
+long and long ago.
+
+The little boy now crept still closer to his father, as footsteps were
+heard ascending the hill-side, and a human form thrust aside the bushes
+that clustered beneath the trees.
+
+“Halloo! who is it?” cried the lime-burner, vexed at his son’s
+timidity, yet half infected by it. “Come forward, and show yourself,
+like a man, or I’ll fling this chunk of marble at your head!”
+
+“You offer me a rough welcome,” said a gloomy voice, as the unknown man
+drew nigh. “Yet I neither claim nor desire a kinder one, even at my own
+fireside.”
+
+To obtain a distincter view, Bartram threw open the iron door of the
+kiln, whence immediately issued a gush of fierce light, that smote full
+upon the stranger’s face and figure. To a careless eye there appeared
+nothing very remarkable in his aspect, which was that of a man in a
+coarse brown, country-made suit of clothes, tall and thin, with the
+staff and heavy shoes of a wayfarer. As he advanced, he fixed his
+eyes—which were very bright—intently upon the brightness of the
+furnace, as if he beheld, or expected to behold, some object worthy of
+note within it.
+
+“Good evening, stranger,” said the lime-burner; “whence come you, so
+late in the day?”
+
+“I come from my search,” answered the wayfarer; “for, at last, it is
+finished.”
+
+“Drunk!—or crazy!” muttered Bartram to himself. “I shall have trouble
+with the fellow. The sooner I drive him away, the better.”
+
+The little boy, all in a tremble, whispered to his father, and begged
+him to shut the door of the kiln, so that there might not be so much
+light; for that there was something in the man’s face which he was
+afraid to look at, yet could not look away from. And, indeed, even the
+lime-burner’s dull and torpid sense began to be impressed by an
+indescribable something in that thin, rugged, thoughtful visage, with
+the grizzled hair hanging wildly about it, and those deeply sunken
+eyes, which gleamed like fires within the entrance of a mysterious
+cavern. But, as he closed the door, the stranger turned towards him,
+and spoke in a quiet, familiar way, that made Bartram feel as if he
+were a sane and sensible man, after all.
+
+“Your task draws to an end, I see,” said he. “This marble has already
+been burning three days. A few hours more will convert the stone to
+lime.”
+
+“Why, who are you?” exclaimed the lime-burner. “You seem as well
+acquainted with my business as I am myself.”
+
+“And well I may be,” said the stranger; “for I followed the same craft
+many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. But you are a
+newcomer in these parts. Did you never hear of Ethan Brand?”
+
+“The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin?” asked Bartram,
+with a laugh.
+
+“The same,” answered the stranger. “He has found what he sought, and
+therefore he comes back again.”
+
+“What! then you are Ethan Brand himself?” cried the lime-burner, in
+amazement. “I am a new-comer here, as you say, and they call it
+eighteen years since you left the foot of Graylock. But, I can tell
+you, the good folks still talk about Ethan Brand, in the village
+yonder, and what a strange errand took him away from his lime-kiln.
+Well, and so you have found the Unpardonable Sin?”
+
+“Even so!” said the stranger, calmly.
+
+“If the question is a fair one,” proceeded Bartram, “where might it
+be?”
+
+Ethan Brand laid his finger on his own heart.
+
+“Here!” replied he.
+
+And then, without mirth in his countenance, but as if moved by an
+involuntary recognition of the infinite absurdity of seeking throughout
+the world for what was the closest of all things to himself, and
+looking into every heart, save his own, for what was hidden in no other
+breast, he broke into a laugh of scorn. It was the same slow, heavy
+laugh, that had almost appalled the lime-burner when it heralded the
+wayfarer’s approach.
+
+The solitary mountain-side was made dismal by it. Laughter, when out of
+place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling,
+may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The laughter of
+one asleep, even if it be a little child,—the madman’s laugh,—the wild,
+screaming laugh of a born idiot,—are sounds that we sometimes tremble
+to hear, and would always willingly forget. Poets have imagined no
+utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh.
+And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange
+man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled
+away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.
+
+“Joe,” said he to his little son, “scamper down to the tavern in the
+village, and tell the jolly fellows there that Ethan Brand has come
+back, and that he has found the Unpardonable Sin!”
+
+The boy darted away on his errand, to which Ethan Brand made no
+objection, nor seemed hardly to notice it. He sat on a log of wood,
+looking steadfastly at the iron door of the kiln. When the child was
+out of sight, and his swift and light footsteps ceased to be heard
+treading first on the fallen leaves and then on the rocky
+mountain-path, the lime-burner began to regret his departure. He felt
+that the little fellow’s presence had been a barrier between his guest
+and himself, and that he must now deal, heart to heart, with a man who,
+on his own confession, had committed the one only crime for which
+Heaven could afford no mercy. That crime, in its indistinct blackness,
+seemed to overshadow him, and made his memory riotous with a throng of
+evil shapes that asserted their kindred with the Master Sin, whatever
+it might be, which it was within the scope of man’s corrupted nature to
+conceive and cherish. They were all of one family; they went to and fro
+between his breast and Ethan Brand’s, and carried dark greetings from
+one to the other.
+
+Then Bartram remembered the stories which had grown traditionary in
+reference to this strange man, who had come upon him like a shadow of
+the night, and was making himself at home in his old place, after so
+long absence, that the dead people, dead and buried for years, would
+have had more right to be at home, in any familiar spot, than he. Ethan
+Brand, it was said, had conversed with Satan himself in the lurid blaze
+of this very kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth heretofore, but
+looked grisly now. According to this tale, before Ethan Brand departed
+on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from the hot
+furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in order to confer with
+him about the Unpardonable Sin; the man and the fiend each laboring to
+frame the image of some mode of guilt which could neither be atoned for
+nor forgiven. And, with the first gleam of light upon the mountain-top,
+the fiend crept in at the iron door, there to abide the intensest
+element of fire until again summoned forth to share in the dreadful
+task of extending man’s possible guilt beyond the scope of Heaven’s
+else infinite mercy.
+
+While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these thoughts,
+Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of the kiln. The
+action was in such accordance with the idea in Bartram’s mind, that he
+almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot, from the
+raging furnace.
+
+“Hold! hold!” cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he was
+ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. “Don’t, for
+mercy’s sake, bring out your Devil now!”
+
+“Man!” sternly replied Ethan Brand, “what need have I of the Devil? I
+have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners
+as you that he busies himself. Fear not, because I open the door. I do
+but act by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like a
+lime-burner, as I was once.”
+
+He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to
+gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce
+glow that reddened upon his face. The lime-burner sat watching him, and
+half suspected this strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a
+fiend, at least to plunge into the flames, and thus vanish from the
+sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the
+door of the kiln.
+
+“I have looked,” said he, “into many a human heart that was seven times
+hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire. But I
+found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!”
+
+“What is the Unpardonable Sin?” asked the lime-burner; and then he
+shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should
+be answered.
+
+“It is a sin that grew within my own breast,” replied Ethan Brand,
+standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his
+stamp. “A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that
+triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God,
+and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims! The only sin that
+deserves a recompense of immortal agony! Freely, were it to do again,
+would I incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution!”
+
+“The man’s head is turned,” muttered the lime-burner to himself. “He
+may be a sinner like the rest of us,—nothing more likely,—but, I’ll be
+sworn, he is a madman too.”
+
+Nevertheless, he felt uncomfortable at his situation, alone with Ethan
+Brand on the wild mountain-side, and was right glad to hear the rough
+murmur of tongues, and the footsteps of what seemed a pretty numerous
+party, stumbling over the stones and rustling through the underbrush.
+Soon appeared the whole lazy regiment that was wont to infest the
+village tavern, comprehending three or four individuals who had drunk
+flip beside the bar-room fire through all the winters, and smoked their
+pipes beneath the stoop through all the summers, since Ethan Brand’s
+departure. Laughing boisterously, and mingling all their voices
+together in unceremonious talk, they now burst into the moonshine and
+narrow streaks of firelight that illuminated the open space before the
+lime-kiln. Bartram set the door ajar again, flooding the spot with
+light, that the whole company might get a fair view of Ethan Brand, and
+he of them.
+
+There, among other old acquaintances, was a once ubiquitous man, now
+almost extinct, but whom we were formerly sure to encounter at the
+hotel of every thriving village throughout the country. It was the
+stage-agent. The present specimen of the genus was a wilted and
+smoke-dried man, wrinkled and red-nosed, in a smartly cut, brown,
+bobtailed coat, with brass buttons, who, for a length of time unknown,
+had kept his desk and corner in the bar-room, and was still puffing
+what seemed to be the same cigar that he had lighted twenty years
+before. He had great fame as a dry joker, though, perhaps, less on
+account of any intrinsic humor than from a certain flavor of
+brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke, which impregnated all his ideas and
+expressions, as well as his person. Another well-remembered, though
+strangely altered, face was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still
+called him in courtesy; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled
+shirtsleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an
+attorney, in what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and
+in great vogue among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and
+toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night,
+had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and degrees
+of bodily labor, till at last, to adopt his own phrase, he slid into a
+soap-vat. In other words, Giles was now a soap-boiler, in a small way.
+He had come to be but the fragment of a human being, a part of one foot
+having been chopped off by an axe, and an entire hand torn away by the
+devilish grip of a steam-engine. Yet, though the corporeal hand was
+gone, a spiritual member remained; for, stretching forth the stump,
+Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers
+with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated. A
+maimed and miserable wretch he was; but one, nevertheless, whom the
+world could not trample on, and had no right to scorn, either in this
+or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since he had still kept up
+the courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in charity, and with his
+one hand—and that the left one—fought a stern battle against want and
+hostile circumstances.
+
+Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with certain points
+of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of difference. It was the
+village doctor; a man of some fifty years, whom, at an earlier period
+of his life, we introduced as paying a professional visit to Ethan
+Brand during the latter’s supposed insanity. He was now a
+purple-visaged, rude, and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure, with
+something wild, ruined, and desperate in his talk, and in all the
+details of his gesture and manners. Brandy possessed this man like an
+evil spirit, and made him as surly and savage as a wild beast, and as
+miserable as a lost soul; but there was supposed to be in him such
+wonderful skill, such native gifts of healing, beyond any which medical
+science could impart, that society caught hold of him, and would not
+let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro upon his horse,
+and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited all the
+sick-chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, and sometimes
+raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or quite as often, no
+doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug many a year too soon.
+The doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and, as somebody said,
+in allusion to his habit of swearing, it was always alight with
+hell-fire.
+
+These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand each
+after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the
+contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he would
+find something far better worth seeking than the Unpardonable Sin. No
+mind, which has wrought itself by intense and solitary meditation into
+a high state of enthusiasm, can endure the kind of contact with low and
+vulgar modes of thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now
+subjected. It made him doubt—and, strange to say, it was a painful
+doubt—whether he had indeed found the Unpardonable Sin, and found it
+within himself. The whole question on which he had exhausted life, and
+more than life, looked like a delusion.
+
+“Leave me,” he said bitterly, “ye brute beasts, that have made
+yourselves so, shrivelling up your souls with fiery liquors! I have
+done with you. Years and years ago, I groped into your hearts and found
+nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gone!”
+
+“Why, you uncivil scoundrel,” cried the fierce doctor, “is that the way
+you respond to the kindness of your best friends? Then let me tell you
+the truth. You have no more found the Unpardonable Sin than yonder boy
+Joe has. You are but a crazy fellow,—I told you so twenty years
+ago,—neither better nor worse than a crazy fellow, and the fit
+companion of old Humphrey, here!”
+
+He pointed to an old man, shabbily dressed, with long white hair, thin
+visage, and unsteady eyes. For some years past this aged person had
+been wandering about among the hills, inquiring of all travellers whom
+he met for his daughter. The girl, it seemed, had gone off with a
+company of circus-performers, and occasionally tidings of her came to
+the village, and fine stories were told of her glittering appearance as
+she rode on horseback in the ring, or performed marvellous feats on the
+tight-rope.
+
+The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed
+unsteadily into his face.
+
+“They tell me you have been all over the earth,” said he, wringing his
+hands with earnestness. “You must have seen my daughter, for she makes
+a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she
+send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?”
+
+Ethan Brand’s eye quailed beneath the old man’s. That daughter, from
+whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our
+tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan
+Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted,
+absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.
+
+“Yes,” he murmured, turning away from the hoary wanderer, “it is no
+delusion. There is an Unpardonable Sin!”
+
+While these things were passing, a merry scene was going forward in the
+area of cheerful light, beside the spring and before the door of the
+hut. A number of the youth of the village, young men and girls, had
+hurried up the hill-side, impelled by curiosity to see Ethan Brand, the
+hero of so many a legend familiar to their childhood. Finding nothing,
+however, very remarkable in his aspect,—nothing but a sunburnt
+wayfarer, in plain garb and dusty shoes, who sat looking into the fire
+as if he fancied pictures among the coals,—these young people speedily
+grew tired of observing him. As it happened, there was other amusement
+at hand. An old German Jew travelling with a diorama on his back, was
+passing down the mountain-road towards the village just as the party
+turned aside from it, and, in hopes of eking out the profits of the
+day, the showman had kept them company to the lime-kiln.
+
+“Come, old Dutchman,” cried one of the young men, “let us see your
+pictures, if you can swear they are worth looking at!”
+
+“Oh yes, Captain,” answered the Jew,—whether as a matter of courtesy or
+craft, he styled everybody Captain,—“I shall show you, indeed, some
+very superb pictures!”
+
+So, placing his box in a proper position, he invited the young men and
+girls to look through the glass orifices of the machine, and proceeded
+to exhibit a series of the most outrageous scratchings and daubings, as
+specimens of the fine arts, that ever an itinerant showman had the face
+to impose upon his circle of spectators. The pictures were worn out,
+moreover, tattered, full of cracks and wrinkles, dingy with
+tobacco-smoke, and otherwise in a most pitiable condition. Some
+purported to be cities, public edifices, and ruined castles in Europe;
+others represented Napoleon’s battles and Nelson’s sea-fights; and in
+the midst of these would be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand,—which
+might have been mistaken for the Hand of Destiny, though, in truth, it
+was only the showman’s,—pointing its forefinger to various scenes of
+the conflict, while its owner gave historical illustrations. When, with
+much merriment at its abominable deficiency of merit, the exhibition
+was concluded, the German bade little Joe put his head into the box.
+Viewed through the magnifying-glasses, the boy’s round, rosy visage
+assumed the strangest imaginable aspect of an immense Titanic child,
+the mouth grinning broadly, and the eyes and every other feature
+overflowing with fun at the joke. Suddenly, however, that merry face
+turned pale, and its expression changed to horror, for this easily
+impressed and excitable child had become sensible that the eye of Ethan
+Brand was fixed upon him through the glass.
+
+“You make the little man to be afraid, Captain,” said the German Jew,
+turning up the dark and strong outline of his visage from his stooping
+posture. “But look again, and, by chance, I shall cause you to see
+somewhat that is very fine, upon my word!”
+
+Ethan Brand gazed into the box for an instant, and then starting back,
+looked fixedly at the German. What had he seen? Nothing, apparently;
+for a curious youth, who had peeped in almost at the same moment,
+beheld only a vacant space of canvas.
+
+“I remember you now,” muttered Ethan Brand to the showman.
+
+“Ah, Captain,” whispered the Jew of Nuremberg, with a dark smile, “I
+find it to be a heavy matter in my show-box,—this Unpardonable Sin! By
+my faith, Captain, it has wearied my shoulders, this long day, to carry
+it over the mountain.”
+
+“Peace,” answered Ethan Brand, sternly, “or get thee into the furnace
+yonder!”
+
+The Jew’s exhibition had scarcely concluded, when a great, elderly
+dog—who seemed to be his own master, as no person in the company laid
+claim to him—saw fit to render himself the object of public notice.
+Hitherto, he had shown himself a very quiet, well-disposed old dog,
+going round from one to another, and, by way of being sociable,
+offering his rough head to be patted by any kindly hand that would take
+so much trouble. But now, all of a sudden, this grave and venerable
+quadruped, of his own mere motion, and without the slightest suggestion
+from anybody else, began to run round after his tail, which, to
+heighten the absurdity of the proceeding, was a great deal shorter than
+it should have been. Never was seen such headlong eagerness in pursuit
+of an object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such
+a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,—as
+if one end of the ridiculous brute’s body were at deadly and most
+unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went
+the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of
+his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity;
+until, utterly exhausted, and as far from the goal as ever, the foolish
+old dog ceased his performance as suddenly as he had begun it. The next
+moment he was as mild, quiet, sensible, and respectable in his
+deportment, as when he first scraped acquaintance with the company.
+
+As may be supposed, the exhibition was greeted with universal laughter,
+clapping of hands, and shouts of encore, to which the canine performer
+responded by wagging all that there was to wag of his tail, but
+appeared totally unable to repeat his very successful effort to amuse
+the spectators.
+
+Meanwhile, Ethan Brand had resumed his seat upon the log, and moved, as
+it might be, by a perception of some remote analogy between his own
+case and that of this self-pursuing cur, he broke into the awful laugh,
+which, more than any other token, expressed the condition of his inward
+being. From that moment, the merriment of the party was at an end; they
+stood aghast, dreading lest the inauspicious sound should be
+reverberated around the horizon, and that mountain would thunder it to
+mountain, and so the horror be prolonged upon their ears. Then,
+whispering one to another that it was late,—that the moon was almost
+down,-that the August night was growing chill,—they hurried homewards,
+leaving the lime-burner and little Joe to deal as they might with their
+unwelcome guest. Save for these three human beings, the open space on
+the hill-side was a solitude, set in a vast gloom of forest. Beyond
+that darksome verge, the firelight glimmered on the stately trunks and
+almost black foliage of pines, intermixed with the lighter verdure of
+sapling oaks, maples, and poplars, while here and there lay the
+gigantic corpses of dead trees, decaying on the leaf-strewn soil. And
+it seemed to little Joe—a timorous and imaginative child—that the
+silent forest was holding its breath until some fearful thing should
+happen.
+
+Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door of the
+kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner and his son, he
+bade, rather than advised, them to retire to rest.
+
+“For myself, I cannot sleep,” said he. “I have matters that it concerns
+me to meditate upon. I will watch the fire, as I used to do in the old
+time.”
+
+“And call the Devil out of the furnace to keep you company, I suppose,”
+muttered Bartram, who had been making intimate acquaintance with the
+black bottle above mentioned. “But watch, if you like, and call as many
+devils as you like! For my part, I shall be all the better for a
+snooze. Come, Joe!”
+
+As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back at the
+wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender spirit had
+an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in which this man had
+enveloped himself.
+
+When they had gone, Ethan Brand sat listening to the crackling of the
+kindled wood, and looking at the little spirts of fire that issued
+through the chinks of the door. These trifles, however, once so
+familiar, had but the slightest hold of his attention, while deep
+within his mind he was reviewing the gradual but marvellous change that
+had been wrought upon him by the search to which he had devoted
+himself. He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,—how the
+dark forest had whispered to him,—how the stars had gleamed upon him,—a
+simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by, and ever
+musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love
+and sympathy for mankind and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had
+first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the
+inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into
+the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and,
+however desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother; with what
+awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed
+that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued
+that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress, disturbed
+the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed
+his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on
+cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were
+susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer
+to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth,
+laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber
+after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,
+indeed, had withered,—had contracted,—had hardened,—had perished! It
+had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of
+the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening
+the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy
+sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was
+now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
+experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets,
+and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were
+demanded for his study.
+
+Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that
+his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his
+intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable
+development,—as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious
+fruit of his life’s labor,—he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!
+
+“What more have I to seek? what more to achieve?” said Ethan Brand to
+himself. “My task is done, and well done!”
+
+Starting from the log with a certain alacrity in his gait and ascending
+the hillock of earth that was raised against the stone circumference of
+the lime-kiln, he thus reached the top of the structure. It was a space
+of perhaps ten feet across, from edge to edge, presenting a view of the
+upper surface of the immense mass of broken marble with which the kiln
+was heaped. All these innumerable blocks and fragments of marble were
+redhot and vividly on fire, sending up great spouts of blue flame,
+which quivered aloft and danced madly, as within a magic circle, and
+sank and rose again, with continual and multitudinous activity. As the
+lonely man bent forward over this terrible body of fire, the blasting
+heat smote up against his person with a breath that, it might be
+supposed, would have scorched and shrivelled him up in a moment.
+
+Ethan Brand stood erect, and raised his arms on high. The blue flames
+played upon his face, and imparted the wild and ghastly light which
+alone could have suited its expression; it was that of a fiend on the
+verge of plunging into his gulf of intensest torment.
+
+“O Mother Earth,” cried he, “who art no more my Mother, and into whose
+bosom this frame shall never be resolved! O mankind, whose brotherhood
+I have cast off, and trampled thy great heart beneath my feet! O stars
+of heaven, that shone on me of old, as if to light me onward and
+upward!—farewell all, and forever. Come, deadly element of
+Fire,-henceforth my familiar friend! Embrace me, as I do thee!”
+
+That night the sound of a fearful peal of laughter rolled heavily
+through the sleep of the lime-burner and his little son; dim shapes of
+horror and anguish haunted their dreams, and seemed still present in
+the rude hovel, when they opened their eyes to the daylight.
+
+“Up, boy, up!” cried the lime-burner, staring about him. “Thank Heaven,
+the night is gone, at last; and rather than pass such another, I would
+watch my lime-kiln, wide awake, for a twelvemonth. This Ethan Brand,
+with his humbug of an Unpardonable Sin, has done me no such mighty
+favor, in taking my place!”
+
+He issued from the hut, followed by little Joe, who kept fast hold of
+his father’s hand. The early sunshine was already pouring its gold upon
+the mountain-tops, and though the valleys were still in shadow, they
+smiled cheerfully in the promise of the bright day that was hastening
+onward. The village, completely shut in by hills, which swelled away
+gently about it, looked as if it had rested peacefully in the hollow of
+the great hand of Providence. Every dwelling was distinctly visible;
+the little spires of the two churches pointed upwards, and caught a
+fore-glimmering of brightness from the sun-gilt skies upon their gilded
+weather-cocks. The tavern was astir, and the figure of the old,
+smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen beneath the stoop.
+Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered
+likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were
+heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into
+the valley, others high up towards the summits, and still others, of
+the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the
+upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that
+rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed
+in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the
+heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream
+to look at it.
+
+To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so
+readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling
+down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while Echo
+caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and
+elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to
+little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each
+contributing a strain of airy sweetness.
+
+Little Joe’s face brightened at once.
+
+“Dear father,” cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, “that strange
+man is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem glad of it!”
+
+“Yes,” growled the lime-burner, with an oath, “but he has let the fire
+go down, and no thanks to him if five hundred bushels of lime are not
+spoiled. If I catch the fellow hereabouts again, I shall feel like
+tossing him into the furnace!”
+
+With his long pole in his hand, he ascended to the top of the kiln.
+After a moment’s pause, he called to his son.
+
+“Come up here, Joe!” said he.
+
+So little Joe ran up the hillock, and stood by his father’s side. The
+marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface,
+in the midst of the circle,—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted
+into lime,—lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after
+long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was
+the shape of a human heart.
+
+“Was the fellow’s heart made of marble?” cried Bartram, in some
+perplexity at this phenomenon. “At any rate, it is burnt into what
+looks like special good lime; and, taking all the bones together, my
+kiln is half a bushel the richer for him.”
+
+So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it fall
+upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled into
+fragments.
+
+
+
+
+A BELL’S BIOGRAPHY
+
+
+Hearken to our neighbor with the iron tongue. While I sit musing over
+my sheet of foolscap, he emphatically tells the hour, in tones loud
+enough for all the town to hear, though doubtless intended only as a
+gentle hint to myself, that I may begin his biography before the
+evening shall be further wasted. Unquestionably, a personage in such an
+elevated position, and making so great a noise in the world, has a fair
+claim to the services of a biographer. He is the representative and
+most illustrious member of that innumerable class, whose characteristic
+feature is the tongue, and whose sole business, to clamor for the
+public good. If any of his noisy brethren, in our tongue-governed
+democracy, be envious of the superiority which I have assigned him,
+they have my free consent to hang themselves as high as he. And, for
+his history, let not the reader apprehend an empty repetition of
+ding-dong-bell. He has been the passive hero of wonderful vicissitudes,
+with which I have chanced to become acquainted, possibly from his own
+mouth; while the careless multitude supposed him to be talking merely
+of the time of day, or calling them to dinner or to church, or bidding
+drowsy people go bedward, or the dead to their graves. Many a
+revolution has it been his fate to go through, and invariably with a
+prodigious uproar. And whether or no he have told me his reminiscences,
+this at least is true, that the more I study his deep-toned language,
+the more sense, and sentiment, and soul, do I discover in it.
+
+This bell—for we may as well drop our quaint personification—is of
+antique French manufacture, and the symbol of the cross betokens that
+it was meant to be suspended in the belfry of a Romish place of
+worship. The old people hereabout have a tradition, that a considerable
+part of the metal was supplied by a brass cannon, captured in one of
+the victories of Louis the Fourteenth over the Spaniards, and that a
+Bourbon princess threw her golden crucifix into the molten mass. It is
+said, likewise, that a bishop baptized and blessed the bell, and prayed
+that a heavenly influence might mingle with its tones. When all due
+ceremonies had been performed, the Grand Monarque bestowed the
+gift—than which none could resound his beneficence more loudly—on the
+Jesuits, who were then converting the American Indians to the spiritual
+dominion of the Pope. So the bell,—our self-same bell, whose familiar
+voice we may hear at all hours, in the streets,—this very bell sent
+forth its first-born accents from the tower of a log-built chapel,
+westward of Lake Champlain, and near the mighty stream of the St.
+Lawrence. It was called Our Lady’s Chapel of the Forest. The peal went
+forth as if to redeem and consecrate the heathen wilderness. The wolf
+growled at the sound, as he prowled stealthily through the underbrush;
+the grim bear turned his back, and stalked sullenly away; the startled
+doe leaped up, and led her fawn into a deeper solitude. The red men
+wondered what awful voice was speaking amid the wind that roared
+through the tree-tops; and, following reverentially its summons, the
+dark-robed fathers blessed them, as they drew near the cross-crowned
+chapel. In a little time, there was a crucifix on every dusky bosom.
+The Indians knelt beneath the lowly roof, worshipping in the same forms
+that were observed under the vast dome of St. Peter’s, when the Pope
+performed high mass in the presence of kneeling princes. All the
+religious festivals, that awoke the chiming bells of lofty cathedrals,
+called forth a peal from Our Lady’s Chapel of the Forest. Loudly rang
+the bell of the wilderness while the streets of Paris echoed with
+rejoicings for the birthday of the Bourbon, or whenever France had
+triumphed on some European battle-field. And the solemn woods were
+saddened with a melancholy knell, as often as the thick-strewn leaves
+were swept away from the virgin soil, for the burial of an Indian
+chief.
+
+Meantime, the bells of a hostile people and a hostile faith were
+ringing on Sabbaths and lecture-days, at Boston and other Puritan
+towns. Their echoes died away hundreds of miles southeastward of Our
+Lady’s Chapel. But scouts had threaded the pathless desert that lay
+between, and, from behind the huge tree-trunks, perceived the Indians
+assembling at the summons of the bell. Some bore flaxen-haired scalps
+at their girdles, as if to lay those bloody trophies on Our Lady’s
+altar. It was reported, and believed, all through New England, that the
+Pope of Rome, and the King of France, had established this little
+chapel in the forest, for the purpose of stirring up the red men to a
+crusade against the English settlers. The latter took energetic
+measures to secure their religion and their lives. On the eve of an
+especial fast of the Romish Church, while the bell tolled dismally, and
+the priests were chanting a doleful stave, a band of New England
+rangers rushed from the surrounding woods. Fierce shouts, and the
+report of musketry, pealed suddenly within the chapel. The ministering
+priests threw themselves before the altar, and were slain even on its
+steps. If, as antique traditions tell us, no grass will grow where the
+blood of martyrs has been shed, there should be a barren spot, to this
+very day, on the site of that desecrated altar.
+
+While the blood was still plashing from step to step, the leader of the
+rangers seized a torch, and applied it to the drapery of the shrine.
+The flame and smoke arose, as from a burnt-sacrifice, at once
+illuminating and obscuring the whole interior of the chapel,—now hiding
+the dead priests in a sable shroud, now revealing them and their
+slayers in one terrific glare. Some already wished that the altar-smoke
+could cover the deed from the sight of Heaven. But one of the rangers—a
+man of sanctified aspect, though his hands were bloody—approached the
+captain.
+
+“Sir,” said he, “our village meeting-house lacks a bell, and hitherto
+we have been fain to summon the good people to worship by beat of drum.
+Give me, I pray you, the bell of this popish chapel, for the sake of
+the godly Mr. Rogers, who doubtless hath remembered us in the prayers
+of the congregation, ever since we began our march. Who can tell what
+share of this night’s good success we owe to that holy man’s wrestling
+with the Lord?”
+
+“Nay, then,” answered the captain, “if good Mr. Rogers hath holpen our
+enterprise, it is right that he should share the spoil. Take the bell
+and welcome, Deacon Lawson, if you will be at the trouble of carrying
+it home. Hitherto it hath spoken nothing but papistry, and that too in
+the French or Indian gibberish; but I warrant me, if Mr. Rogers
+consecrate it anew, it will talk like a good English and Protestant
+bell.”
+
+So Deacon Lawson and half a score of his townsmen took down the bell,
+suspended it on a pole, and bore it away on their sturdy shoulders,
+meaning to carry it to the shore of Lake Champlain, and thence homeward
+by water. Far through the woods gleamed the flames of Our Lady’s
+Chapel, flinging fantastic shadows from the clustered foliage, and
+glancing on brooks that had never caught the sunlight. As the rangers
+traversed the midnight forest, staggering under their heavy burden, the
+tongue of the bell gave many a tremendous stroke,—clang, clang,
+clang!—a most doleful sound, as if it were tolling for the slaughter of
+the priests and the ruin of the chapel. Little dreamed Deacon Lawson
+and his townsmen that it was their own funeral knell. A war-party of
+Indians had heard the report, of musketry, and seen the blaze of the
+chapel, and now were on the track of the rangers, summoned to vengeance
+by the bell’s dismal murmurs. In the midst of a deep swamp, they made a
+sudden onset on the retreating foe. Good Deacon Lawson battled stoutly,
+but had his skull cloven by a tomahawk, and sank into the depths of the
+morass, with the ponderous bell above him. And, for many a year
+thereafter, our hero’s voice was heard no more on earth, neither at the
+hour of worship, nor at festivals nor funerals.
+
+And is he still buried in that unknown grave? Scarcely so, dear reader.
+Hark! How plainly we hear him at this moment, the spokesman of Time,
+proclaiming that it is nine o’clock at night! We may therefore safely
+conclude that some happy chance has restored him to upper air.
+
+But there lay the bell, for many silent years; and the wonder is, that
+he did not lie silent there a century, or perhaps a dozen centuries,
+till the world should have forgotten not only his voice, but the voices
+of the whole brotherhood of bells. How would the first accent of his
+iron tongue have startled his resurrectionists! But he was not fated to
+be a subject of discussion among the antiquaries of far posterity. Near
+the close of the Old French War, a party of New England axe-men, who
+preceded the march of Colonel Bradstreet toward Lake Ontario, were
+building a bridge of logs through a swamp. Plunging down a stake, one
+of these pioneers felt it graze against some hard, smooth substance. He
+called his comrades, and, by their united efforts, the top of the bell
+was raised to the surface, a rope made fast to it, and thence passed
+over the horizontal limb of a tree. Heave ho! up they hoisted their
+prize, dripping with moisture, and festooned with verdant water-moss.
+As the base of the bell emerged from the swamp, the pioneers perceived
+that a skeleton was clinging with its bony fingers to the clapper, but
+immediately relaxing its nerveless grasp, sank back into the stagnant
+water. The bell then gave forth a sullen clang. No wonder that he was
+in haste to speak, after holding his tongue for such a length of time!
+The pioneers shoved the bell to and fro, thus ringing a loud and heavy
+peal, which echoed widely through the forest, and reached the ears of
+Colonel Bradstreet, and his three thousand men. The soldiers paused on
+their march; a feeling of religion, mingled with borne-tenderness,
+overpowered their rude hearts; each seemed to hear the clangor of the
+old church-bell, which had been familiar to hint from infancy, and had
+tolled at the funerals of all his forefathers. By what magic had that
+holy sound strayed over the wide-murmuring ocean, and become audible
+amid the clash of arms, the loud crashing of the artillery over the
+rough wilderness-path, and the melancholy roar of the wind among the
+boughs?
+
+The New-Englanders hid their prize in a shadowy nook, betwixt a large
+gray stone and the earthy roots of an overthrown tree; and when the
+campaign was ended, they conveyed our friend to Boston, and put him up
+at auction on the sidewalk of King Street. He was suspended, for the
+nonce, by a block and tackle, and being swung backward and forward,
+gave such loud and clear testimony to his own merits, that the
+auctioneer had no need to say a word. The highest bidder was a rich old
+representative from our town, who piously bestowed the bell on the
+meeting-house where he had been a worshipper for half a century. The
+good man had his reward. By a strange coincidence, the very first duty
+of the sexton, after the bell had been hoisted into the belfry, was to
+toll the funeral knell of the donor. Soon, however, those doleful
+echoes were drowned by a triumphant peal for the surrender of Quebec.
+
+Ever since that period, our hero has occupied the same elevated
+station, and has put in his word on all matters of public importance,
+civil, military, or religious. On the day when Independence was first
+proclaimed in the street beneath, he uttered a peal which many deemed
+ominous and fearful, rather than triumphant. But he has told the same
+story these sixty years, and none mistake his meaning now. When
+Washington, in the fulness of his glory, rode through our flower-strewn
+streets, this was the tongue that bade the Father of his Country
+welcome! Again the same voice was heard, when La Fayette came to gather
+in his half-century’s harvest of gratitude. Meantime, vast changes have
+been going on below. His voice, which once floated over a little
+provincial seaport, is now reverberated between brick edifices, and
+strikes the ear amid the buzz and tumult of a city. On the Sabbaths of
+olden time, the summons of the bell was obeyed by a picturesque and
+varied throng; stately gentlemen in purple velvet coats, embroidered
+waistcoats, white wigs, and gold-laced hats, stepping with grave
+courtesy beside ladies in flowered satin gowns, and hoop-petticoats of
+majestic circumference; while behind followed a liveried slave or
+bondsman, bearing the psalm-book, and a stove for his mistress’s feet.
+The commonalty, clad in homely garb, gave precedence to their betters
+at the door of the meetinghouse, as if admitting that there were
+distinctions between them, even in the sight of God. Yet, as their
+coffins were borne one after another through the street, the bell has
+tolled a requiem for all alike. What mattered it, whether or no there
+were a silver scutcheon on the coffin-lid? “Open thy bosom, Mother
+Earth!” Thus spake the bell. “Another of thy children is coming to his
+long rest. Take him to thy bosom, and let him slumber in peace.” Thus
+spake the bell, and Mother Earth received her child. With the self-same
+tones will the present generation be ushered to the embraces of their
+mother; and Mother Earth will still receive her children. Is not thy
+tongue a-weary, mournful talker of two centuries? O funeral bell! wilt
+thou never be shattered with thine own melancholy strokes? Yea, and a
+trumpet-call shall arouse the sleepers, whom thy heavy clang could
+awake no more!
+
+Again—again thy voice, reminding me that I am wasting the “midnight
+oil.” In my lonely fantasy, I can scarce believe that other mortals
+have caught the sound, or that it vibrates elsewhere than in my secret
+soul. But to many hast thou spoken. Anxious men have heard thee on
+their sleepless pillows, and bethought themselves anew of to-morrow’s
+care. In a brief interval of wakefulness, the sons of toil have heard
+thee, and say, “Is so much of our quiet slumber spent?—is the morning
+so near at hand?” Crime has heard thee, and mutters, “Now is the very
+hour!” Despair answers thee, “Thus much of this weary life is gone!”
+The young mother, on her bed of pain and ecstasy, has counted thy
+echoing strokes, and dates from them her first-born’s share of life and
+immortality. The bridegroom and the bride have listened, and feel that
+their night of rapture flits like a dream away. Thine accents have
+fallen faintly on the ear of the dying man, and warned him that, ere
+thou speakest again, his spirit shall have passed whither no voice of
+time can ever reach. Alas for the departing traveller, if thy voice—the
+voice of fleeting time—have taught him no lessons for Eternity!
+
+
+
+
+SYLPH ETHEREGE
+
+
+On a bright summer evening, two persons stood among the shrubbery of a
+garden, stealthily watching a young girl, who sat in the window seat of
+a neighboring mansion. One of these unseen observers, a gentleman, was
+youthful, and had an air of high breeding and refinement, and a face
+marked with intellect, though otherwise of unprepossessing aspect. His
+features wore even an ominous, though somewhat mirthful expression,
+while he pointed his long forefinger at the girl, and seemed to regard
+her as a creature completely within the scope of his influence.
+
+“The charm works!” said he, in a low, but emphatic whisper.
+
+“Do you know, Edward Hamilton,—since so you choose to be named,—do you
+know,” said the lady beside him, “that I have almost a mind to break
+the spell at once? What if the lesson should prove too severe! True, if
+my ward could be thus laughed out of her fantastic nonsense, she might
+be the better for it through life. But then, she is such a delicate
+creature! And, besides, are you not ruining your own chance, by putting
+forward this shadow of a rival?”
+
+“But will he not vanish into thin air, at my bidding?” rejoined Edward
+Hamilton. “Let the charm work!”
+
+The girl’s slender and sylph-like figure, tinged with radiance from the
+sunset clouds, and overhung with the rich drapery of the silken
+curtains, and set within the deep frame of the window, was a perfect
+picture; or, rather, it was like the original loveliness in a painter’s
+fancy, from which the most finished picture is but an imperfect copy.
+Though her occupation excited so much interest in the two spectators,
+she was merely gazing at a miniature which she held in her hand,
+encased in white satin and red morocco; nor did there appear to be any
+other cause for the smile of mockery and malice with which Hamilton
+regarded her.
+
+“The charm works!” muttered he, again. “Our pretty Sylvia’s scorn will
+have a dear retribution!”
+
+At this moment the girl raised her eyes, and, instead of a life-like
+semblance of the miniature, beheld the ill-omened shape of Edward
+Hamilton, who now stepped forth from his concealment in the shrubbery.
+
+Sylvia Etherege was an orphan girl, who had spent her life, till within
+a few months past, under the guardianship, and in the secluded
+dwelling, of an old bachelor uncle. While yet in her cradle, she had
+been the destined bride of a cousin, who was no less passive in the
+betrothal than herself. Their future union had been projected, as the
+means of uniting two rich estates, and was rendered highly expedient,
+if not indispensable, by the testamentary dispositions of the parents
+on both sides. Edgar Vaughan, the promised bridegroom, had been bred
+from infancy in Europe, and had never seen the beautiful girl whose
+heart he was to claim as his inheritance. But already, for several
+years, a correspondence had been kept up between tine cousins, and had
+produced an intellectual intimacy, though it could but imperfectly
+acquaint them with each other’s character.
+
+Sylvia was shy, sensitive, and fanciful; and her guardian’s secluded
+habits had shut her out from even so much of the world as is generally
+open to maidens of her age. She had been left to seek associates and
+friends for herself in the haunts of imagination, and to converse with
+them, sometimes in the language of dead poets, oftener in the poetry of
+her own mind. The companion whom she chiefly summoned up was the cousin
+with whose idea her earliest thoughts had been connected. She made a
+vision of Edgar Vaughan, and tinted it with stronger hues than a mere
+fancy-picture, yet graced it with so many bright and delicate
+perfections, that her cousin could nowhere have encountered so
+dangerous a rival. To this shadow she cherished a romantic fidelity.
+With its airy presence sitting by her side, or gliding along her
+favorite paths, the loneliness of her young life was blissful; her
+heart was satisfied with love, while yet its virgin purity was
+untainted by the earthliness that the touch of a real lover would have
+left there. Edgar Vaughan seemed to be conscious of her character; for,
+in his letters, he gave her a name that was happily appropriate to the
+sensitiveness of her disposition, the delicate peculiarity of her
+manners, and the ethereal beauty both of her mind and person. Instead
+of Sylvia, he called her Sylph,—with the prerogative of a cousin and a
+lover,—his dear Sylph Etherege.
+
+When Sylvia was seventeen, her guardian died, and she passed under the
+care of Mrs. Grosvenor, a lady of wealth and fashion, and Sylvia’s
+nearest relative, though a distant one. While an inmate of Mrs.
+Grosvenor’s family, she still preserved somewhat of her life-long
+habits of seclusion, and shrank from a too familiar intercourse with
+those around her. Still, too, she was faithful to her cousin, or to the
+shadow which bore his name.
+
+The time now drew near when Edgar Vaughan, whose education had been
+completed by an extensive range of travel, was to revisit the soil of
+his nativity. Edward Hamilton, a young gentleman, who had been
+Vaughan’s companion, both in his studies and rambles, had already
+recrossed the Atlantic, bringing letters to Mrs. Grosvenor and Sylvia
+Etherege. These credentials insured him an earnest welcome, which,
+however, on Sylvia’s part, was not followed by personal partiality, or
+even the regard that seemed due to her cousin’s most intimate friend.
+As she herself could have assigned no cause for her repugnance, it
+might be termed instinctive. Hamilton’s person, it is true, was the
+reverse of attractive, especially when beheld for the first time. Yet,
+in the eyes of the most fastidious judges, the defect of natural grace
+was compensated by the polish of his manners, and by the intellect
+which so often gleamed through his dark features. Mrs. Grosvenor, with
+whom he immediately became a prodigious favorite, exerted herself to
+overcome Sylvia’s dislike. But, in this matter, her ward could neither
+be reasoned with nor persuaded. The presence of Edward Hamilton was
+sure to render her cold, shy, and distant, abstracting all the vivacity
+from her deportment, as if a cloud had come betwixt her and the
+sunshine.
+
+The simplicity of Sylvia’s demeanor rendered it easy for so keen an
+observer as Hamilton to detect her feelings. Whenever any slight
+circumstance made him sensible of them, a smile might be seen to flit
+over the young man’s sallow visage. None, that had once beheld this
+smile, were in any danger of forgetting it; whenever they recalled to
+memory the features of Edward Hamilton, they were always duskily
+illuminated by this expression of mockery and malice.
+
+In a few weeks after Hamilton’s arrival, he presented to Sylvia
+Etherege a miniature of her cousin, which, as he informed her, would
+have been delivered sooner, but was detained with a portion of his
+baggage. This was the miniature in the contemplation of which we beheld
+Sylvia so absorbed, at the commencement of our story. Such, in truth,
+was too often the habit of the shy and musing girl. The beauty of the
+pictured countenance was almost too perfect to represent a human
+creature, that had been born of a fallen and world-worn race, and had
+lived to manhood amid ordinary troubles and enjoyments, and must become
+wrinkled with age and care. It seemed too bright for a thing formed of
+dust, and doomed to crumble into dust again. Sylvia feared that such a
+being would be too refined and delicate to love a simple girl like her.
+Yet, even while her spirit drooped with that apprehension, the picture
+was but the masculine counterpart of Sylph Etherege’s sylphlike beauty.
+There was that resemblance between her own face and the miniature which
+is said often to exist between lovers whom Heaven has destined for each
+other, and which, in this instance, might be owing to the kindred blood
+of the two parties. Sylvia felt, indeed, that there was something
+familiar in the countenance, so like a friend did the eyes smile upon
+her, and seem to imply a knowledge of her thoughts. She could account
+for this impression only by supposing that, in some of her day-dreams,
+imagination had conjured up the true similitude of her distant and
+unseen lover.
+
+But now could Sylvia give a brighter semblance of reality to those
+day-dreams. Clasping the miniature to her heart, she could summon
+forth, from that haunted cell of pure and blissful fantasies, the
+life-like shadow, to roam with her in the moonlight garden. Even at
+noontide it sat with her in the arbor, when the sunshine threw its
+broken flakes of gold into the clustering shade. The effect upon her
+mind was hardly less powerful than if she had actually listened to, and
+reciprocated, the vows of Edgar Vaughan; for, though the illusion never
+quite deceived her, yet the remembrance was as distinct as of a
+remembered interview. Those heavenly eyes gazed forever into her soul,
+which drank at them as at a fountain, and was disquieted if reality
+threw a momentary cloud between. She heard the melody of a voice
+breathing sentiments with which her own chimed in like music. O happy,
+yet hapless girl! Thus to create the being whom she loves, to endow him
+with all the attributes that were most fascinating to her heart, and
+then to flit with the airy creature into the realm of fantasy and
+moonlight, where dwelt his dreamy kindred! For her lover wiled Sylvia
+away from earth, which seemed strange, and dull, and darksome, and
+lured her to a country where her spirit roamed in peaceful rapture,
+deeming that it had found its home. Many, in their youth, have visited
+that land of dreams, and wandered so long in its enchanted groves,
+that, when banished thence, they feel like exiles everywhere.
+
+The dark-browed Edward Hamilton, like the villain of a tale, would
+often glide through the romance wherein poor Sylvia walked. Sometimes,
+at the most blissful moment of her ecstasy, when the features of the
+miniature were pictured brightest in the air, they would suddenly
+change, and darken, and be transformed into his visage. And always,
+when such change occurred, the intrusive visage wore that peculiar
+smile with which Hamilton had glanced at Sylvia.
+
+Before the close of summer, it was told Sylvia Etherege that Vaughan
+had arrived from France, and that she would meet him—would meet, for
+the first time, the loved of years—that very evening. We will not tell
+how often and how earnestly she gazed upon the miniature, thus
+endeavoring to prepare herself for the approaching interview, lest the
+throbbing of her timorous heart should stifle the words of welcome.
+While the twilight grew deeper and duskier, she sat with Mrs. Grosvenor
+in an inner apartment, lighted only by the softened gleam from an
+alabaster lamp, which was burning at a distance on the centre-table of
+the drawing-room. Never before had Sylph Etherege looked so sylph-like.
+She had communed with a creature of imagination, till her own
+loveliness seemed but the creation of a delicate and dreamy fancy.
+Every vibration of her spirit was visible in her frame, as she listened
+to the rattling of wheels and the tramp upon the pavement, and deemed
+that even the breeze bore the sound of her lover’s footsteps, as if he
+trode upon the viewless air. Mrs. Grosvenor, too, while she watched the
+tremulous flow of Sylvia’s feelings, was deeply moved; she looked
+uneasily at the agitated girl, and was about to speak, when the opening
+of the street-door arrested the words upon her lips.
+
+Footsteps ascended the staircase, with a confident and familiar tread,
+and some one entered the drawing-room. From the sofa where they sat, in
+the inner apartment, Mrs. Grosvenor and Sylvia could not discern the
+visitor.
+
+“Sylph!” cried a voice. “Dearest Sylph! Where are you, sweet Sylph
+Etherege? Here is your Edgar Vaughan!”
+
+But instead of answering, or rising to meet her lover,—who had greeted
+her by the sweet and fanciful name, which, appropriate as it was to her
+character, was known only to him,—Sylvia grasped Mrs. Grosvenor’s arm,
+while her whole frame shook with the throbbing of her heart.
+
+“Who is it?” gasped she. “Who calls me Sylph?”
+
+Before Mrs. Grosvenor could reply, the stranger entered the room,
+bearing the lamp in his hand. Approaching the sofa, he displayed to
+Sylvia the features of Edward Hamilton, illuminated by that evil smile,
+from which his face derived so marked an individuality.
+
+“Is not the miniature an admirable likeness?” inquired he.
+
+Sylvia shuddered, but had not power to turn away her white face from
+his gaze. The miniature, which she had been holding in her hand, fell
+down upon the floor, where Hamilton, or Vaughan, set his foot upon it,
+and crushed the ivory counterfeit to fragments.
+
+“There, my sweet Sylph,” he exclaimed. “It was I that created your
+phantom-lover, and now I annihilate him! Your dream is rudely broken.
+Awake, Sylph Etherege, awake to truth! I am the only Edgar Vaughan!”
+
+“We have gone too far, Edgar Vaughan,” said Mrs. Grosvenor, catching
+Sylvia in her arms. The revengeful freak, which Vaughan’s wounded
+vanity had suggested, had been countenanced by this lady, in the hope
+of curing Sylvia of her romantic notions, and reconciling her to the
+truths and realities of life. “Look at the poor child!” she continued.
+“I protest I tremble for the consequences!”
+
+“Indeed, madam!” replied Vaughan, sneeringly, as he threw the light of
+the lamp on Sylvia’s closed eyes and marble features. “Well, my
+conscience is clear. I did but look into this delicate creature’s
+heart; and with the pure fantasies that I found there, I made what
+seemed a man,—and the delusive shadow has wiled her away to
+Shadow-land, and vanished there! It is no new tale. Many a sweet maid
+has shared the lot of poor Sylph Etherege!”
+
+“And now, Edgar Vaughan,” said Mrs. Grosvenor, as Sylvia’s heart began
+faintly to throb again, “now try, in good earnest, to win back her love
+from the phantom which you conjured up. If you succeed, she will be the
+better, her whole life long, for the lesson we have given her.”
+
+Whether the result of the lesson corresponded with Mrs. Grosvenor’s
+hopes, may be gathered from the closing scene of our story. It had been
+made known to the fashionable world that Edgar Vaughan had returned
+from France, and, under the assumed name of Edward Hamilton, had won
+the affections of the lovely girl to whom he had been affianced in his
+boyhood. The nuptials were to take place at an early date. One evening,
+before the day of anticipated bliss arrived, Edgar Vaughan entered Mrs.
+Grosvenor’s drawing-room, where he found that lady and Sylph Etherege.
+
+“Only that Sylvia makes no complaint,” remarked Mrs. Grosvenor, “I
+should apprehend that the town air is ill-suited to her constitution.
+She was always, indeed, a delicate creature; but now she is a mere
+gossamer. Do but look at her! Did you ever imagine anything so
+fragile?”
+
+Vaughan was already attentively observing his mistress, who sat in a
+shadowy and moonlighted recess of the room, with her dreamy eyes fixed
+steadfastly upon his own. The bough of a tree was waving before the
+window, and sometimes enveloped her in the gloom of its shadow, into
+which she seemed to vanish.
+
+“Yes,” he said, to Mrs. Grosvenor. “I can scarcely deem her of the
+earth, earthy. No wonder that I call her Sylph! Methinks she will fade
+into the moonlight, which falls upon her through the window. Or, in the
+open air, she might flit away upon the breeze, like a wreath of mist!”
+
+Sylvia’s eyes grew yet brighter. She waved her hand to Edgar Vaughan,
+with a gesture of ethereal triumph.
+
+“Farewell!” she said. “I will neither fade into the moonlight, nor flit
+away upon the breeze. Yet you cannot keep me here!”
+
+There was something in Sylvia’s look and tones that startled Mrs.
+Grosvenor with a terrible apprehension. But, as she was rushing towards
+the girl, Vaughan held her back.
+
+“Stay!” cried he, with a strange smile of mockery and anguish. “Can our
+sweet Sylph be going to heaven, to seek the original of the miniature?”
+
+
+
+
+THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS
+
+
+The summer moon, which shines in so many a tale, was beaming over a
+broad extent of uneven country. Some of its brightest rays were flung
+into a spring of water, where no traveller, toiling, as the writer has,
+up the hilly road beside which it gushes, ever failed to quench his
+thirst. The work of neat hands and considerate art was visible about
+this blessed fountain. An open cistern, hewn and hollowed out of solid
+stone, was placed above the waters, which filled it to the brim, but by
+some invisible outlet were conveyed away without dripping down its
+sides. Though the basin had not room for another drop, and the
+continual gush of water made a tremor on the surface, there was a
+secret charm that forbade it to overflow. I remember, that when I had
+slaked my summer thirst, and sat panting by the cistern, it was my
+fanciful theory that Nature could not afford to lavish so pure a
+liquid, as she does the waters of all meaner fountains.
+
+While the moon was hanging almost perpendicularly over this spot, two
+figures appeared on the summit of the hill, and came with noiseless
+footsteps down towards the spring. They were then in the first
+freshness of youth; nor is there a wrinkle now on either of their
+brows, and yet they wore a strange, old-fashioned garb. One, a young
+man with ruddy cheeks, walked beneath the canopy of a broad-brimmed
+gray hat; he seemed to have inherited his great-grandsire’s
+square-skirted coat, and a waistcoat that extended its immense flaps to
+his knees; his brown locks, also, hung down behind, in a mode unknown
+to our times. By his side was a sweet young damsel, her fair features
+sheltered by a prim little bonnet, within which appeared the vestal
+muslin of a cap; her close, long-waisted gown, and indeed her whole
+attire, might have been worn by some rustic beauty who had faded half a
+century before. But that there was something too warm and life-like in
+them, I would here have compared this couple to the ghosts of two young
+lovers who had died long since in the glow of passion, and now were
+straying out of their graves, to renew the old vows, and shadow forth
+the unforgotten kiss of their earthly lips, beside the moonlit spring.
+
+“Thee and I will rest here a moment, Miriam,” said the young man, as
+they drew near the stone cistern, “for there is no fear that the elders
+know what we have done; and this may be the last time we shall ever
+taste this water.”
+
+Thus speaking, with a little sadness in his face, which was also
+visible in that of his companion, he made her sit down on a stone, and
+was about to place himself very close to her side; she, however,
+repelled him, though not unkindly.
+
+“Nay, Josiah,” said she, giving him a timid push with her maiden hand,
+“thee must sit farther off, on that other stone, with the spring
+between us. What would the sisters say, if thee were to sit so close to
+me?”
+
+“But we are of the world’s people now, Miriam,” answered Josiah.
+
+The girl persisted in her prudery, nor did the youth, in fact, seem
+altogether free from a similar sort of shyness; so they sat apart from
+each other, gazing up the hill, where the moonlight discovered the tops
+of a group of buildings. While their attention was thus occupied, a
+party of travellers, who had come wearily up the long ascent, made a
+halt to refresh themselves at the spring. There were three men, a
+woman, and a little girl and boy. Their attire was mean, covered with
+the dust of the summer’s day, and damp with the night-dew; they all
+looked woebegone, as if the cares and sorrows of the world had made
+their steps heavier as they climbed the hill; even the two little
+children appeared older in evil days than the young man and maiden who
+had first approached the spring.
+
+“Good evening to you, young folks,” was the salutation of the
+travellers; and “Good evening, friends,” replied the youth and damsel.
+
+“Is that white building the Shaker meeting-house?” asked one of the
+strangers. “And are those the red roofs of the Shaker village?”
+
+“Friend, it is the Shaker village,” answered Josiah, after some
+hesitation.
+
+The travellers, who, from the first, had looked suspiciously at the
+garb of these young people, now taxed them with an intention which all
+the circumstances, indeed, rendered too obvious to be mistaken.
+
+“It is true, friends,” replied the young man, summoning up his courage.
+“Miriam and I have a gift to love each other, and we are going among
+the world’s people, to live after their fashion. And ye know that we do
+not transgress the law of the land; and neither ye, nor the elders
+themselves, have a right to hinder us.”
+
+“Yet you think it expedient to depart without leave-taking,” remarked
+one of the travellers.
+
+“Yea, ye-a,” said Josiah, reluctantly, “because father Job is a very
+awful man to speak with; and being aged himself, he has but little
+charity for what he calls the iniquities of the flesh.”
+
+“Well,” said the stranger, “we will neither use force to bring you back
+to the village, nor will we betray you to the elders. But sit you here
+awhile, and when you have heard what we shall tell you of the world
+which we have left, and into which you are going, perhaps you will turn
+back with us of your own accord. What say you?” added he, turning to
+his companions. “We have travelled thus far without becoming known to
+each other. Shall we tell our stories, here by this pleasant spring,
+for our own pastime, and the benefit of these misguided young lovers?”
+
+In accordance with this proposal, the whole party stationed themselves
+round the stone cistern; the two children, being very weary, fell
+asleep upon the damp earth, and the pretty Shaker girl, whose feelings
+were those of a nun or a Turkish lady, crept as close as possible to
+the female traveller, and as far as she well could from the unknown
+men. The same person who had hitherto been the chief spokesman now
+stood up, waving his hat in his hand, and suffered the moonlight to
+fall full upon his front.
+
+“In me,” said he, with a certain majesty of utterance,—“in me, you
+behold a poet.”
+
+Though a lithographic print of this gentleman is extant, it may be well
+to notice that he was now nearly forty, a thin and stooping figure, in
+a black coat, out at elbows; notwithstanding the ill condition of his
+attire, there were about him several tokens of a peculiar sort of
+foppery, unworthy of a mature man, particularly in the arrangement of
+his hair which was so disposed as to give all possible loftiness and
+breadth to his forehead. However, he had an intelligent eye, and, on
+the whole, a marked countenance.
+
+“A poet!” repeated the young Shaker, a little puzzled how to understand
+such a designation, seldom heard in the utilitarian community where he
+had spent his life. “Oh, ay, Miriam, he means a varse-maker, thee must
+know.”
+
+This remark jarred upon the susceptible nerves of the poet; nor could
+he help wondering what strange fatality had put into this young man’s
+mouth an epithet, which ill-natured people had affirmed to be more
+proper to his merit than the one assumed by himself.
+
+“True, I am a verse-maker,” he resumed, “but my verse is no more than
+the material body into which I breathe the celestial soul of thought.
+Alas! how many a pang has it cost me, this same insensibility to the
+ethereal essence of poetry, with which you have here tortured me again,
+at the moment when I am to relinquish my profession forever! O Fate!
+why hast thou warred with Nature, turning all her higher and more
+perfect gifts to the ruin of me, their possessor? What is the voice of
+song, when the world lacks the ear of taste? How can I rejoice in my
+strength and delicacy of feeling, when they have but made great sorrows
+out of little ones? Have I dreaded scorn like death, and yearned for
+fame as others pant for vital air, only to find myself in a middle
+state between obscurity and infamy? But I have my revenge! I could have
+given existence to a thousand bright creations. I crush them into my
+heart, and there let them putrefy! I shake off the dust of my feet
+against my countrymen! But posterity, tracing my footsteps up this
+weary hill, will cry shame upon the unworthy age that drove one of the
+fathers of American song to end his days in a Shaker village!”
+
+During this harangue, the speaker gesticulated with great energy, and,
+as poetry is the natural language of passion, there appeared reason to
+apprehend his final explosion into an ode extempore. The reader must
+understand that, for all these bitter words, he was a kind, gentle,
+harmless, poor fellow enough, whom Nature, tossing her ingredients
+together without looking at her recipe, had sent into the world with
+too much of one sort of brain, and hardly any of another.
+
+“Friend,” said the young Shaker, in some perplexity, “thee seemest to
+have met with great troubles; and, doubtless, I should pity them, if—if
+I could but understand what they were.”
+
+“Happy in your ignorance!” replied the poet, with an air of sublime
+superiority. “To your coarser mind, perhaps, I may seem to speak of
+more important griefs when I add, what I had well-nigh forgotten, that
+I am out at elbows, and almost starved to death. At any rate, you have
+the advice and example of one individual to warn you back; for I am
+come hither, a disappointed man, flinging aside the fragments of my
+hopes, and seeking shelter in the calm retreat which you are so anxious
+to leave.”
+
+“I thank thee, friend,” rejoined the youth, “but I do not mean to be a
+poet, nor, Heaven be praised! do I think Miriam ever made a varse in
+her life. So we need not fear thy disappointments. But, Miriam,” he
+added, with real concern, “thee knowest that the elders admit nobody
+that has not a gift to be useful. Now, what under the sun can they do
+with this poor varse-maker?”
+
+“Nay, Josiah, do not thee discourage the poor man,” said the girl, in
+all simplicity and kindness. “Our hymns are very rough, and perhaps
+they may trust him to smooth them.”
+
+Without noticing this hint of professional employment, the poet turned
+away, and gave himself up to a sort of vague reverie, which he called
+thought. Sometimes he watched the moon, pouring a silvery liquid on the
+clouds, through which it slowly melted till they became all bright;
+then he saw the same sweet radiance dancing on the leafy trees which
+rustled as if to shake it off, or sleeping on the high tops of hills,
+or hovering down in distant valleys, like the material of unshaped
+dreams; lastly, he looked into the spring, and there the light was
+mingling with the water. In its crystal bosom, too, beholding all
+heaven reflected there, he found an emblem of a pure and tranquil
+breast. He listened to that most ethereal of all sounds, the song of
+crickets, coming in full choir upon the wind, and fancied that, if
+moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that. Finally, he
+took a draught at the Shaker spring, and, as if it were the true
+Castalia, was forthwith moved to compose a lyric, a Farewell to his
+Harp, which he swore should be its closing strain, the last verse that
+an ungrateful world should have from him. This effusion, with two or
+three other little pieces, subsequently written, he took the first
+opportunity to send, by one of the Shaker brethren, to Concord, where
+they were published in the New Hampshire Patriot.
+
+Meantime, another of the Canterbury pilgrims, one so different from the
+poet that the delicate fancy of the latter could hardly have conceived
+of him, began to relate his sad experience. He was a small man, of
+quick and unquiet gestures, about fifty years old, with a narrow
+forehead, all wrinkled and drawn together. He held in his hand a
+pencil, and a card of some commission-merchant in foreign parts, on the
+back of which, for there was light enough to read or write by, he
+seemed ready to figure out a calculation.
+
+“Young man,” said he, abruptly, “what quantity of land do the Shakers
+own here, in Canterbury?”
+
+“That is more than I can tell thee, friend,” answered Josiah, “but it
+is a very rich establishment, and for a long way by the roadside thee
+may guess the land to be ours, by the neatness of the fences.”
+
+“And what may be the value of the whole,” continued the stranger, “with
+all the buildings and improvements, pretty nearly, in round numbers?”
+
+“Oh, a monstrous sum,—more than I can reckon,” replied the young
+Shaker.
+
+“Well, sir,” said the pilgrim, “there was a day, and not very long ago,
+neither, when I stood at my counting-room window, and watched the
+signal flags of three of my own ships entering the harbor, from the
+East Indies, from Liverpool, and from up the Straits, and I would not
+have given the invoice of the least of them for the title-deeds of this
+whole Shaker settlement. You stare. Perhaps, now, you won’t believe
+that I could have put more value on a little piece of paper, no bigger
+than the palm of your hand, than all these solid acres of grain, grass,
+and pasture-land would sell for?”
+
+“I won’t dispute it, friend,” answered Josiah, “but I know I had rather
+have fifty acres of this good land than a whole sheet of thy paper.”
+
+“You may say so now,” said the ruined merchant, bitterly, “for my name
+would not be worth the paper I should write it on. Of course, you must
+have heard of my failure?”
+
+And the stranger mentioned his name, which, however mighty it might
+have been in the commercial world, the young Shaker had never heard of
+among the Canterbury hills.
+
+“Not heard of my failure!” exclaimed the merchant, considerably piqued.
+“Why, it was spoken of on ’Change in London, and from Boston to New
+Orleans men trembled in their shoes. At all events, I did fail, and you
+see me here on my road to the Shaker village, where, doubtless (for the
+Shakers are a shrewd sect), they will have a due respect for my
+experience, and give me the management of the trading part of the
+concern, in which case I think I can pledge myself to double their
+capital in four or five years. Turn back with me, young man; for though
+you will never meet with my good luck, you can hardly escape my bad.”
+
+“I will not turn back for this,” replied Josiah, calmly, “any more than
+for the advice of the varse-maker, between whom and thee, friend, I see
+a sort of likeness, though I can’t justly say where it lies. But Miriam
+and I can earn our daily bread among the world’s people as well as in
+the Shaker village. And do we want anything more, Miriam?”
+
+“Nothing more, Josiah,” said the girl, quietly.
+
+“Yea, Miriam, and daily bread for some other little mouths, if God send
+them,” observed the simple Shaker lad.
+
+Miriam did not reply, but looked down into the spring, where she
+encountered the image of her own pretty face, blushing within the prim
+little bonnet. The third pilgrim now took up the conversation. He was a
+sunburnt countryman, of tall frame and bony strength, on whose rude and
+manly face there appeared a darker, more sullen and obstinate
+despondency, than on those of either the poet or the merchant.
+
+“Well, now, youngster,” he began, “these folks have had their say, so
+I’ll take my turn. My story will cut but a poor figure by the side of
+theirs; for I never supposed that I could have a right to meat and
+drink, and great praise besides, only for tagging rhymes together, as
+it seems this man does; nor ever tried to get the substance of hundreds
+into my own hands, like the trader there. When I was about of your
+years, I married me a wife,—just such a neat and pretty young woman as
+Miriam, if that’s her name,—and all I asked of Providence was an
+ordinary blessing on the sweat of my brow, so that we might be decent
+and comfortable, and have daily bread for ourselves, and for some other
+little mouths that we soon had to feed. We had no very great prospects
+before us; but I never wanted to be idle; and I thought it a matter of
+course that the Lord would help me, because I was willing to help
+myself.”
+
+“And didn’t He help thee, friend?” demanded Josiah, with some
+eagerness.
+
+“No,” said the yeoman, sullenly; “for then you would not have seen me
+here. I have labored hard for years; and my means have been growing
+narrower, and my living poorer, and my heart colder and heavier, all
+the time; till at last I could bear it no longer. I set myself down to
+calculate whether I had best go on the Oregon expedition, or come here
+to the Shaker village; but I had not hope enough left in me to begin
+the world over again; and, to make my story short, here I am. And now,
+youngster, take my advice, and turn back; or else, some few years
+hence, you’ll have to climb this hill, with as heavy a heart as mine.”
+
+This simple story had a strong effect on the young fugitives. The
+misfortunes of the poet and merchant had won little sympathy from their
+plain good sense and unworldly feelings, qualities which made them such
+unprejudiced and inflexible judges, that few men would have chosen to
+take the opinion of this youth and maiden as to the wisdom or folly of
+their pursuits. But here was one whose simple wishes had resembled
+their own, and who, after efforts which almost gave him a right to
+claim success from fate, had failed in accomplishing them.
+
+“But thy wife, friend?” exclaimed the younger man. “What became of the
+pretty girl, like Miriam? Oh, I am afraid she is dead!”
+
+“Yea, poor man, she must be dead,—she and the children, too,” sobbed
+Miriam.
+
+The female pilgrim had been leaning over the spring, wherein latterly a
+tear or two might have been seen to fall, and form its little circle on
+the surface of the water. She now looked up, disclosing features still
+comely, but which had acquired an expression of fretfulness, in the
+same long course of evil fortune that had thrown a sullen gloom over
+the temper of the unprosperous yeoman.
+
+“I am his wife,” said she, a shade of irritability just perceptible in
+the sadness of her tone. “These poor little things, asleep on the
+ground, are two of our children. We had two more, but God has provided
+better for them than we could, by taking them to Himself.”
+
+“And what would thee advise Josiah and me to do?” asked Miriam, this
+being the first question which she had put to either of the strangers.
+
+“’Tis a thing almost against nature for a woman to try to part true
+lovers,” answered the yeoman’s wife, after a pause; “but I’ll speak as
+truly to you as if these were my dying words. Though my husband told
+you some of our troubles, he didn’t mention the greatest, and that
+which makes all the rest so hard to bear. If you and your sweetheart
+marry, you’ll be kind and pleasant to each other for a year or two, and
+while that’s the case, you never will repent; but, by and by, he’ll
+grow gloomy, rough, and hard to please, and you’ll be peevish, and full
+of little angry fits, and apt to be complaining by the fireside, when
+he comes to rest himself from his troubles out of doors; so your love
+will wear away by little and little, and leave you miserable at last.
+It has been so with us; and yet my husband and I were true lovers once,
+if ever two young folks were .”
+
+As she ceased, the yeoman and his wife exchanged a glance, in which
+there was more and warmer affection than they had supposed to have
+escaped the frost of a wintry fate, in either of their breasts. At that
+moment, when they stood on the utmost verge of married life, one word
+fitly spoken, or perhaps one peculiar look, had they had mutual
+confidence enough to reciprocate it, might have renewed all their old
+feelings, and sent them back, resolved to sustain each other amid the
+struggles of the world. But the crisis passed and never came again.
+Just then, also, the children, roused by their mother’s voice, looked
+up, and added their wailing accents to the testimony borne by all the
+Canterbury pilgrims against the world from which they fled.
+
+“We are tired and hungry!” cried they. “Is it far to the Shaker
+village?”
+
+The Shaker youth and maiden looked mournfully into each other’s eyes.
+They had but stepped across the threshold of their homes, when lo! the
+dark array of cares and sorrows that rose up to warn them back. The
+varied narratives of the strangers had arranged themselves into a
+parable; they seemed not merely instances of woful fate that had
+befallen others, but shadowy omens of disappointed hope and unavailing
+toil, domestic grief and estranged affection, that would cloud the
+onward path of these poor fugitives. But after one instant’s
+hesitation, they opened their arms, and sealed their resolve with as
+pure and fond an embrace as ever youthful love had hallowed.
+
+“We will not go back,” said they. “The world never can be dark to us,
+for we will always love one another.”
+
+Then the Canterbury pilgrims went up the hill, while the poet chanted a
+drear and desperate stanza of the Farewell to his Harp, fitting music
+for that melancholy band. They sought a home where all former ties of
+nature or society would be sundered, and all old distinctions levelled,
+and a cold and passionless security be substituted for mortal hope and
+fear, as in that other refuge of the world’s weary outcasts, the grave.
+The lovers drank at the Shaker spring, and then, with chastened hopes,
+but more confiding affections, went on to mingle in an untried life.
+
+
+
+
+OLD NEWS
+
+
+There is a volume of what were once newspapers each on a small
+half-sheet, yellow and time-stained, of a coarse fabric, and imprinted
+with a rude old type. Their aspect conveys a singular impression of
+antiquity, in a species of literature which we are accustomed to
+consider as connected only with the present moment. Ephemeral as they
+were intended and supposed to be, they have long outlived the printer
+and his whole subscription-list, and have proved more durable, as to
+their physical existence, than most of the timber, bricks, and stone of
+the town where they were issued. These are but the least of their
+triumphs. The government, the interests, the opinions, in short, all
+the moral circumstances that were contemporary with their publication,
+have passed away, and left no better record of what they were than may
+be found in these frail leaves. Happy are the editors of newspapers!
+Their productions excel all others in immediate popularity, and are
+certain to acquire another sort of value with the lapse of time. They
+scatter their leaves to the wind, as the sibyl did, and posterity
+collects them, to be treasured up among the best materials of its
+wisdom. With hasty pens they write for immortality.
+
+It is pleasant to take one of these little dingy half-sheets between
+the thumb and finger, and picture forth the personage who, above ninety
+years ago, held it, wet from the press, and steaming, before the fire.
+Many of the numbers bear the name of an old colonial dignitary. There
+he sits, a major, a member of the council, and a weighty merchant, in
+his high-backed arm-chair, wearing a solemn wig and grave attire, such
+as befits his imposing gravity of mien, and displaying but little
+finery, except a huge pair of silver shoe-buckles, curiously carved.
+Observe the awful reverence of his visage, as he reads his Majesty’s
+most gracious speech; and the deliberate wisdom with which he ponders
+over some paragraph of provincial politics, and the keener intelligence
+with which he glances at the ship-news and commercial advertisements.
+Observe, and smile! He may have been a wise man in his day; but, to us,
+the wisdom of the politician appears like folly, because we can compare
+its prognostics with actual results; and the old merchant seems to have
+busied himself about vanities, because we know that the expected ships
+have been lost at sea, or mouldered at the wharves; that his imported
+broadcloths were long ago worn to tatters, and his cargoes of wine
+quaffed to the lees; and that the most precious leaves of his ledger
+have become waste-paper. Yet, his avocations were not so vain as our
+philosophic moralizing. In this world we are the things of a moment,
+and are made to pursue momentary things, with here and there a thought
+that stretches mistily towards eternity, and perhaps may endure as
+long. All philosophy that would abstract mankind from the present is no
+more than words.
+
+The first pages of most of these old papers are as soporific as a bed
+of poppies. Here we have an erudite clergyman, or perhaps a Cambridge
+professor, occupying several successive weeks with a criticism on Tate
+and Brady, as compared with the New England version of the Psalms. Of
+course, the preference is given to the native article. Here are doctors
+disagreeing about the treatment of a putrid fever then prevalent, and
+blackguarding each other with a characteristic virulence that renders
+the controversy not altogether unreadable. Here are President
+Wigglesworth and the Rev. Dr. Colman, endeavoring to raise a fund for
+the support of missionaries among the Indians of Massachusetts Bay.
+Easy would be the duties of such a mission now! Here—for there is
+nothing new under the sun—are frequent complaints of the disordered
+state of the currency, and the project of a bank with a capital of five
+hundred thousand pounds, secured on lands. Here are literary essays,
+from the Gentleman’s Magazine; and squibs against the Pretender, from
+the London newspapers. And here, occasionally, are specimens of New
+England honor, laboriously light and lamentably mirthful, as if some
+very sober person, in his zeal to be merry, were dancing a jig to the
+tune of a funeral-psalm. All this is wearisome, and we must turn the
+leaf.
+
+There is a good deal of amusement, and some profit, in the perusal of
+those little items which characterize the manners and circumstances of
+the country. New England was then in a state incomparably more
+picturesque than at present, or than it has been within the memory of
+man; there being, as yet, only a narrow strip of civilization along the
+edge of a vast forest, peopled with enough of its original race to
+contrast the savage life with the old customs of another world. The
+white population, also, was diversified by the influx of all sorts of
+expatriated vagabonds, and by the continual importation of
+bond-servants from Ireland and elsewhere, so that there was a wild and
+unsettled multitude, forming a strong minority to the sober descendants
+of the Puritans. Then, there were the slaves, contributing their dark
+shade to the picture of society. The consequence of all this was a
+great variety and singularity of action and incident, many instances of
+which might be selected from these columns, where they are told with a
+simplicity and quaintness of style that bring the striking points into
+very strong relief. It is natural to suppose, too, that these
+circumstances affected the body of the people, and made their course of
+life generally less regular than that of their descendants. There is no
+evidence that the moral standard was higher then than now; or, indeed,
+that morality was so well defined as it has since become. There seem to
+have been quite as many frauds and robberies, in proportion to the
+number of honest deeds; there were murders, in hot-blood and in malice;
+and bloody quarrels over liquor. Some of our fathers also appear to
+have been yoked to unfaithful wives, if we may trust the frequent
+notices of elopements from bed and board. The pillory, the
+whipping-post, the prison, and the gallows, each had their use in those
+old times; and, in short, as often as our imagination lives in the
+past, we find it a ruder and rougher age than our own, with hardly any
+perceptible advantages, and much that gave life a gloomier tinge. In
+vain we endeavor to throw a sunny and joyous air over our picture of
+this period; nothing passes before our fancy but a crowd of sad-visaged
+people, moving duskily through a dull gray atmosphere. It is certain
+that winter rushed upon them with fiercer storms than now, blocking up
+the narrow forest-paths, and overwhelming the roads along the sea-coast
+with mountain snow drifts; so that weeks elapsed before the newspaper
+could announce how many travellers had perished, or what wrecks had
+strewn the shore. The cold was more piercing then, and lingered further
+into the spring, making the chimney-corner a comfortable seat till long
+past May-day. By the number of such accidents on record, we might
+suppose that the thunder-stone, as they termed it, fell oftener and
+deadlier on steeples, dwellings, and unsheltered wretches. In fine, our
+fathers bore the brunt of more raging and pitiless elements than we.
+There were forebodings, also, of a more fearful tempest than those of
+the elements. At two or three dates, we have stories of drums,
+trumpets, and all sorts of martial music, passing athwart the midnight
+sky, accompanied with the—roar of cannon and rattle of musketry,
+prophetic echoes of the sounds that were soon to shake the land.
+Besides these airy prognostics, there were rumors of French fleets on
+the coast, and of the march of French and Indians through the
+wilderness, along the borders of the settlements. The country was
+saddened, moreover, with grievous sicknesses. The small-pox raged in
+many of the towns, and seems, though so familiar a scourge, to have
+been regarded with as much affright as that which drove the throng from
+Wall Street and Broadway at the approach of a new pestilence. There
+were autumnal fevers too, and a contagious and destructive
+throat-distemper,—diseases unwritten in medical hooks. The dark
+superstition of former days had not yet been so far dispelled as not to
+heighten the gloom of the present times. There is an advertisement,
+indeed, by a committee of the Legislature, calling for information as
+to the circumstances of sufferers in the “late calamity of 1692,” with
+a view to reparation for their losses and misfortunes. But the
+tenderness with which, after above forty years, it was thought
+expedient to allude to the witchcraft delusion, indicates a good deal
+of lingering error, as well as the advance of more enlightened
+opinions. The rigid hand of Puritanism might yet be felt upon the reins
+of government, while some of the ordinances intimate a disorderly
+spirit on the part of the people. The Suffolk justices, after a
+preamble that great disturbances have been committed by persons
+entering town and leaving it in coaches, chaises, calashes, and other
+wheel-carriages, on the evening before the Sabbath, give notice that a
+watch will hereafter be set at the “fortification-gate,” to prevent
+these outrages. It is amusing to see Boston assuming the aspect of a
+walled city, guarded, probably, by a detachment of church-members, with
+a deacon at their head. Governor Belcher makes proclamation against
+certain “loose and dissolute people” who have been wont to stop
+passengers in the streets, on the Fifth of November, “otherwise called
+Pope’s Day,” and levy contributions for the building of bonfires. In
+this instance, the populace are more puritanic than the magistrate.
+
+The elaborate solemnities of funerals were in accordance with the
+sombre character of the times. In cases of ordinary death, the printer
+seldom fails to notice that the corpse was “very decently interred.”
+But when some mightier mortal has yielded to his fate, the decease of
+the “worshipful” such-a-one is announced, with all his titles of
+deacon, justice, councillor, and colonel; then follows an heraldic
+sketch of his honorable ancestors, and lastly an account of the black
+pomp of his funeral, and the liberal expenditure of scarfs, gloves, and
+mourning rings. The burial train glides slowly before us, as we have
+seen it represented in the woodcuts of that day, the coffin, and the
+bearers, and the lamentable friends, trailing their long black
+garments, while grim Death, a most misshapen skeleton, with all kinds
+of doleful emblems, stalks hideously in front. There was a coach maker
+at this period, one John Lucas, who scents to have gained the chief of
+his living by letting out a sable coach to funerals. It would not be
+fair, however, to leave quite so dismal an impression on the reader’s
+mind; nor should it be forgotten that happiness may walk soberly in
+dark attire, as well as dance lightsomely in a gala-dress. And this
+reminds us that there is an incidental notice of the “dancing-school
+near the Orange-Tree,” whence we may infer that the salutatory art was
+occasionally practised, though perhaps chastened into a characteristic
+gravity of movement. This pastime was probably confined to the
+aristocratic circle, of which the royal governor was the centre. But we
+are scandalized at the attempt of Jonathan Furness to introduce a more
+reprehensible amusement: he challenges the whole country to match his
+black gelding in a race for a hundred pounds, to be decided on Metonomy
+Common or Chelsea Beach. Nothing as to the manners of the times can be
+inferred from this freak of an individual. There were no daily and
+continual opportunities of being merry; but sometimes the people
+rejoiced, in their own peculiar fashion, oftener with a calm, religious
+smile than with a broad laugh, as when they feasted, like one great
+family, at Thanksgiving time, or indulged a livelier mirth throughout
+the pleasant days of Election-week. This latter was the true holiday
+season of New England. Military musters were too seriously important in
+that warlike time to be classed among amusements; but they stirred up
+and enlivened the public mind, and were occasions of solemn festival to
+the governor and great men of the province, at the expense of the
+field-offices. The Revolution blotted a feast-day out of our calendar;
+for the anniversary of the king’s birth appears to have been celebrated
+with most imposing pomp, by salutes from Castle William, a military
+parade, a grand dinner at the town-house, and a brilliant illumination
+in the evening. There was nothing forced nor feigned in these
+testimonials of loyalty to George the Second. So long as they dreaded
+the re-establishment of a popish dynasty, the people were fervent for
+the house of Hanover: and, besides, the immediate magistracy of the
+country was a barrier between the monarch and the occasional
+discontents of the colonies; the waves of faction sometimes reached the
+governor’s chair, but never swelled against the throne. Thus, until
+oppression was felt to proceed from the king’s own hand, New England
+rejoiced with her whole heart on his Majesty’s birthday.
+
+But the slaves, we suspect, were the merriest part of the population,
+since it was their gift to be merry in the worst of circumstances; and
+they endured, comparatively, few hardships, under the domestic sway of
+our fathers. There seems to have been a great trade in these human
+commodities. No advertisements are more frequent than those of “a negro
+fellow, fit for almost any household work”; “a negro woman, honest,
+healthy, and capable”; “a negro wench of many desirable qualities”; “a
+negro man, very fit for a taylor.” We know not in what this natural
+fitness for a tailor consisted, unless it were some peculiarity of
+conformation that enabled him to sit cross-legged. When the slaves of a
+family were inconveniently prolific,—it being not quite orthodox to
+drown the superfluous offspring, like a litter of kittens,—notice was
+promulgated of “a negro child to be given away.” Sometimes the slaves
+assumed the property of their own persons, and made their escape; among
+many such instances, the governor raises a hue-and-cry after his negro
+Juba. But, without venturing a word in extenuation of the general
+system, we confess our opinion that Caesar, Pompey, Scipio, and all
+such great Roman namesakes, would have been better advised had they
+stayed at home, foddering the cattle, cleaning dishes,—in fine,
+performing their moderate share of the labors of life, without being
+harassed by its cares. The sable inmates of the mansion were not
+excluded from the domestic affections: in families of middling rank,
+they had their places at the board; and when the circle closed round
+the evening hearth, its blaze glowed on their dark shining faces,
+intermixed familiarly with their master’s children. It must have
+contributed to reconcile them to their lot, that they saw white men and
+women imported from Europe as they had been from Africa, and sold,
+though only for a term of years, yet as actual slaves to the highest
+bidder. Slave labor being but a small part of the industry of the
+country, it did not change the character of the people; the latter, on
+the contrary, modified and softened the institution, making it a
+patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity of the times.
+
+Ah! We had forgotten the good old merchant, over whose shoulder we were
+peeping, while he read the newspaper. Let us now suppose him putting on
+his three-cornered gold-laced hat, grasping his cane, with a head
+inlaid of ebony and mother-of-pearl, and setting forth, through the
+crooked streets of Boston, on various errands, suggested by the
+advertisements of the day. Thus he communes with himself: I must be
+mindful, says he, to call at Captain Scut’s, in Creek Lane, and examine
+his rich velvet, whether it be fit for my apparel on Election-day,—that
+I may wear a stately aspect in presence of the governor and my brethren
+of the council. I will look in, also, at the shop of Michael Cario, the
+jeweller: he has silver buckles of a new fashion; and mine have lasted
+me some half-score years. My fair daughter Miriam shall have an apron
+of gold brocade, and a velvet mask,—though it would be a pity the wench
+should hide her comely visage; and also a French cap, from Robert
+Jenkins’s, on the north side of the town-house. He hath beads, too, and
+ear-rings, and necklaces, of all sorts; these are but vanities,
+nevertheless, they would please the silly maiden well. My dame desireth
+another female in the kitchen; wherefore, I must inspect the lot of
+Irish lasses, for sale by Samuel Waldo, aboard the schooner Endeavor;
+as also the likely negro wench, at Captain Bulfinch’s. It were not
+amiss that I took my daughter Miriam to see the royal waxwork, near the
+town-dock, that she may learn to honor our most gracious King and
+Queen, and their royal progeny, even in their waxen images; not that I
+would approve of image-worship. The camel, too, that strange beast from
+Africa, with two great humps, to be seen near the Common; methinks I
+would fain go thither, and see how the old patriarchs were wont to
+ride. I will tarry awhile in Queen Street, at the bookstore of my good
+friends Kneeland & Green, and purchase Dr. Colman’s new sermon, and the
+volume of discourses by Mr. Henry Flynt; and look over the controversy
+on baptism, between the Rev. Peter Clarke and an unknown adversary; and
+see whether this George Whitefield be as great in print as he is famed
+to be in the pulpit. By that time, the auction will have commenced at
+the Royal Exchange, in King Street. Moreover, I must look to the
+disposal of my last cargo of West India rum and muscovado sugar; and
+also the lot of choice Cheshire cheese, lest it grow mouldy. It were
+well that I ordered a cask of good English beer, at the lower end of
+Milk Street.
+
+Then am I to speak with certain dealers about the lot of stout old
+Vidonia, rich Canary, and Oporto-wines, which I have now lying in the
+cellar of the Old South meeting-house. But, a pipe or two of the rich
+Canary shall be reserved, that it may grow mellow in mine own
+wine-cellar, and gladden my heart when it begins to droop with old age.
+
+Provident old gentleman! But, was he mindful of his sepulchre? Did he
+bethink him to call at the workshop of Timothy Sheaffe, in Cold Lane,
+and select such a gravestone as would best please him? There wrought
+the man whose handiwork, or that of his fellow-craftsmen, was
+ultimately in demand by all the busy multitude who have left a record
+of their earthly toil in these old time-stained papers. And now, as we
+turn over the volume, we seem to be wandering among the mossy stones of
+a burial-ground.
+
+II. THE OLD FRENCH WAR.
+
+At a period about twenty years subsequent to that of our former sketch,
+we again attempt a delineation of some of the characteristics of life
+and manners in New England. Our text-book, as before, is a file of
+antique newspapers. The volume which serves us for a writing-desk is a
+folio of larger dimensions than the one before described; and the
+papers are generally printed on a whole sheet, sometimes with a
+supplemental leaf of news and advertisements. They have a venerable
+appearance, being overspread with a duskiness of more than seventy
+years, and discolored, here and there, with the deeper stains of some
+liquid, as if the contents of a wineglass had long since been splashed
+upon the page. Still, the old book conveys an impression that, when the
+separate numbers were flying about town, in the first day or two of
+their respective existences, they might have been fit reading for very
+stylish people. Such newspapers could have been issued nowhere but in a
+metropolis the centre, not only of public and private affairs, but of
+fashion and gayety. Without any discredit to the colonial press, these
+might have been, and probably were, spread out on the tables of the
+British coffee-house, in king Street, for the perusal of the throng of
+officers who then drank their wine at that celebrated establishment. To
+interest these military gentlemen, there were bulletins of the war
+between Prussia and Austria; between England and France, on the old
+battle-plains of Flanders; and between the same antagonists, in the
+newer fields of the East Indies,—and in our own trackless woods, where
+white men never trod until they came to fight there. Or, the travelled
+American, the petit-maitre of the colonies,—the ape of London foppery,
+as the newspaper was the semblance of the London journals,—he, with his
+gray powdered periwig, his embroidered coat, lace ruffles, and glossy
+silk stockings, golden-clocked,—his buckles of glittering paste, at
+knee-band and shoe-strap,—his scented handkerchief, and chapeau beneath
+his arm, even such a dainty figure need not have disdained to glance at
+these old yellow pages, while they were the mirror of passing times.
+For his amusement, there were essays of wit and humor, the light
+literature of the day, which, for breadth and license, might have
+proceeded from the pen of Fielding or Smollet; while, in other columns,
+he would delight his imagination with the enumerated items of all sorts
+of finery, and with the rival advertisements of half a dozen
+peruke-makers. In short, newer manners and customs had almost entirely
+superseded those of the Puritans, even in their own city of refuge.
+
+It was natural that, with the lapse of time and increase of wealth and
+population, the peculiarities of the early settlers should have waxed
+fainter and fainter through the generations of their descendants, who
+also had been alloyed by a continual accession of emigrants from many
+countries and of all characters. It tended to assimilate the colonial
+manners to those of the mother-country, that the commercial intercourse
+was great, and that the merchants often went thither in their own
+ships. Indeed, almost every man of adequate fortune felt a yearning
+desire, and even judged it a filial duty, at least once in his life, to
+visit the home of his ancestors. They still called it their own home,
+as if New England were to them, what many of the old Puritans had
+considered it, not a permanent abiding-place, but merely a lodge in the
+wilderness, until the trouble of the times should be passed. The
+example of the royal governors must have had much influence on the
+manners of the colonists; for these rulers assumed a degree of state
+and splendor which had never been practised by their predecessors, who
+differed in nothing from republican chief-magistrates, under the old
+charter. The officers of the crown, the public characters in the
+interest of the administration, and the gentlemen of wealth and good
+descent, generally noted for their loyalty, would constitute a
+dignified circle, with the governor in the centre, bearing a very
+passable resemblance to a court. Their ideas, their habits, their bode
+of courtesy, and their dress would have all the fresh glitter of
+fashions immediately derived from the fountain-head, in England. To
+prevent their modes of life from becoming the standard with all who had
+the ability to imitate them, there was no longer an undue severity of
+religion, nor as yet any disaffection to British supremacy, nor
+democratic prejudices against pomp. Thus, while the colonies were
+attaining that strength which was soon to render them an independent
+republic, it might have been supposed that the wealthier classes were
+growing into an aristocracy, and ripening for hereditary rank, while
+the poor were to be stationary in their abasement, and the country,
+perhaps, to be a sister monarchy with England. Such, doubtless, were
+the plausible conjectures deduced from the superficial phenomena of our
+connection with a monarchical government, until the prospective
+nobility were levelled with the mob, by the mere gathering of winds
+that preceded the storm of the Revolution. The portents of that storm
+were not yet visible in the air. A true picture of society, therefore,
+would have the rich effect produced by distinctions of rank that seemed
+permanent, and by appropriate habits of splendor on the part of the
+gentry.
+
+The people at large had been somewhat changed in character, since the
+period of our last sketch, by their great exploit, the conquest of
+Louisburg. After that event, the New-Englanders never settled into
+precisely the same quiet race which all the world had imagined them to
+be. They had done a deed of history, and were anxious to add new ones
+to the record. They had proved themselves powerful enough to influence
+the result of a war, and were thenceforth called upon, and willingly
+consented, to join their strength against the enemies of England; on
+those fields, at least, where victory would redound to their peculiar
+advantage. And now, in the heat of the Old French War, they might well
+be termed a martial people. Every man was a soldier, or the father or
+brother of a soldier; and the whole land literally echoed with the roll
+of the drum, either beating up for recruits among the towns and
+villages, or striking the march towards the frontiers. Besides the
+provincial troops, there were twenty-three British regiments in the
+northern colonies. The country has never known a period of such
+excitement and warlike life; except during the Revolution,—perhaps
+scarcely then; for that was a lingering war, and this a stirring and
+eventful one.
+
+One would think that no very wonderful talent was requisite for an
+historical novel, when the rough and hurried paragraphs of these
+newspapers can recall the past so magically. We seem to be waiting in
+the street for the arrival of the post-rider—who is seldom more than
+twelve hours beyond his time—with letters, by way of Albany, from the
+various departments of the army. Or, we may fancy ourselves in the
+circle of listeners, all with necks stretched out towards an old
+gentleman in the centre, who deliberately puts on his spectacles,
+unfolds the wet newspaper, and gives us the details of the broken and
+contradictory reports, which have been flying from mouth to mouth, ever
+since the courier alighted at Secretary Oliver’s office. Sometimes we
+have an account of the Indian skirmishes near Lake George, and how a
+ranging party of provincials were so closely pursued, that they threw
+away their arms, and eke their shoes, stockings, and breeches, barely
+reaching the camp in their shirts, which also were terribly tattered by
+the bushes. Then, there is a journal of the siege of Fort Niagara, so
+minute that it almost numbers the cannon-shot and bombs, and describes
+the effect of the latter missiles on the French commandant’s stone
+mansion, within the fortress. In the letters of the provincial
+officers, it is amusing to observe how some of them endeavor to catch
+the careless and jovial turn of old campaigners. One gentleman tells us
+that he holds a brimming glass in his hand, intending to drink the
+health of his correspondent, unless a cannon ball should dash the
+liquor from his lips; in the midst of his letter he hears the bells of
+the French churches ringing, in Quebec, and recollects that it is
+Sunday; whereupon, like a good Protestant, he resolves to disturb the
+Catholic worship by a few thirty-two pound shot. While this wicked man
+of war was thus making a jest of religion, his pious mother had
+probably put up a note, that very Sabbath-day, desiring the “prayers of
+the congregation for a son gone a soldiering.” We trust, however, that
+there were some stout old worthies who were not ashamed to do as their
+fathers did, but went to prayer, with their soldiers, before leading
+them to battle; and doubtless fought none the worse for that. If we had
+enlisted in the Old French War, it should have been under such a
+captain; for we love to see a man keep the characteristics of his
+country.*
+
+[* The contemptuous jealousy of the British army, from the general
+downwards, was very galling to the provincial troops. In one of the
+newspapers, there is an admirable letter of a New England man, copied
+from the London Chronicle, defending the provincials with an ability
+worthy of Franklin, and somewhat in his style. The letter is
+remarkable, also, because it takes up the cause of the whole range of
+colonies, as if the writer looked upon them all as constituting one
+country, and that his own. Colonial patriotism had not hitherto been so
+broad a sentiment.]
+
+
+These letters, and other intelligence from the army, are pleasant and
+lively reading, and stir up the mind like the music of a drum and fife.
+It is less agreeable to meet with accounts of women slain and scalped,
+and infants dashed against trees, by the Indians on the frontiers. It
+is a striking circumstance, that innumerable bears, driven from the
+woods, by the uproar of contending armies in their accustomed haunts,
+broke into the settlements, and committed great ravages among children,
+as well as sheep and swine. Some of them prowled where bears had never
+been for a century, penetrating within a mile or two of Boston; a fact
+that gives a strong and gloomy impression of something very terrific
+going on in the forest, since these savage beasts fled townward to
+avoid it. But it is impossible to moralize about such trifles, when
+every newspaper contains tales of military enterprise, and often a
+huzza for victory; as, for instance, the taking of Ticonderoga, long a
+place of awe to the provincials, and one of the bloodiest spots in the
+present war. Nor is it unpleasant, among whole pages of exultation, to
+find a note of sorrow for the fall of some brave officer; it comes
+wailing in, like a funeral strain amidst a peal of triumph, itself
+triumphant too. Such was the lamentation over Wolfe. Somewhere, in this
+volume of newspapers, though we cannot now lay our finger upon the
+passage, we recollect a report that General Wolfe was slain, not by the
+enemy, but by a shot from his own soldiers.
+
+In the advertising columns, also, we are continually reminded that the
+country was in a state of war. Governor Pownall makes proclamation for
+the enlisting of soldiers, and directs the militia colonels to attend
+to the discipline of their regiments, and the selectmen of every town
+to replenish their stocks of ammunition. The magazine, by the way, was
+generally kept in the upper loft of the village meeting-house. The
+provincial captains are drumming up for soldiers, in every newspaper.
+Sir Jeffrey Amherst advertises for batteaux-men, to be employed on the
+lakes; and gives notice to the officers of seven British regiments,
+dispersed on the recruiting service, to rendezvous in Boston. Captain
+Hallowell, of the province ship-of-war King George, invites able-bodied
+seamen to serve his Majesty, for fifteen pounds, old tenor, per month.
+By the rewards offered, there would appear to have been frequent
+desertions from the New England forces: we applaud their wisdom, if not
+their valor or integrity. Cannon of all calibres, gunpowder and balls,
+firelocks, pistols, swords, and hangers, were common articles of
+merchandise. Daniel Jones, at the sign of the hat and helmet, offers to
+supply officers with scarlet broadcloth, gold-lace for hats and
+waistcoats, cockades, and other military foppery, allowing credit until
+the payrolls shall be made up. This advertisement gives us quite a
+gorgeous idea of a provincial captain in full dress.
+
+At the commencement of the campaign of 1759, the British general
+informs the farmers of New England that a regular market will be
+established at Lake George, whither they are invited to bring
+provisions and refreshments of all sorts, for the use of the army.
+Hence, we may form a singular picture of petty traffic, far away from
+any permanent settlements, among the hills which border that romantic
+lake, with the solemn woods overshadowing the scene. Carcasses of
+bullocks and fat porkers are placed upright against the huge trunks of
+the trees; fowls hang from the lower branches, bobbing against the
+heads of those beneath; butter-firkins, great cheeses, and brown loaves
+of household bread, baked in distant ovens, are collected under
+temporary shelters or pine-boughs, with gingerbread, and pumpkin-pies,
+perhaps, and other toothsome dainties. Barrels of cider and spruce-beer
+are running freely into the wooden canteens of the soldiers. Imagine
+such a scene, beneath the dark forest canopy, with here and there a few
+struggling sunbeams, to dissipate the gloom. See the shrewd yeomen,
+haggling with their scarlet-coated customers, abating somewhat in their
+prices, but still dealing at monstrous profit; and then complete the
+picture with circumstances that bespeak war and danger. A cannon shall
+be seen to belch its smoke from among the trees, against some distant
+canoes on the lake; the traffickers shall pause, and seem to hearken,
+at intervals, as if they heard the rattle of musketry or the shout of
+Indians; a scouting-party shall be driven in, with two or three faint
+and bloody men among them. And, in spite of these disturbances,
+business goes on briskly in the market of the wilderness.
+
+It must not be supposed that the martial character of the times
+interrupted all pursuits except those connected with war. On the
+contrary, there appears to have been a general vigor and vivacity
+diffused into the whole round of colonial life. During the winter of
+1759, it was computed that about a thousand sled-loads of country
+produce were daily brought into Boston market. It was a symptom of an
+irregular and unquiet course of affairs, that innumerable lotteries
+were projected, ostensibly for the purpose of public improvements, such
+as roads and bridges. Many females seized the opportunity to engage in
+business: as, among others, Alice Quick, who dealt in crockery and
+hosiery, next door to Deacon Beautineau’s; Mary Jackson, who sold
+butter, at the Brazen-Head, in Cornhill; Abigail Hiller, who taught
+ornamental work, near the Orange-Tree, where also were to be seen the
+King and Queen, in wax-work; Sarah Morehead, an instructor in
+glass-painting, drawing, and japanning; Mary Salmon, who shod horses,
+at the South End; Harriet Pain, at the Buck and Glove, and Mrs.
+Henrietta Maria Caine, at the Golden Fan, both fashionable milliners;
+Anna Adams, who advertises Quebec and Garrick bonnets, Prussian cloaks,
+and scarlet cardinals, opposite the old brick meeting-house; besides a
+lady at the head of a wine and spirit establishment. Little did these
+good dames expect to reappear before the public, so long after they had
+made their last courtesies behind the counter. Our great-grandmothers
+were a stirring sisterhood, and seem not to have been utterly despised
+by the gentlemen at the British coffee-house; at least, some gracious
+bachelor, there resident, gives public notice of his willingness to
+take a wife, provided she be not above twenty-three, and possess brown
+hair, regular features, a brisk eye, and a fortune. Now, this was great
+condescension towards the ladies of Massachusetts Bay, in a threadbare
+lieutenant of foot.
+
+Polite literature was beginning to make its appearance. Few native
+works were advertised, it is true, except sermons and treatises of
+controversial divinity; nor were the English authors of the day much
+known on this side of the Atlantic. But catalogues were frequently
+offered at auction or private sale, comprising the standard English
+books, history, essays, and poetry, of Queen Anne’s age, and the
+preceding century. We see nothing in the nature of a novel, unless it
+be “The Two Mothers, price four coppers.” There was an American poet,
+however, of whom Mr. Kettell has preserved no specimen,—the author of
+“War, an Heroic Poem”; he publishes by subscription, and threatens to
+prosecute his patrons for not taking their books. We have discovered a
+periodical, also, and one that has a peculiar claim to be recorded
+here, since it bore the title of “THE NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE,” a
+forgotten predecessor, for which we should have a filial respect, and
+take its excellence on trust. The fine arts, too, were budding into
+existence. At the “old glass and picture shop,” in Cornhill, various
+maps, plates, and views are advertised, and among them a “Prospect of
+Boston,” a copperplate engraving of Quebec, and the effigies of all the
+New England ministers ever done in mezzotinto. All these must have been
+very salable articles. Other ornamental wares were to be found at the
+same shop; such as violins, flutes, hautboys, musical books, English
+and Dutch toys, and London babies. About this period, Mr. Dipper gives
+notice of a concert of vocal and instrumental music. There had already
+been an attempt at theatrical exhibitions.
+
+There are tokens, in every newspaper, of a style of luxury and
+magnificence which we do not usually associate with our ideas of the
+times. When the property of a deceased person was to be sold, we find,
+among the household furniture, silk beds and hangings, damask
+table-cloths, Turkey carpets, pictures, pier-glasses, massive plate,
+and all things proper for a noble mansion. Wine was more generally
+drunk than now, though by no means to the neglect of ardent spirits.
+For the apparel of both sexes, the mercers and milliners imported good
+store of fine broadcloths, especially scarlet, crimson, and sky-blue,
+silks, satins, lawns, and velvets, gold brocade, and gold and silver
+lace, and silver tassels, and silver spangles, until Cornhill shone and
+sparkled with their merchandise. The gaudiest dress permissible by
+modern taste fades into a Quaker-like sobriety, compared with the deep,
+rich, glowing splendor of our ancestors. Such figures were almost too
+fine to go about town on foot; accordingly, carriages were so numerous
+as to require a tax; and it is recorded that, when Governor Bernard
+came to the province, he was met between Dedham and Boston by a
+multitude of gentlemen in their coaches and chariots.
+
+Take my arm, gentle reader, and come with me into some street, perhaps
+trodden by your daily footsteps, but which now has such an aspect of
+half-familiar strangeness, that you suspect yourself to be walking
+abroad in a dream. True, there are some brick edifices which you
+remember from childhood, and which your father and grandfather
+remembered as well; but you are perplexed by the absence of many that
+were here only an hour or two since; and still more amazing is the
+presence of whole rows of wooden and plastered houses, projecting over
+the sidewalks, and bearing iron figures on their fronts, which prove
+them to have stood on the same sites above a century. Where have your
+eyes been that you never saw them before? Along the ghostly
+street,—for, at length, you conclude that all is unsubstantial, though
+it be so good a mockery of an antique town,—along the ghostly street,
+there are ghostly people too. Every gentleman has his three-cornered
+hat, either on his head or under his arm; and all wear wigs in infinite
+variety,—the Tie, the Brigadier, the Spencer, the Albemarle, the Major,
+the Ramillies, the grave Full-bottom, or the giddy Feather-top. Look at
+the elaborate lace-ruffles, and the square-skirted coats of gorgeous
+hues, bedizened with silver and gold! Make way for the phantom-ladies,
+whose hoops require such breadth of passage, as they pace majestically
+along, in silken gowns, blue, green, or yellow, brilliantly
+embroidered, and with small satin hats surmounting their powdered hair.
+Make way; for the whole spectral show will vanish, if your earthly
+garments brush against their robes. Now that the scene is brightest,
+and the whole street glitters with imaginary sunshine,—now hark to the
+bells of the Old South and the Old North, ringing out with a sudden and
+merry peal, while the cannon of Castle William thunder below the town,
+and those of the Diana frigate repeat the sound, and the Charlestown
+batteries reply with a nearer roar! You see the crowd toss up their
+hats in visionary joy. You hear of illuminations and fire-works, and of
+bonfires, built oil scaffolds, raised several stories above the ground,
+that are to blaze all night in King Street and on Beacon Hill. And here
+come the trumpets and kettle-drums, and the tramping hoofs of the
+Boston troop of horseguards, escorting the governor to King’s Chapel,
+where he is to return solemn thanks for the surrender of Quebec. March
+on, thou shadowy troop! and vanish, ghostly crowd! and change again,
+old street! for those stirring times are gone.
+
+Opportunely for the conclusion of our sketch, a fire broke out, on the
+twentieth of March, 1760, at the Brazen-Head, in Cornhill, and consumed
+nearly four hundred buildings. Similar disasters have always been
+epochs in the chronology of Boston. That of 1711 had hitherto been
+termed the Great Fire, but now resigned its baleful dignity to one
+which has ever since retained it. Did we desire to move the reader’s
+sympathies on this subject, we would not be grandiloquent about the sea
+of billowy flame, the glowing and crumbling streets, the broad, black
+firmament of smoke, and the blast or wind that sprang up with the
+conflagration and roared behind it. It would be more effective to mark
+out a single family at the moment when the flames caught upon an angle
+of their dwelling: then would ensue the removal of the bedridden
+grandmother, the cradle with the sleeping infant, and, most dismal of
+all, the dying man just at the extremity of a lingering disease. Do but
+imagine the confused agony of one thus awfully disturbed in his last
+hour; his fearful glance behind at the consuming fire raging after him,
+from house to house, as its devoted victim; and, finally, the almost
+eagerness with which he would seize some calmer interval to die! The
+Great Fire must have realized many such a scene.
+
+Doubtless posterity has acquired a better city by the calamity of that
+generation. None will be inclined to lament it at this late day, except
+the lover of antiquity, who would have been glad to walk among those
+streets of venerable houses, fancying the old inhabitants still there,
+that he might commune with their shadows, and paint a more vivid
+picture of their times.
+
+III. THE OLD TORY.
+
+Again we take a leap of about twenty years, and alight in the midst of
+the Revolution. Indeed, having just closed a volume of colonial
+newspapers, which represented the period when monarchical and
+aristocratic sentiments were at the highest,—and now opening another
+volume printed in the same metropolis, after such sentiments had long
+been deemed a sin and shame,—we feel as if the leap were more than
+figurative. Our late course of reading has tinctured us, for the
+moment, with antique prejudices; and we shrink from the strangely
+contrasted times into which we emerge, like one of those immutable old
+Tories, who acknowledge no oppression in the Stamp Act. It may be the
+most effective method of going through the present file of papers, to
+follow out this idea, and transform ourself, perchance, from a modern
+Tory into such a sturdy King-man as once wore that pliable nickname.
+
+Well, then, here we sit, an old, gray, withered, sour-visaged,
+threadbare sort of gentleman, erect enough, here in our solitude, but
+marked out by a depressed and distrustful mien abroad, as one conscious
+of a stigma upon his forehead, though for no crime. We were already in
+the decline of life when the first tremors of the earthquake that has
+convulsed the continent were felt. Our mind had grown too rigid to
+change any of its opinions, when the voice of the people demanded that
+all should be changed. We are an Episcopalian, and sat under the
+High-Church doctrines of Dr. Caner; we have been a captain of the
+provincial forces, and love our king the better for the blood that we
+shed in his cause on the Plains of Abraham. Among all the refugees,
+there is not one more loyal to the backbone than we. Still we lingered
+behind when the British army evacuated Boston, sweeping in its train
+most of those with whom we held communion; the old, loyal gentlemen,
+the aristocracy of the colonies, the hereditary Englishman, imbued with
+more than native zeal and admiration for the glorious island and its
+monarch, because the far-intervening ocean threw a dim reverence around
+them. When our brethren departed, we could not tear our aged roots out
+of the soil.
+
+We have remained, therefore, enduring to be outwardly a freeman, but
+idolizing King George in secrecy and silence,—one true old heart
+amongst a host of enemies. We watch, with a weary hope, for the moment
+when all this turmoil shall subside, and the impious novelty that has
+distracted our latter years, like a wild dream, give place to the
+blessed quietude of royal sway, with the king’s name in every
+ordinance, his prayer in the church, his health at the board, and his
+love in the people’s heart. Meantime, our old age finds little honor.
+Hustled have we been, till driven from town-meetings; dirty water has
+been cast upon our ruffles by a Whig chambermaid; John Hancock’s
+coachman seizes every opportunity to bespatter us with mud; daily are
+we hooted by the unbreeched rebel brats; and narrowly, once, did our
+gray hairs escape the ignominy of tar and feathers. Alas! only that we
+cannot bear to die till the next royal governor comes over, we would
+fain be in our quiet grave.
+
+Such an old man among new things are we who now hold at arm’s-length
+the rebel newspaper of the day. The very figure-head, for the
+thousandth time, elicits it groan of spiteful lamentation. Where are
+the united heart and crown, the loyal emblem, that used to hallow the
+sheet on which it was impressed, in our younger days? In its stead we
+find a continental officer, with the Declaration of Independence in one
+hand, a drawn sword in the other, and above his head a scroll, bearing
+the motto, “WE APPEAL TO HEAVEN.” Then say we, with a prospective
+triumph, let Heaven judge, in its own good time! The material of the
+sheet attracts our scorn. It is a fair specimen of rebel manufacture,
+thick and coarse, like wrapping-paper, all overspread with little
+knobs; and of such a deep, dingy blue color, that we wipe our
+spectacles thrice before we can distinguish a letter of the wretched
+print. Thus, in all points, the newspaper is a type of the times, far
+more fit for the rough hands of a democratic mob, than for our own
+delicate, though bony fingers. Nay we will not handle it without our
+gloves!
+
+Glancing down the page, our eyes are greeted everywhere by the offer of
+lands at auction, for sale or to be leased, not by the rightful owners,
+but a rebel committee; notices of the town constable, that he is
+authorized to receive the taxes on such all estate, in default of
+which, that also is to be knocked down to the highest bidder; and
+notifications of complaints filed by the attorney-general against
+certain traitorous absentees, and of confiscations that are to ensue.
+And who are these traitors? Our own best friends; names as old, once as
+honored, as any in the land where they are no longer to have a
+patrimony, nor to be remembered as good men who have passed away. We
+are ashamed of not relinquishing our little property, too; but comfort
+ourselves because we still keep our principles, without gratifying the
+rebels with our plunder. Plunder, indeed, they are seizing
+everywhere,—by the strong hand at sea, as well as by legal forms oil
+shore. Here are prize-vessels for sale; no French nor Spanish
+merchantmen, whose wealth is the birthright of British subjects, but
+hulls of British oak, from Liverpool, Bristol, and the Thames, laden
+with the king’s own stores, for his army in New York. And what a fleet
+of privateers—pirates, say we—are fitting out for new ravages, with
+rebellion in their very names! The Free Yankee, the General Greene, the
+Saratoga, the Lafayette, and the Grand Monarch! Yes, the Grand Monarch;
+so is a French king styled, by the sons of Englishmen. And here we have
+an ordinance from the Court of Versailles, with the Bourbon’s own
+signature affixed, as if New England were already a French province.
+Everything is French,—French soldiers, French sailors, French surgeons,
+and French diseases too, I trow; besides French dancing-masters and
+French milliners, to debauch our daughters with French fashions!
+Everything in America is French, except the Canadas, the loyal Canadas,
+which we helped to wrest, from France. And to that old French province
+the Englishman of the colonies must go to find his country!
+
+O, the misery of seeing the whole system of things changed in my old
+days, when I would be loath to change even a pair of buckles! The
+British coffee-house, where oft we sat, brimful of wine and loyalty,
+with the gallant gentlemen of Amherst’s army, when we wore a redcoat
+too,—the British coffee-house, forsooth, must now be styled the
+American, with a golden eagle instead of the royal arms above the door.
+Even the street it stands in is no longer King Street! Nothing is the
+king’s, except this heavy heart in my old bosom. Wherever I glance my
+eyes, they meet something that pricks them like a needle. This
+soap-maker, for instance, this Hobert Hewes, has conspired against my
+peace, by notifying that his shop is situated near Liberty Stump. But
+when will their misnamed liberty have its true emblem in that Stump,
+hewn down by British steel?
+
+Where shall we buy our next year’s almanac? Not this of Weatherwise’s,
+certainly; for it contains a likeness of George Washington, the upright
+rebel, whom we most hate, though reverentially, as a fallen angel, with
+his heavenly brightness undiminished, evincing pure fame in an
+unhallowed cause. And here is a new book for my evening’s recreation,—a
+History of the War till the close of the year 1779, with the heads of
+thirteen distinguished officers, engraved on copperplate. A plague upon
+their heads! We desire not to see them till they grin at us from the
+balcony before the town-house, fixed on spikes, as the heads of
+traitors. How bloody-minded the villains make a peaceable old man! What
+next? An Oration, on the Horrid Massacre of 1770. When that blood was
+shed,—the first that the British soldier ever drew from the bosoms of
+our countrymen,—we turned sick at heart, and do so still, as often as
+they make it reek anew from among the stones in King Street. The pool
+that we saw that night has swelled into a lake,—English blood and
+American,—no! all British, all blood of my brethren. And here come down
+tears. Shame on me, since half of them are shed for rebels! Who are not
+rebels now! Even the women are thrusting their white hands into the
+war, and come out in this very paper with proposals to form a
+society—the lady of George Washington at their head—for clothing the
+continental troops. They will strip off their stiff petticoats to cover
+the ragged rascals, and then enlist in the ranks themselves.
+
+What have we here? Burgoyne’s proclamation turned into Hudibrastic
+rhyme! And here, some verses against the king, in which the scribbler
+leaves a blank for the name of George, as if his doggerel might yet
+exalt him to the pillory. Such, after years of rebellion, is the
+heart’s unconquerable reverence for the Lord’s anointed! In the next
+column, we have scripture parodied in a squib against his sacred
+Majesty. What would our Puritan great-grandsires have said to that?
+They never laughed at God’s word, though they cut off a king’s head.
+
+Yes; it was for us to prove how disloyalty goes hand in hand with
+irreligion, and all other vices come trooping in the train. Nowadays
+men commit robbery and sacrilege for the mere luxury of wickedness, as
+this advertisement testifies. Three hundred pounds reward for the
+detection of the villains who stole and destroyed the cushions and
+pulpit drapery of the Brattle Street and Old South churches. Was it a
+crime? I can scarcely think our temples hallowed, since the king ceased
+to be prayed for. But it is not temples only that they rob. Here a man
+offers a thousand dollars—a thousand dollars, in Continental rags!—for
+the recovery of his stolen cloak, and other articles of clothing.
+Horse-thieves are innumerable. Now is the day when every beggar gets on
+horseback. And is not the whole land like a beggar on horseback riding
+post to the Davil? Ha! here is a murder, too. A woman slain at
+midnight, by all unknown ruffian, and found cold, stiff, and bloody, in
+her violated bed! Let the hue-and-cry follow hard after the man in the
+uniform of blue and buff who last went by that way. My life on it, he
+is the blood-stained ravisher! These deserters whom we see proclaimed
+in every column,—proof that the banditti are as false to their Stars
+and Stripes as to the Holy Red Cross,—they bring the crimes of a rebel
+camp into a soil well suited to them; the bosom of a people, without
+the heart that kept them virtuous,—their king!
+
+Here flaunting down a whole column, with official seal and signature,
+here comes a proclamation. By whose authority? Ah! the United
+States,—these thirteen little anarchies, assembled in that one grand
+anarchy, their Congress. And what the import? A general Fast. By
+Heaven! for once the traitorous blockheads have legislated wisely! Yea;
+let a misguided people kneel down in sackcloth and ashes, from end to
+end, from border to border, of their wasted country. Well may they fast
+where there is no food, and cry aloud for whatever remnant of God’s
+mercy their sins may not have exhausted. We too will fast, even at a
+rebel summons. Pray others as they will, there shall be at least an old
+man kneeling for the righteous cause. Lord, put down the rebels! God
+save the king!
+
+Peace to the good old Tory! One of our objects has been to exemplify,
+without softening a single prejudice proper to the character which we
+assumed, that the Americans who clung to the losing side in the
+Revolution were men greatly to be pitied and often worthy of our
+sympathy. It would be difficult to say whose lot was most lamentable,
+that of the active Tories, who gave up their patrimonies for a pittance
+from the British pension-roll, and their native land for a cold
+reception in their miscalled home, or the passive ones who remained
+behind to endure the coldness of former friends, and the public
+opprobrium, as despised citizens, under a government which they
+abhorred. In justice to the old gentleman who has favored us with his
+discontented musings, we must remark that the state of the country, so
+far as can be gathered from these papers, was of dismal augury for the
+tendencies of democratic rule. It was pardonable in the conservative of
+that day to mistake the temporary evils of a change for permanent
+diseases of the system which that change was to establish. A
+revolution, or anything that interrupts social order, may afford
+opportunities for the individual display of eminent virtues; but its
+effects are pernicious to general morality. Most people are so
+constituted that they can be virtuous only in a certain routine; and an
+irregular course of public affairs demoralizes them. One great source
+of disorder was the multitude of disbanded troops, who were continually
+returning home, after terms of service just long enough to give them a
+distaste to peaceable occupations; neither citizens nor soldiers, they
+were very liable to become ruffians. Almost all our impressions in
+regard to this period are unpleasant, whether referring to the state of
+civil society, or to the character of the contest, which, especially
+where native Americans were opposed to each other, was waged with the
+deadly hatred of fraternal enemies. It is the beauty of war, for men to
+commit mutual havoc with undisturbed good-humor.
+
+The present volume of newspapers contains fewer characteristic traits
+than any which we have looked over. Except for the peculiarities
+attendant on the passing struggle, manners seem to have taken a modern
+cast. Whatever antique fashions lingered into the War of the
+Revolution, or beyond it, they were not so strongly marked as to leave
+their traces in the public journals. Moreover, the old newspapers had
+an indescribable picturesqueness, not to be found in the later ones.
+Whether it be something in the literary execution, or the ancient print
+and paper, and the idea that those same musty pages have been handled
+by people once alive and bustling amid the scenes there recorded, yet
+now in their graves beyond the memory of man; so it is, that in those
+elder volumes we seem to find the life of a past age preserved between
+the leaves, like a dry specimen of foliage. It is so difficult to
+discover what touches are really picturesque, that we doubt whether our
+attempts have produced any similar effect.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF ADAMANT: AN APOLOGUE
+
+
+In the old times of religious gloom and intolerance lived Richard
+Digby, the gloomiest and most intolerant of a stern brotherhood. His
+plan of salvation was so narrow, that, like a plank in a tempestuous
+sea, it could avail no sinner but himself, who bestrode it
+triumphantly, and hurled anathemas against the wretches whom he saw
+struggling with the billows of eternal death. In his view of the
+matter, it was a most abominable crime—as, indeed, it is a great
+folly—for men to trust to their own strength, or even to grapple to any
+other fragment of the wreck, save this narrow plank, which, moreover,
+he took special care to keep out of their reach. In other words, as his
+creed was like no man’s else, and being well pleased that Providence
+had intrusted him alone, of mortals, with the treasure of a true faith,
+Richard Digby determined to seclude himself to the sole and constant
+enjoyment of his happy fortune.
+
+“And verily,” thought he, “I deem it a chief condition of Heaven’s
+mercy to myself, that I hold no communion with those abominable myriads
+which it hath cast off to perish. Peradventure, were I to tarry longer
+in the tents of Kedar, the gracious boon would be revoked, and I also
+be swallowed up in the deluge of wrath, or consumed in the storm of
+fire and brimstone, or involved in whatever new kind of ruin is
+ordained for the horrible perversity of this generation.”
+
+So Richard Digby took an axe, to hew space enough for a tabernacle in
+the wilderness, and some few other necessaries, especially a sword and
+gun, to smite and slay any intruder upon his hallowed seclusion; and
+plunged into the dreariest depths of the forest. On its verge, however,
+he paused a moment, to shake off the dust of his feet against the
+village where he had dwelt, and to invoke a curse on the meeting-house,
+which he regarded as a temple of heathen idolatry. He felt a curiosity,
+also, to see whether the fire and brimstone would not rush down from
+Heaven at once, now that the one righteous man had provided for his own
+safety. But, as the sunshine continued to fall peacefully on the
+cottages and fields, and the husbandmen labored and children played,
+and as there were many tokens of present happiness, and nothing ominous
+of a speedy judgment, he turned away, somewhat disappointed. The
+farther he went, however, and the lonelier he felt himself, and the
+thicker the trees stood along his path, and the darker the shadow
+overhead, so much the more did Richard Digby exult. He talked to
+himself, as he strode onward; he read his Bible to himself, as he sat
+beneath the trees; and, as the gloom of the forest hid the blessed sky,
+I had almost added, that, at morning, noon, and eventide, he prayed to
+himself. So congenial was this mode of life to his disposition, that he
+often laughed to himself, but was displeased when an echo tossed him
+back the long loud roar.
+
+In this manner, he journeyed onward three days and two nights, and
+came, on the third evening, to the mouth of a cave, which, at first
+sight, reminded him of Elijah’s cave at Horeb, though perhaps it more
+resembled Abraham’s sepulchral cave at Machpelah. It entered into the
+heart of a rocky hill. There was so dense a veil of tangled foliage
+about it, that none but a sworn lover of gloomy recesses would have
+discovered the low arch of its entrance, or have dared to step within
+its vaulted chamber, where the burning eyes of a panther might
+encounter him. If Nature meant this remote and dismal cavern for the
+use of man, it could only be to bury in its gloom the victims of a
+pestilence, and then to block up its mouth with stones, and avoid the
+spot forever after. There was nothing bright nor cheerful near it,
+except a bubbling fountain, some twenty paces off, at which Richard
+Digby hardly threw away a glance. But he thrust his head into the cave,
+shivered, and congratulated himself.
+
+“The finger of Providence hath pointed my way!” cried he, aloud, while
+the tomb-like den returned a strange echo, as if some one within were
+mocking him. “Here my soul will be at peace; for the wicked will not
+find me. Here I can read the Scriptures, and be no more provoked with
+lying interpretations. Here I can offer up acceptable prayers, because
+my voice will not be mingled with the sinful supplications of the
+multitude. Of a truth, the only way to heaven leadeth through the
+narrow entrance of this cave,—and I alone have found it!”
+
+In regard to this cave it was observable that the roof, so far as the
+imperfect light permitted it to be seen, was hung with substances
+resembling opaque icicles; for the damps of unknown centuries, dripping
+down continually, had become as hard as adamant; and wherever that
+moisture fell, it seemed to possess the power of converting what it
+bathed to stone. The fallen leaves and sprigs of foliage, which the
+wind had swept into the cave, and the little feathery shrubs, rooted
+near the threshold, were not wet with a natural dew, but had been
+embalmed by this wondrous process. And here I am put in mind that
+Richard Digby, before he withdrew himself from the world, was supposed
+by skilful physicians to have contracted a disease for which no remedy
+was written in their medical books. It was a deposition of calculous
+particles within his heart, caused by an obstructed circulation of the
+blood; and, unless a miracle should be wrought for him, there was
+danger that the malady might act on the entire substance of the organ,
+and change his fleshy heart to stone. Many, indeed, affirmed that the
+process was already near its consummation. Richard Digby, however,
+could never be convinced that any such direful work was going on within
+him; nor when he saw the sprigs of marble foliage, did his heart even
+throb the quicker, at the similitude suggested by these once tender
+herbs. It may be that this same insensibility was a symptom of the
+disease.
+
+Be that as it might, Richard Digby was well contented with his
+sepulchral cave. So dearly did he love this congenial spot, that,
+instead of going a few paces to the bubbling spring for water, he
+allayed his thirst with now and then a drop of moisture from the roof,
+which, had it fallen anywhere but on his tongue, would have been
+congealed into a pebble. For a man predisposed to stoniness of the
+heart, this surely was unwholesome liquor. But there he dwelt, for
+three days more eating herbs and roots, drinking his own destruction,
+sleeping, as it were, in a tomb, and awaking to the solitude of death,
+yet esteeming this horrible mode of life as hardly inferior to
+celestial bliss. Perhaps superior; for, above the sky, there would be
+angels to disturb him. At the close of the third day, he sat in the
+portal of his mansion, reading the Bible aloud, because no other ear
+could profit by it, and reading it amiss, because the rays of the
+setting sun did not penetrate the dismal depth of shadow round about
+him, nor fall upon the sacred page. Suddenly, however, a faint gleam of
+light was thrown over the volume, and, raising his eyes, Richard Digby
+saw that a young woman stood before the mouth of the cave, and that the
+sunbeams bathed her white garment, which thus seemed to possess a
+radiance of its own.
+
+“Good evening, Richard,” said the girl; “I have come from afar to find
+thee.”
+
+The slender grace and gentle loveliness of this young woman were at
+once recognized by Richard Digby. Her name was Mary Goffe. She had been
+a convert to his preaching of the word in England, before he yielded
+himself to that exclusive bigotry which now enfolded him with such an
+iron grasp that no other sentiment could reach his bosom. When he came
+a pilgrim to America, she had remained in her father’s hall; but now,
+as it appeared, had crossed the ocean after him, impelled by the same
+faith that led other exiles hither, and perhaps by love almost as holy.
+What else but faith and love united could have sustained so delicate a
+creature, wandering thus far into the forest, with her golden hair
+dishevelled by the boughs, and her feet wounded by the thorns? Yet,
+weary and faint though she must have been, and affrighted at the
+dreariness of the cave, she looked on the lonely man with a mild and
+pitying expression, such as might beam from an angel’s eyes, towards an
+afflicted mortal. But the recluse, frowning sternly upon her, and
+keeping his finger between the leaves of his half-closed Bible,
+motioned her away with his hand.
+
+“Off!” cried he. “I am sanctified, and thou art sinful. Away!”
+
+“O Richard,” said she, earnestly, “I have come this weary way because I
+heard that a grievous distemper had seized upon thy heart; and a great
+Physician hath given me the skill to cure it. There is no other remedy
+than this which I have brought thee. Turn me not away, therefore, nor
+refuse my medicine; for then must this dismal cave be thy sepulchre.”
+
+“Away!” replied Richard Digby, still with a dark frown. “My heart is in
+better condition than thine own. Leave me, earthly one; for the sun is
+almost set; and when no light reaches the door of the cave, then is my
+prayer-time.”
+
+Now, great as was her need, Mary Goffe did not plead with this
+stony-hearted man for shelter and protection, nor ask anything whatever
+for her own sake. All her zeal was for his welfare.
+
+“Come back with me!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands,—“come back to
+thy fellow-men; for they need thee, Richard, and thou hast tenfold need
+of them. Stay not in this evil den; for the air is chill, and the damps
+are fatal; nor will any that perish within it ever find the path to
+heaven. Hasten hence, I entreat thee, for thine own soul’s sake; for
+either the roof will fall upon thy head, or some other speedy
+destruction is at hand.”
+
+“Perverse woman!” answered Richard Digby, laughing aloud,—for he was
+moved to bitter mirth by her foolish vehemence,—“I tell thee that the
+path to heaven leadeth straight through this narrow portal where I sit.
+And, moreover, the destruction thou speakest of is ordained, not for
+this blessed cave, but for all other habitations of mankind, throughout
+the earth. Get thee hence speedily, that thou mayst have thy share!”
+
+So saving, he opened his Bible again, and fixed his eyes intently on
+the page, being resolved to withdraw his thoughts from this child of
+sin and wrath, and to waste no more of his holy breath upon her. The
+shadow had now grown so deep, where he was sitting, that he made
+continual mistakes in what he read, converting all that was gracious
+and merciful to denunciations of vengeance and unutterable woe on every
+created being but himself. Mary Goffe, meanwhile, was leaning against a
+tree, beside the sepulchral cave, very sad, yet with something heavenly
+and ethereal in her unselfish sorrow. The light from the setting sun
+still glorified her form, and was reflected a little way within the
+darksome den, discovering so terrible a gloom that the maiden shuddered
+for its self-doomed inhabitant. Espying the bright fountain near at
+hand, she hastened thither, and scooped up a portion of its water, in a
+cup of birchen bark. A few tears mingled with the draught, and perhaps
+gave it all its efficacy. She then returned to the mouth of the cave,
+and knelt down at Richard Digby’s feet.
+
+“Richard,” she said, with passionate fervor, yet a gentleness in all
+her passion, “I pray thee, by thy hope of heaven, and as thou wouldst
+not dwell in this tomb forever, drink of this hallowed water, be it but
+a single drop! Then, make room for me by thy side, and let us read
+together one page of that blessed volume; and, lastly, kneel down with
+me and pray! Do this, and thy stony heart shall become softer than a
+babe’s, and all be well.”
+
+But Richard Digby, in utter abhorrence of the proposal, cast the Bible
+at his feet, and eyed her with such a fixed and evil frown, that he
+looked less like a living man than a marble statue, wrought by some
+dark-imagined sculptor to express the most repulsive mood that human
+features could assume. And, as his look grew even devilish, so, with an
+equal change did Mary Goffe become more sad, more mild, more pitiful,
+more like a sorrowing angel. But, the more heavenly she was, the more
+hateful did she seem to Richard Digby, who at length raised his hand,
+and smote down the cup of hallowed water upon the threshold of the
+cave, thus rejecting the only medicine that could have cured his stony
+heart. A sweet perfume lingered in the air for a moment, and then was
+gone.
+
+“Tempt me no more, accursed woman,” exclaimed he, still with his marble
+frown, “lest I smite thee down also! What hast thou to do with my
+Bible?—what with my prayers?—what with my heaven?”
+
+No sooner had he spoken these dreadful words, than Richard Digby’s
+heart ceased to beat; while—so the legend says-the form of Mary Goffe
+melted into the last sunbeams, and returned from the sepulchral cave to
+heaven. For Mary Golfe had been buried in an English churchyard, months
+before; and either it was her ghost that haunted the wild forest, or
+else a dream-like spirit, typifying pure Religion.
+
+Above a century afterwards, when the trackless forest of Richard
+Digby’s day had long been interspersed with settlements, the children
+of a neighboring farmer were playing at the foot of a hill. The trees,
+on account of the rude and broken surface of this acclivity, had never
+been felled, and were crowded so densely together as to hide all but a
+few rocky prominences, wherever their roots could grapple with the
+soil. A little boy and girl, to conceal themselves from their
+playmates, had crept into the deepest shade, where not only the
+darksome pines, but a thick veil of creeping plants suspended from an
+overhanging rock, combined to make a twilight at noonday, and almost a
+midnight at all other seasons. There the children hid themselves, and
+shouted, repeating the cry at intervals, till the whole party of
+pursuers were drawn thither, and, pulling aside the matted foliage, let
+in a doubtful glimpse of daylight. But scarcely was this accomplished,
+when the little group uttered a simultaneous shriek, and tumbled
+headlong down the hill, making the best of their way homeward, without
+a second glance into the gloomy recess. Their father, unable to
+comprehend what had so startled them, took his axe, and, by felling one
+or two trees, and tearing away the creeping plants, laid the mystery
+open to the day. He had discovered the entrance of a cave, closely
+resembling the mouth of a sepulchre, within which sat the figure of a
+man, whose gesture and attitude warned the father and children to stand
+back, while his visage wore a most forbidding frown. This repulsive
+personage seemed to have been carved in the same gray stone that formed
+the walls and portal of the cave. On minuter inspection, indeed, such
+blemishes were observed, as made it doubtful whether the figure were
+really a statue, chiselled by human art and somewhat worn and defaced
+by the lapse of ages, or a freak of Nature, who might have chosen to
+imitate, in stone, her usual handiwork of flesh. Perhaps it was the
+least unreasonable idea, suggested by this strange spectacle, that the
+moisture of the cave possessed a petrifying quality, which had thus
+awfully embalmed a human corpse.
+
+There was something so frightful in the aspect of this Man of Adamant,
+that the farmer, the moment that he recovered from the fascination of
+his first gaze, began to heap stones into the mouth of the cavern. His
+wife, who had followed him to the hill, assisted her husband’s efforts.
+The children, also, approached as near as they durst, with their little
+hands full of pebbles, and cast them on the pile. Earth was then thrown
+into the crevices, and the whole fabric overlaid with sods. Thus all
+traces of the discovery were obliterated, leaving only a marvellous
+legend, which grew wilder from one generation to another, as the
+children told it to their grandchildren, and they to their posterity,
+till few believed that there had ever been a cavern or a statue, where
+now they saw but a grassy patch on the shadowy hillside. Yet, grown
+people avoid the spot, nor do children play there. Friendship, and
+Love, and Piety, all human and celestial sympathies, should keep aloof
+from that hidden cave; for there still sits, and, unless an earthquake
+crumble down the roof upon his head, shall sit forever, the shape of
+Richard Digby, in the attitude of repelling the whole race of
+mortals,—not from heaven,—but from the horrible loneliness of his dark,
+cold sepulchre!
+
+
+
+
+THE DEVIL IN MANUSCRIPT
+
+
+On a bitter evening of December, I arrived by mail in a large town,
+which was then the residence of an intimate friend, one of those gifted
+youths who cultivate poetry and the belles-lettres, and call themselves
+students at law. My first business, after supper, was to visit him at
+the office of his distinguished instructor. As I have said, it was a
+bitter night, clear starlight, but cold as Nova Zembla,—the
+shop-windows along the street being frosted, so as almost to hide the
+lights, while the wheels of coaches thundered equally loud over frozen
+earth and pavements of stone. There was no snow, either on the ground
+or the roofs of the houses. The wind blew so violently, that I had but
+to spread my cloak like a main-sail, and scud along the street at the
+rate of ten knots, greatly envied by other navigators, who were beating
+slowly up, with the gale right in their teeth. One of these I capsized,
+but was gone on the wings of the wind before he could even vociferate
+an oath.
+
+After this picture of an inclement night, behold us seated by a great
+blazing fire, which looked so comfortable and delicious that I felt
+inclined to lie down and roll among the hot coals. The usual furniture
+of a lawyer’s office was around us,—rows of volumes in sheepskin, and a
+multitude of writs, summonses, and other legal papers, scattered over
+the desks and tables. But there were certain objects which seemed to
+intimate that we had little dread of the intrusion of clients, or of
+the learned counsellor himself, who, indeed, was attending court in a
+distant town. A tall, decanter-shaped bottle stood on the table,
+between two tumblers, and beside a pile of blotted manuscripts,
+altogether dissimilar to any law documents recognized in our courts. My
+friend, whom I shall call Oberon,—it was a name of fancy and friendship
+between him and me,—my friend Oberon looked at these papers with a
+peculiar expression of disquietude.
+
+“I do believe,” said he, soberly, “or, at least, I could believe, if I
+chose, that there is a devil in this pile of blotted papers. You have
+read them, and know what I mean,—that conception in which I endeavored
+to embody the character of a fiend, as represented in our traditions
+and the written records of witchcraft. Oh, I have a horror of what was
+created in my own brain, and shudder at the manuscripts in which I gave
+that dark idea a sort of material existence! Would they were out of my
+sight!”
+
+“And of mine, too,” thought I.
+
+“You remember,” continued Oberon, “how the hellish thing used to suck
+away the happiness of those who, by a simple concession that seemed
+almost innocent, subjected themselves to his power. Just so my peace is
+gone, and all by these accursed manuscripts. Have you felt nothing of
+the same influence?”
+
+“Nothing,” replied I, “unless the spell be hid in a desire to turn
+novelist, after reading your delightful tales.”
+
+“Novelist!” exclaimed Oberon, half seriously. “Then, indeed, my devil
+has his claw on you! You are gone! You cannot even pray for
+deliverance! But we will be the last and only victims; for this night I
+mean to burn the manuscripts, and commit the fiend to his retribution
+in the flames.”
+
+“Burn your tales!” repeated I, startled at the desperation of the idea.
+
+“Even so,” said the author, despondingly. “You cannot conceive what an
+effect the composition of these tales has had on me. I have become
+ambitious of a bubble, and careless of solid reputation. I am
+surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me, by aping the
+realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the
+world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude,—a solitude in the
+midst of men,-where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels
+as I do. The tales have done all this. When they are ashes, perhaps I
+shall be as I was before they had existence. Moreover, the sacrifice is
+less than you may suppose, since nobody will publish them.”
+
+“That does make a difference, indeed,” said I.
+
+“They have been offered, by letter,” continued Oberon, reddening with
+vexation, “to some seventeen booksellers. It would make you stare to
+read their answers; and read them you should, only that I burnt them as
+fast as they arrived. One man publishes nothing but school-books;
+another has five novels already under examination.”
+
+“What a voluminous mass the unpublished literature of America must be!”
+cried I.
+
+“Oh, the Alexandrian manuscripts were nothing to it!” said my friend.
+“Well, another gentleman is just giving up business, on purpose, I
+verily believe, to escape publishing my book. Several, however, would
+not absolutely decline the agency, on my advancing half the cost of an
+edition, and giving bonds for the remainder, besides a high percentage
+to themselves, whether the book sells or not. Another advises a
+subscription.”
+
+“The villain!” exclaimed I.
+
+“A fact!” said Oberon. “In short, of all the seventeen booksellers,
+only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he—a literary
+dabbler himself, I should judge—has the impertinence to criticise them,
+proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a
+general sentence of condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he
+will not be concerned on any terms.”
+
+“It might not be amiss to pull that fellow’s nose,” remarked I.
+
+“If the whole ‘trade’ had one common nose, there would be some
+satisfaction in pulling it,” answered the author. “But, there does seem
+to be one honest man among these seventeen unrighteous ones; and he
+tells me fairly, that no American publisher will meddle with an
+American work,—seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new
+one,—unless at the writer’s risk.”
+
+“The paltry rogues!” cried I. “Will they live by literature, and yet
+risk nothing for its sake? But, after all, you might publish on your
+own account.”
+
+“And so I might,” replied Oberon. “But the devil of the business is
+this. These people have put me so out of conceit with the tales, that I
+loathe the very thought of them, and actually experience a physical
+sickness of the stomach, whenever I glance at them on the table. I tell
+you there is a demon in them! I anticipate a wild enjoyment in seeing
+them in the blaze; such as I should feel in taking vengeance on an
+enemy, or destroying something noxious.”
+
+I did not very strenuously oppose this determination, being privately
+of opinion, in spite of my partiality for the author, that his tales
+would make a more brilliant appearance in the fire than anywhere else.
+Before proceeding to execution, we broached the bottle of champagne,
+which Oberon had provided for keeping up his spirits in this doleful
+business. We swallowed each a tumblerful, in sparkling commotion; it
+went bubbling down our throats, and brightened my eyes at once, but
+left my friend sad and heavy as before. He drew the tales towards him,
+with a mixture of natural affection and natural disgust, like a father
+taking a deformed infant into his arms.
+
+“Pooh! Pish! Pshaw!” exclaimed he, holding them at arm’s-length. “It
+was Gray’s idea of heaven, to lounge on a sofa and read new novels.
+Now, what more appropriate torture would Dante himself have contrived,
+for the sinner who perpetrates a bad book, than to be continually
+turning over the manuscript?”
+
+“It would fail of effect,” said I, “because a bad author is always his
+own great admirer.”
+
+“I lack that one characteristic of my tribe,—the only desirable one,”
+observed Oberon. “But how many recollections throng upon me, as I turn
+over these leaves! This scene came into my fancy as I walked along a
+hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in the pure and bracing
+air, I became all soul, and felt as if I could climb the sky, and run a
+race along the Milky Way. Here is another tale, in which I wrapt myself
+during a dark and dreary night-ride in the month of March, till the
+rattling of the wheels and the voices of my companions seemed like
+faint sounds of a dream, and my visions a bright reality. That
+scribbled page describes shadows which I summoned to my bedside at
+midnight: they would not depart when I bade them; the gray dawn came,
+and found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own
+enchantments!”
+
+“There must have been a sort of happiness in all this,” said I, smitten
+with a strange longing to make proof of it.
+
+“There may be happiness in a fever fit,” replied the author. “And then
+the various moods in which I wrote! Sometimes my ideas were like
+precious stones under the earth, requiring toil to dig them up, and
+care to polish and brighten them; but often a delicious stream of
+thought would gush out upon the page at once, like water sparkling up
+suddenly in the desert; and when it had passed, I gnawed my pen
+hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and miserable toil, as if there
+were a wall of ice between me and my subject.”
+
+“Do you now perceive a corresponding difference,” inquired I, “between
+the passages which you wrote so coldly, and those fervid flashes of the
+mind?”
+
+“No,” said Oberon, tossing the manuscripts on the table. “I find no
+traces of the golden pen with which I wrote in characters of fire. My
+treasure of fairy coin is changed to worthless dross. My picture,
+painted in what seemed the loveliest hues, presents nothing but a faded
+and indistinguishable surface. I have been eloquent and poetical and
+humorous in a dream,—and behold! it is all nonsense, now that I am
+awake.”
+
+My friend now threw sticks of wood and dry chips upon the fire, and
+seeing it blaze like Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, seized the champagne
+bottle, and drank two or three brimming bumpers, successively. The
+heady liquor combined with his agitation to throw him into a species of
+rage. He laid violent hands on the tales. In one instant more, their
+faults and beauties would alike have vanished in a glowing purgatory.
+But, all at once, I remembered passages of high imagination, deep
+pathos, original thoughts, and points of such varied excellence, that
+the vastness of the sacrifice struck me most forcibly. I caught his
+arm.
+
+“Surely, you do not mean to burn them!” I exclaimed.
+
+“Let me alone!” cried Oberon, his eyes flashing fire. “I will burn
+them! Not a scorched syllable shall escape! Would you have me a damned
+author?—To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint
+praise, bestowed, for pity’s sake, against the giver’s conscience! A
+hissing and a laughing-stock to my own traitorous thoughts! An outlaw
+from the protection of the grave,—one whose ashes every careless foot
+might spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death! Am
+I to bear all this, when yonder fire will insure me from the whole? No!
+There go the tales! May my hand wither when it would write another!”
+
+The deed was done. He had thrown the manuscripts into the hottest of
+the fire, which at first seemed to shrink away, but soon curled around
+them, and made them a part of its own fervent brightness. Oberon stood
+gazing at the conflagration, and shortly began to soliloquize, in the
+wildest strain, as if Fancy resisted and became riotous, at the moment
+when he would have compelled her to ascend that funeral pile. His words
+described objects which he appeared to discern in the fire, fed by his
+own precious thoughts; perhaps the thousand visions which the writer’s
+magic had incorporated with these pages became visible to him in the
+dissolving heat, brightening forth ere they vanished forever; while the
+smoke, the vivid sheets of flame, the ruddy and whitening coals, caught
+the aspect of a varied scenery.
+
+“They blaze,” said he, “as if I had steeped them in the intensest
+spirit of genius. There I see my lovers clasped in each other’s arms.
+How pure the flame that bursts from their glowing hearts! And yonder
+the features of a villain writhing in the fire that shall torment him
+to eternity. My holy men, my pious and angelic women, stand like
+martyrs amid the flames, their mild eyes lifted heavenward. Ring out
+the bells! A city is on fire. See!—destruction roars through my dark
+forests, while the lakes boil up in steaming billows, and the mountains
+are volcanoes, and the sky kindles with a lurid brightness! All
+elements are but one pervading flame! Ha! The fiend!”
+
+I was somewhat startled by this latter exclamation. The tales were
+almost consumed, but just then threw forth a broad sheet of fire, which
+flickered as with laughter, making the whole room dance in its
+brightness, and then roared portentously up the chimney.
+
+“You saw him? You must have seen him!” cried Oberon. “How he glared at
+me and laughed, in that last sheet of flame, with just the features
+that I imagined for him! Well! The tales are gone.”
+
+The papers were indeed reduced to a heap of black cinders, with a
+multitude of sparks hurrying confusedly among them, the traces of the
+pen being now represented by white lines, and the whole mass fluttering
+to and fro in the draughts of air. The destroyer knelt down to look at
+them.
+
+“What is more potent than fire!” said he, in his gloomiest tone. “Even
+thought, invisible and incorporeal as it is, cannot escape it. In this
+little time, it has annihilated the creations of long nights and days,
+which I could no more reproduce, in their first glow and freshness,
+than cause ashes and whitened bones to rise up and live. There, too, I
+sacrificed the unborn children of my mind. All that I had
+accomplished—all that I planned for future years—has perished by one
+common ruin, and left only this heap of embers! The deed has been my
+fate. And what remains? A weary and aimless life,—a long repentance of
+this hour,—and at last an obscure grave, where they will bury and
+forget me!”
+
+As the author concluded his dolorous moan, the extinguished embers
+arose and settled down and arose again, and finally flew up the
+chimney, like a demon with sable wings. Just as they disappeared, there
+was a loud and solitary cry in the street below us. “Fire!” Fire! Other
+voices caught up that terrible word, and it speedily became the shout
+of a multitude. Oberon started to his feet, in fresh excitement.
+
+“A fire on such a night!” cried he. “The wind blows a gale, and
+wherever it whirls the flames, the roofs will flash up like gunpowder.
+Every pump is frozen up, and boiling water would turn to ice the moment
+it was flung from the engine. In an hour, this wooden town will be one
+great bonfire! What a glorious scene for my next—Pshaw!”
+
+The street was now all alive with footsteps, and the air full of
+voices. We heard one engine thundering round a corner, and another
+rattling from a distance over the pavements. The bells of three
+steeples clanged out at once, spreading the alarm to many a neighboring
+town, and expressing hurry, confusion, and terror, so inimitably that I
+could almost distinguish in their peal the burden of the universal
+cry,—“Fire! Fire! Fire!”
+
+“What is so eloquent as their iron tongues!” exclaimed Oberon. “My
+heart leaps and trembles, but not with fear. And that other sound,
+too,—deep and awful as a mighty organ,—the roar and thunder of the
+multitude on the pavement below! Come! We are losing time. I will cry
+out in the loudest of the uproar, and mingle my spirit with the wildest
+of the confusion, and be a bubble on the top of the ferment!”
+
+From the first outcry, my forebodings had warned me of the true object
+and centre of alarm. There was nothing now but uproar, above, beneath,
+and around us; footsteps stumbling pell-mell up the public staircase,
+eager shouts and heavy thumps at the door, the whiz and dash of water
+from the engines, and the crash of furniture thrown upon the pavement.
+At once, the truth flashed upon my friend. His frenzy took the hue of
+joy, and, with a wild gesture of exultation, he leaped almost to the
+ceiling of the chamber.
+
+“My tales!” cried Oberon. “The chimney! The roof! The Fiend has gone
+forth by night, and startled thousands in fear and wonder from their
+beds! Here I stand,—a triumphant author! Huzza! Huzza! My brain has set
+the town on fire! Huzza!”
+
+
+
+
+JOHN INGLEFIELD’S THANKSGIVING
+
+
+On the evening of Thanksgiving day, John Inglefield, the blacksmith,
+sat in his elbow-chair, among those who had been keeping festival at
+his board. Being the central figure of the domestic circle, the fire
+threw its strongest light on his massive and sturdy frame, reddening
+his rough visage, so that it looked like the head of an iron statue,
+all aglow, from his own forge, and with its features rudely fashioned
+on his own anvil. At John Inglefield’s right hand was an empty chair.
+The other places round the hearth were filled by the members of the
+family, who all sat quietly, while, with a semblance of fantastic
+merriment, their shadows danced on the wall behind then. One of the
+group was John Inglefield’s son, who had been bred at college, and was
+now a student of theology at Andover. There was also a daughter of
+sixteen, whom nobody could look at without thinking of a rosebud almost
+blossomed. The only other person at the fireside was Robert Moore,
+formerly an apprentice of the blacksmith, but now his journeyman, and
+who seemed more like an own son of John Inglefield than did the pale
+and slender student.
+
+Only these four had kept New England’s festival beneath that roof. The
+vacant chair at John Inglefield’s right hand was in memory of his wife,
+whom death had snatched from him since the previous Thanksgiving. With
+a feeling that few would have looked for in his rough nature, the
+bereaved husband had himself set the chair in its place next his own;
+and often did his eye glance thitherward, as if he deemed it possible
+that the cold grave might send back its tenant to the cheerful
+fireside, at least for that one evening. Thus did he cherish the grief
+that was dear to him. But there was another grief which he would fain
+have torn from his heart; or, since that could never be, have buried it
+too deep for others to behold, or for his own remembrance. Within the
+past year another member of his household had gone from him, but not to
+the grave. Yet they kept no vacant chair for her.
+
+While John Inglefield and his family were sitting round the hearth with
+the shadows dancing behind them on the wall, the outer door was opened,
+and a light footstep came along the passage. The latch of the inner
+door was lifted by some familiar hand, and a young girl came in,
+wearing a cloak and hood, which she took off, and laid on the table
+beneath the looking-glass. Then, after gazing a moment at the fireside
+circle, she approached, and took the seat at John Inglefield’s right
+hand, as if it had been reserved on purpose for her.
+
+“Here I am, at last, father,” said she. “You ate your Thanksgiving
+dinner without me, but I have come back to spend the evening with you.”
+
+Yes, it was Prudence Inglefield. She wore the same neat and maidenly
+attire which she had been accustomed to put on when the household work
+was over for the day, and her hair was parted from her brow, in the
+simple and modest fashion that became her best of all. If her cheek
+might otherwise have been pale, yet the glow of the fire suffused it
+with a healthful bloom. If she had spent the many months of her absence
+in guilt and infamy, yet they seemed to have left no traces on her
+gentle aspect. She could not have looked less altered, had she merely
+stepped away from her father’s fireside for half an hour, and returned
+while the blaze was quivering upwards from the same brands that were
+burning at her departure. And to John Inglefield she was the very image
+of his buried wife, such as he remembered her on the first Thanksgiving
+which they had passed under their own roof. Therefore, though naturally
+a stern and rugged man, he could not speak unkindly to his sinful
+child, nor yet could he take her to his bosom.
+
+“You are welcome home, Prudence,” said he, glancing sideways at her,
+and his voice faltered. “Your mother would have rejoiced to see you,
+but she has been gone from us these four months.”
+
+“I know it, father, I know it,” replied Prudence, quickly. “And yet,
+when I first came in, my eyes were so dazzled by the firelight, that
+she seemed to be sitting in this very chair!”
+
+By this time the other members of the family had begun to recover from
+their surprise, and became sensible that it was no ghost from the
+grave, nor vision of their vivid recollections, but Prudence, her own
+self. Her brother was the next that greeted her. He advanced and held
+out his hand affectionately, as a brother should; yet not entirely like
+a brother, for, with all his kindness, he was still a clergyman, and
+speaking to a child of sin.
+
+“Sister Prudence,” said he, earnestly, “I rejoice that a merciful
+Providence hath turned your steps homeward, in time for me to bid you a
+last farewell. In a few weeks, sister, I am to sail as a missionary to
+the far islands of the Pacific. There is not one of these beloved faces
+that I shall ever hope to behold again on this earth. O, may I see all
+of them--yours and all--beyond the grave!”
+
+A shadow flitted across the girl’s countenance.
+
+“The grave is very dark, brother,” answered she, withdrawing her hand
+somewhat hastily from his grasp. “You must look your last at me by the
+light of this fire.”
+
+While this was passing, the twin-girl-the rosebud that had grown on the
+same stem with the castaway--stood gazing at her sister, longing to
+fling herself upon her bosom, so that the tendrils of their hearts
+might intertwine again. At first she was restrained by mingled grief
+and shame, and by a dread that Prudence was too much changed to respond
+to her affection, or that her own purity would be felt as a reproach by
+the lost one. But, as she listened to the familiar voice, while the
+face grew more and more familiar, she forgot everything save that
+Prudence had come back. Springing forward, she would have clasped her
+in a close embrace. At that very instant, however, Prudence started
+from her chair, and held out both her hands, with a warning gesture.
+
+“No, Mary,--no, my sister,” cried she, “do not you touch me. Your bosom
+must not be pressed to mine!”
+
+Mary shuddered and stood still, for she felt that something darker than
+the grave was between Prudence and herself, though they seemed so near
+each other in the light of their father’s hearth, where they had grown
+up together. Meanwhile Prudence threw her eyes around the room, in
+search of one who had not yet bidden her welcome. He had withdrawn from
+his seat by the fireside, and was standing near the door, with his face
+averted, so that his features could be discerned only by the flickering
+shadow of the profile upon the wall. But Prudence called to him, in a
+cheerful and kindly tone:--
+
+“Come, Robert,” said she, “won’t you shake hands with your old friend?”
+
+Robert Moore held back for a moment, but affection struggled
+powerfully, and overcame his pride and resentment; he rushed towards
+Prudence, seized her hand, and pressed it to his bosom.
+
+“There, there, Robert!” said she, smiling sadly, as she withdrew her
+hand, “you must not give me too warm a welcome.”
+
+And now, having exchanged greetings with each member of the family,
+Prudence again seated herself in the chair at John Inglefield’s right
+hand. She was naturally a girl of quick and tender sensibilities,
+gladsome in her general mood, but with a bewitching pathos interfused
+among her merriest words and deeds. It was remarked of her, too, that
+she had a faculty, even from childhood, of throwing her own feelings,
+like a spell, over her companions. Such as she had been in her days of
+innocence, so did she appear this evening. Her friends, in the surprise
+and bewilderment of her return, almost forgot that she had ever left
+them, or that she had forfeited any of her claims to their affection.
+In the morning, perhaps, they might have looked at her with altered
+eyes, but by the Thanksgiving fireside they felt only that their own
+Prudence had come back to them, and were thankful. John Inglefleld’s
+rough visage brightened with the glow of his heart, as it grew warm and
+merry within him; once or twice, even, he laughed till the room rang
+again, yet seemed startled by the echo of his own mirth. The grave
+young minister became as frolicsome as a school-boy. Mary, too, the
+rosebud, forgot that her twin-blossom had ever been torn from the stem,
+and trampled in the dust. And as for Robert Moore, he gazed at Prudence
+with the bashful earnestness of love new-born, while she, with sweet
+maiden coquetry, half smiled upon and half discouraged him.
+
+In short, it was one of those intervals when sorrow vanishes in its own
+depth of shadow, and joy starts forth in transitory brightness. When
+the clock struck eight, Prudence poured out her father’s customary
+draught of herb-tea, which had been steeping by the fireside ever since
+twilight.
+
+“God bless you, child!” said John Inglefield, as he took the cup from
+her hand; “you have made your old father happy again. But we miss your
+mother sadly, Prudence, sadly. It seems as if she ought to be here
+now.”
+
+“Now, father, or never,” replied Prudence.
+
+It was now the hour for domestic worship. But while the family were
+making preparations for this duty, they suddenly perceived that
+Prudence had put on her cloak and hood, and was lifting the latch of
+the door.
+
+“Prudence, Prudence! where are you going?” cried they all, with one
+voice.
+
+As Prudence passed out of the door, she turned towards them, and flung
+back her hand with a gesture of farewell. But her face was so changed
+that they hardly recognized it. Sin and evil passions glowed through
+its comeliness, and wrought a horrible deformity; a smile gleamed in
+her eyes, as of triumphant mockery, at their surprise and grief.
+
+“Daughter,” cried John Inglefield, between wrath and sorrow, “stay and
+be your father’s blessing, or take his curse with you!”
+
+For an instant Prudence lingered and looked back into the fire-lighted
+room, while her countenance wore almost the expression as if she were
+struggling with a fiend, who had power to seize his victim even within
+the hallowed precincts of her father’s hearth. The fiend prevailed; and
+Prudence vanished into the outer darkness. When the family rushed to
+the door, they could see nothing, but heard the sound of wheels
+rattling over the frozen ground.
+
+That same night, among the painted beauties at the theatre of a
+neighboring city, there was one whose dissolute mirth seemed
+inconsistent with any sympathy for pure affections, and for the joys
+and griefs which are hallowed by them. Yet this was Prudence
+Inglefield. Her visit to the Thanksgiving fireside was the realization
+of one of those waking dreams in which the guilty soul will sometimes
+stray back to its innocence. But Sin, alas! is careful of her
+bond-slaves; they hear her voice, perhaps, at the holiest moment, and
+are constrained to go whither she summons them. The same dark power
+that drew Prudence Inglefleld from her father’s hearth--the same in its
+nature, though heightened then to a dread necessity--would snatch a
+guilty soul from the gate of heaven, and make its sin and its
+punishment alike eternal.
+
+
+
+
+OLD TICONDEROGA
+
+A PICTURE OF THE PAST
+
+The greatest attraction, in this vicinity, is the famous old fortress
+of Ticonderoga, the remains of which are visible from the piazza of the
+tavern, on a swell of land that shuts in the prospect of the lake.
+Those celebrated heights, Mount Defiance and Mount Independence,
+familiar to all Americans in history, stand too prominent not to be
+recognized, though neither of them precisely corresponds to the images
+excited by their names. In truth, the whole scene, except the interior
+of the fortress, disappointed me. Mount Defiance, which one pictures as
+a steep, lofty, and rugged hill, of most formidable aspect, frowning
+down with the grim visage of a precipice on old Ticonderoga, is merely
+a long and wooded ridge; and bore, at some former period, the gentle
+name of Sugar Hill. The brow is certainly difficult to climb, and high
+enough to look into every corner of the fortress. St. Clair’s most
+probable reason, however, for neglecting to occupy it, was the
+deficiency of troops to man the works already constructed, rather than
+the supposed inaccessibility of Mount Defiance. It is singular that the
+French never fortified this height, standing, as it does, in the
+quarter whence they must have looked for the advance of a British army.
+
+In my first view of the ruins, I was favored with the scientific
+guidance of a young lieutenant of engineers, recently from West Point,
+where he had gained credit for great military genius. I saw nothing but
+confusion in what chiefly interested him; straight lines and zigzags,
+defence within defence, wall opposed to wall, and ditch intersecting
+ditch; oblong squares of masonry below the surface of the earth, and
+huge mounds, or turf-covered hills of stone, above it. On one of these
+artificial hillocks, a pine-tree has rooted itself, and grown tall and
+strong, since the banner-staff was levelled. But where my unmilitary
+glance could trace no regularity, the young lieutenant was perfectly at
+home. He fathomed the meaning of every ditch, and formed an entire plan
+of the fortress from its half-obliterated lines. His description of
+Ticonderoga would be as accurate as a geometrical theorem, and as
+barren of the poetry that has clustered round its decay. I viewed
+Ticonderoga as a place of ancient strength, in ruins for half a
+century: where the flags of three nations had successively waved, and
+none waved now; where armies had struggled, so long ago that the bones
+of the slain were mouldered; where Peace had found a heritage in the
+forsaken haunts of War. Now the young West-Pointer, with his lectures
+on ravelins, counterscarps, angles, and covered ways, made it an affair
+of brick and mortar and hewn stone, arranged on certain regular
+principles, having a good deal to do with mathematics, but nothing at
+all with poetry.
+
+I should have been glad of a hoary veteran to totter by my side, and
+tell me, perhaps, of the French garrisons and their Indian allies,—of
+Abercrombie, Lord Howe, and Amherst,—of Ethan Allen’s triumph and St.
+Clair’s surrender. The old soldier and the old fortress would be
+emblems of each other. His reminiscences, though vivid as the image of
+Ticonderoga in the lake, would harmonize with the gray influence of the
+scene. A survivor of the long-disbanded garrisons, though but a private
+soldier, might have mustered his dead chiefs and comrades,—some from
+Westminster Abbey, and English churchyards, and battle-fields in
+Europe,—others from their graves here in America,—others, not a few,
+who lie sleeping round the fortress; he might have mustered them all,
+and bid them march through the ruined gateway, turning their old
+historic faces on me, as they passed. Next to such a companion, the
+best is one’s own fancy.
+
+At another visit I was alone, and, after rambling all over the
+ramparts, sat down to rest myself in one of the roofless barracks.
+These are old French structures, and appear to have occupied three
+sides of a large area, now overgrown with grass, nettles, and thistles.
+The one in which I sat was long and narrow, as all the rest had been,
+with peaked gables. The exterior walls were nearly entire, constructed
+of gray, flat, unpicked stones, the aged strength of which promised
+long to resist the elements, if no other violence should precipitate
+their fall.—The roof, floors, partitions, and the rest of the wood-work
+had probably been burnt, except some bars of stanch old oak, which were
+blackened with fire, but still remained imbedded into the window-sills
+and over the doors. There were a few particles of plastering near the
+chimney, scratched with rude figures, perhaps by a soldier’s hand. A
+most luxuriant crop of weeds had sprung up within the edifice, and hid
+the scattered fragments of the wall. Grass and weeds grew in the
+windows, and in all the crevices of the stone, climbing, step by step,
+till a tuft of yellow flowers was waving on the highest peak of the
+gable. Some spicy herb diffused a pleasant odor through the ruin. A
+verdant heap of vegetation had covered the hearth of the second floor,
+clustering on the very spot where the huge logs had mouldered to
+glowing coals, and flourished beneath the broad flue, which had so
+often puffed the smoke over a circle of French or English soldiers. I
+felt that there was no other token of decay so impressive as that bed
+of weeds in the place of the backlog.
+
+Here I sat, with those roofless walls about me, the clear sky over my
+head, and the afternoon sunshine falling gently bright through the
+window-frames and doorway. I heard the tinkling of a cow-bell, the
+twittering of birds, and the pleasant hum of insects. Once a gay
+butterfly, with four gold-speckled wings, came and fluttered about my
+head, then flew up and lighted on the highest tuft of yellow flowers,
+and at last took wing across the lake. Next a bee buzzed through the
+sunshine, and found much sweetness among the weeds. After watching him
+till he went off to his distant hive, I closed my eyes on Ticonderoga
+in ruins, and cast a dream-like glance over pictures of the past, and
+scenes of which this spot had been the theatre.
+
+At first, my fancy saw only the stern hills, lonely lakes, and
+venerable woods. Not a tree, since their seeds were first scattered
+over the infant soil, had felt the axe, but had grown up and flourished
+through its long generation, had fallen beneath the weight of years,
+been buried in green moss, and nourished the roots of others as
+gigantic. Hark! A light paddle dips into the lake, a birch canoe glides
+round the point, and an Indian chief has passed, painted and
+feather-crested, armed with a bow of hickory, a stone tomahawk, and
+flint-headed arrows. But the ripple had hardly vanished from the water,
+when a white flag caught the breeze, over a castle in the wilderness,
+with frowning ramparts and a hundred cannon. There stood a French
+chevalier, commandant of the fortress, paying court to a copper-colored
+lady, the princess of the land, and winning her wild love by the arts
+which had been successful with Parisian dames. A war-party of French
+and Indians were issuing from the gate to lay waste some village of New
+England. Near the fortress there was a group of dancers. The merry
+soldiers footing it with the swart savage maids; deeper in the wood,
+some red men were growing frantic around a keg of the fire-water; and
+elsewhere a Jesuit preached the faith of high cathedrals beneath a
+canopy of forest boughs, and distributed crucifixes to be worn beside
+English scalps.
+
+I tried to make a series of pictures from the old French war, when
+fleets were on the lake and armies in the woods, and especially of
+Abercrombie’s disastrous repulse, where thousands of lives were utterly
+thrown away; but, being at a loss how to order the battle, I chose an
+evening scene in the barracks, after the fortress had surrendered to
+Sir Jeffrey Amherst. What an immense fire blazes on that hearth,
+gleaming on swords, bayonets, and musket-barrels, and blending with the
+hue of the scarlet coats till the whole barrack-room is quivering with
+ruddy light! One soldier has thrown himself down to rest, after a
+deer-hunt, or perhaps a long run through the woods with Indians on his
+trail. Two stand up to wrestle, and are on the point of coming to
+blows. A fifer plays a shrill accompaniment to a drummer’s song,—a
+strain of light love and bloody war, with a chorus thundered forth by
+twenty voices. Meantime, a veteran in the corner is prosing about
+Dettingen and Fontenoy, and relates camp-traditions of Marlborough’s
+battles, till his pipe, having been roguishly charged with gunpowder,
+makes a terrible explosion under his nose. And now they all vanish in a
+puff of smoke from the chimney.
+
+I merely glanced at the ensuing twenty years, which glided peacefully
+over the frontier fortress, till Ethan Allen’s shout was heard,
+summoning it to surrender “in the name of the great Jehovah and of the
+Continental Congress.” Strange allies! thought the British captain.
+Next came the hurried muster of the soldiers of liberty, when the
+cannon of Burgoyne, pointing down upon their stronghold from the brow
+of Mount Defiance, announced a new conqueror of Ticonderoga. No virgin
+fortress, this! Forth rushed the motley throng from the barracks, one
+man wearing the blue and buff of the Union, another the red coat of
+Britain, a third a dragoon’s jacket, and a fourth a cotton frock; here
+was a pair of leather breeches, and striped trousers there; a
+grenadier’s cap on one head, and a broad-brimmed hat, with a tall
+feather, on the next; this fellow shouldering a king’s arm, that might
+throw a bullet to Crown Point, and his comrade a long fowling-piece,
+admirable to shoot ducks on the lake. In the midst of the bustle, when
+the fortress was all alive with its last warlike scene, the ringing of
+a bell on the lake made me suddenly unclose my eyes, and behold only
+the gray and weed-grown ruins. They were as peaceful in the sun as a
+warrior’s grave.
+
+Hastening to the rampart, I perceived that the signal had been given by
+the steamboat Franklin, which landed a passenger from Whitehall at the
+tavern, and resumed its progress northward, to reach Canada the next
+morning. A sloop was pursuing the same track; a little skiff had just
+crossed the ferry; while a scow, laden with lumber, spread its huge
+square sail, and went up the lake. The whole country was a cultivated
+farm. Within musket-shot of the ramparts lay the neat villa of Mr.
+Pell, who, since the Revolution, has become proprietor of a spot for
+which France, England, and America have so often struggled. How
+forcibly the lapse of time and change of circumstances came home to my
+apprehension! Banner would never wave again, nor cannon roar, nor blood
+be shed, nor trumpet stir up a soldier’s heart, in this old fort of
+Ticonderoga. Tall trees have grown upon its ramparts, since the last
+garrison marched out, to return no more, or only at some dreamer’s
+summons, gliding from the twilight past to vanish among realities.
+
+
+
+
+THE WIVES OF THE DEAD
+
+
+The following story, the simple and domestic incidents of which may be
+deemed scarcely worth relating, after such a lapse of time, awakened
+some degree of interest, a hundred years ago, in a principal seaport of
+the Bay Province. The rainy twilight of an autumn day,—a parlor on the
+second floor of a small house, plainly furnished, as beseemed the
+middling circumstances of its inhabitants, yet decorated with little
+curiosities from beyond the sea, and a few delicate specimens of Indian
+manufacture,—these are the only particulars to be premised in regard to
+scene and season. Two young and comely women sat together by the
+fireside, nursing their mutual and peculiar sorrows. They were the
+recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman, and two
+successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the
+chances of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic. The universal
+sympathy excited by this bereavement drew numerous condoling guests to
+the habitation of the widowed sisters. Several, among whom was the
+minister, had remained till the verge of evening; when, one by one,
+whispering many comfortable passages of Scripture, that were answered
+by more abundant tears, they took their leave, and departed to their
+own happier homes. The mourners, though not insensible to the kindness
+of their friends, had yearned to be left alone. United, as they had
+been, by the relationship of the living, and now more closely so by
+that of the dead, each felt as if whatever consolation her grief
+admitted were to be found in the bosom of the other. They joined their
+hearts, and wept together silently. But after an hour of such
+indulgence, one of the sisters, all of whose emotions were influenced
+by her mild, quiet, yet not feeble character, began to recollect the
+precepts of resignation and endurance which piety had taught her, when
+she did not think to need them. Her misfortune, besides, as earliest
+known, should earliest cease to interfere with her regular course of
+duties; accordingly, having placed the table before the fire, and
+arranged a frugal meal, she took the hand of her companion.
+
+“Come, dearest sister; you have eaten not a morsel to-day,” she said.
+“Arise, I pray you, and let us ask a blessing on that which is provided
+for us.”
+
+Her sister-in-law was of a lively and irritable temperament, and the
+first pangs of her sorrow had been expressed by shrieks and passionate
+lamentation. She now shrunk from Mary’s words, like a wounded sufferer
+from a hand that revives the throb.
+
+“There is no blessing left for me, neither will I ask it!” cried
+Margaret, with a fresh burst of tears. “Would it were His will that I
+might never taste food more!”
+
+Yet she trembled at these rebellious expressions, almost as soon as
+they were uttered, and, by degrees, Mary succeeded in bringing her
+sister’s mind nearer to the situation of her own. Time went on, and
+their usual hour of repose arrived. The brothers and their brides,
+entering the married state with no more than the slender means which
+then sanctioned such a step, had confederated themselves in one
+household, with equal rights to the parlor, and claiming exclusive
+privileges in two sleeping-rooms contiguous to it. Thither the widowed
+ones retired, after heaping ashes upon the dying embers of their fire,
+and placing a lighted lamp upon the hearth. The doors of both chambers
+were left open, so that a part of the interior of each, and the beds
+with their unclosed curtains, were reciprocally visible. Sleep did not
+steal upon the sisters at one and the same time. Mary experienced the
+effect often consequent upon grief quietly borne, and soon sunk into
+temporary forgetfulness, while Margaret became more disturbed and
+feverish, in proportion as the night advanced with its deepest and
+stillest hours. She lay listening to the drops of rain, that came down
+in monotonous succession, unswayed by a breath of wind; and a nervous
+impulse continually caused her to lift her head from the pillow, and
+gaze into Mary’s chamber and the intermediate apartment. The cold light
+of the lamp threw the shadows of the furniture up against the wall,
+stamping them immovably there, except when they were shaken by a sudden
+flicker of the flame. Two vacant arm-chairs were in their old positions
+on opposite sides of the hearth, where the brothers had been wont to
+sit in young and laughing dignity, as heads of families; two humbler
+seats were near them, the true thrones of that little empire, where
+Mary and herself had exercised in love a power that love had won. The
+cheerful radiance of the fire had shone upon the happy circle, and the
+dead glimmer of the lamp might have befitted their reunion now. While
+Margaret groaned in bitterness, she heard a knock at the street door.
+
+“How would my heart have leapt at that sound but yesterday!” thought
+she, remembering the anxiety with which she had long awaited tidings
+from her husband.
+
+“I care not for it now; let them begone, for I will not arise.”
+
+But even while a sort of childish fretfulness made her thus resolve,
+she was breathing hurriedly, and straining her ears to catch a
+repetition of the summons. It is difficult to be convinced of the death
+of one whom we have deemed another self. The knocking was now renewed
+in slow and regular strokes, apparently given with the soft end of a
+doubled fist, and was accompanied by words, faintly heard through
+several thicknesses of wall. Margaret looked to her sister’s chamber,
+and beheld her still lying in the depths of sleep. She arose, placed
+her foot upon the floor, and slightly arrayed herself, trembling
+between fear and eagerness as she did so.
+
+“Heaven help me!” sighed she. “I have nothing left to fear, and
+methinks I am ten times more a coward than ever.”
+
+Seizing the lamp from the hearth, she hastened to the window that
+overlooked the street-door. It was a lattice, turning upon hinges; and
+having thrown it back, she stretched her head a little way into the
+moist atmosphere. A lantern was reddening the front of the house, and
+melting its light in the neighboring puddles, while a deluge of
+darkness overwhelmed every other object. As the window grated on its
+hinges, a man in a broad-brimmed hat and blanket-coat stepped from
+under the shelter of the projecting story, and looked upward to
+discover whom his application had aroused. Margaret knew him as a
+friendly innkeeper of the town.
+
+“What would you have, Goodman Parker?” cried the widow.
+
+“Lackaday, is it you, Mistress Margaret?” replied the innkeeper. “I was
+afraid it might be your sister Mary; for I hate to see a young woman in
+trouble, when I have n’t a word of comfort to whisper her.”
+
+“For Heaven’s sake, what news do you bring?” screamed Margaret.
+
+“Why, there has been an express through the town within this
+half-hour,” said Goodman Parker, “travelling from the eastern
+jurisdiction with letters from the governor and council. He tarried at
+my house to refresh himself with a drop and a morsel, and I asked him
+what tidings on the frontiers. He tells me we had the better in the
+skirmish you wot of, and that thirteen men reported slain are well and
+sound, and your husband among them. Besides, he is appointed of the
+escort to bring the captivated Frenchers and Indians home to the
+province jail. I judged you would n’t mind being broke of your rest,
+and so I stepped over to tell you. Good night.”
+
+So saying, the honest man departed; and his lantern gleamed along the
+street, bringing to view indistinct shapes of things, and the fragments
+of a world, like order glimmering through chaos, or memory roaming over
+the past. But Margaret stayed not to watch these picturesque effects.
+Joy flashed into her heart, and lighted it up at once; and breathless,
+and with winged steps, she flew to the bedside of her sister. She
+paused, however, at the door of the chamber, while a thought of pain
+broke in upon her.
+
+“Poor Mary!” said she to herself. “Shall I waken her, to feel her
+sorrow sharpened by my happiness? No; I will keep it within my own
+bosom till the morrow.”
+
+She approached the bed, to discover if Mary’s sleep were peaceful. Her
+face was turned partly inward to the pillow, and had been hidden there
+to weep; but a look of motionless contentment was now visible upon it,
+as if her heart, like a deep lake, had grown calm because its dead had
+sunk down so far within. Happy is it, and strange, that the lighter
+sorrows are those from which dreams are chiefly fabricated. Margaret
+shrunk from disturbing her sister-in-law, and felt as if her own better
+fortune had rendered her involuntarily unfaithful, and as if altered
+and diminished affection must be the consequence of the disclosure she
+had to make. With a sudden step she turned away. But joy could not long
+be repressed, even by circumstances that would have excited heavy grief
+at another moment. Her mind was thronged with delightful thoughts, till
+sleep stole on, and transformed them to visions, more delightful and
+more wild, like the breath of winter (but what a cold comparison!)
+working fantastic tracery upon a window.
+
+When the night was far advanced, Mary awoke with a sudden start. A
+vivid dream had latterly involved her in its unreal life, of which,
+however, she could only remember that it had been broken in upon at the
+most interesting point. For a little time, slumber hung about her like
+a morning mist, hindering her from perceiving the distinct outline of
+her situation. She listened with imperfect consciousness to two or
+three volleys of a rapid and eager knocking; and first she deemed the
+noise a matter of course, like the breath she drew; next, it appeared a
+thing in which she had no concern; and lastly, she became aware that it
+was a summons necessary to be obeyed. At the same moment, the pang of
+recollection darted into her mind; the pall of sleep was thrown back
+from the face of grief; the dim light of the chamber, and the objects
+therein revealed, had retained all her suspended ideas, and restored
+them as soon as she unclosed her eyes. Again there was a quick peal
+upon the street-door. Fearing that her sister would also be disturbed,
+Mary wrapped herself in a cloak and hood, took the lamp from the
+hearth, and hastened to the window. By some accident, it had been left
+unhasped, and yielded easily to her hand.
+
+“Who’s there?” asked Mary, trembling as she looked forth.
+
+The storm was over, and the moon was up; it shone upon broken clouds
+above, and below upon houses black with moisture, and upon little lakes
+of the fallen rain, curling into silver beneath the quick enchantment
+of a breeze. A young man in a sailor’s dress, wet as if he had come out
+of the depths of the sea, stood alone under the window. Mary recognized
+him as one whose livelihood was gained by short voyages along the
+coast; nor did she forget that, previous to her marriage, he had been
+an unsuccessful wooer of her own.
+
+“What do you seek here, Stephen?” said she.
+
+“Cheer up, Mary, for I seek to comfort you,” answered the rejected
+lover. “You must know I got home not ten minutes ago, and the first
+thing my good mother told me was the news about your husband. So,
+without saying a word to the old woman, I clapped on my hat, and ran
+out of the house. I could n’t have slept a wink before speaking to you,
+Mary, for the sake of old times.”
+
+“Stephen, I thought better of you!” exclaimed the widow, with gushing
+tears and preparing to close the lattice; for she was no whit inclined
+to imitate the first wife of Zadig.
+
+“But stop, and hear my story out,” cried the young sailor. “I tell you
+we spoke a brig yesterday afternoon, bound in from Old England. And who
+do you think I saw standing on deck, well and hearty, only a bit
+thinner than he was five months ago?”
+
+Mary leaned from the window, but could not speak. “Why, it was your
+husband himself,” continued the generous seaman. “He and three others
+saved themselves on a spar, when the Blessing turned bottom upwards.
+The brig will beat into the bay by daylight, with this wind, and you’ll
+see him here to-morrow. There’s the comfort I bring you, Mary, and so
+good night.”
+
+He hurried away, while Mary watched him with a doubt of waking reality,
+that seemed stronger or weaker as he alternately entered the shade of
+the houses, or emerged into the broad streaks of moonlight. Gradually,
+however, a blessed flood of conviction swelled into her heart, in
+strength enough to overwhelm her, had its increase been more abrupt.
+Her first impulse was to rouse her sister-in-law, and communicate the
+new-born gladness. She opened the chamber-door, which had been closed
+in the course of the night, though not latched, advanced to the
+bedside, and was about to lay her hand upon the slumberer’s shoulder.
+But then she remembered that Margaret would awake to thoughts of death
+and woe, rendered not the less bitter by their contrast with her own
+felicity. She suffered the rays of the lamp to fall upon the
+unconscious form of the bereaved one. Margaret lay in unquiet sleep,
+and the drapery was displaced around her; her young cheek was
+rosy-tinted, and her lips half opened in a vivid smile; an expression
+of joy, debarred its passage by her sealed eyelids, struggled forth
+like incense from the whole countenance.
+
+“My poor sister! you will waken too soon from that happy dream,”
+thought Mary.
+
+Before retiring, she set down the lamp, and endeavored to arrange the
+bedclothes so that the chill air might not do harm to the feverish
+slumberer. But her hand trembled against Margaret’s neck, a tear also
+fell upon her cheek, and she suddenly awoke.
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE DAFFYDOWNDILLY
+
+
+Daffydowndilly was so called because in his nature he resembled a
+flower, and loved to do only what was beautiful and agreeable, and took
+no delight in labor of any kind. But, while Daffydowndilly was yet a
+little boy, his mother sent him away from his pleasant home, and put
+him under the care of a very strict schoolmaster, who went by the name
+of Mr. Toil. Those who knew him best affirmed that this Mr. Toil was a
+very worthy character; and that he had done more good, both to children
+and grown people, than anybody else in the world. Certainly he had
+lived long enough to do a great deal of good; for, if all stories be
+true, he had dwelt upon earth ever since Adam was driven from the
+garden of Eden.
+
+Nevertheless, Mr. Toil had a severe and ugly countenance, especially
+for such little boys or big men as were inclined to be idle; his voice,
+too, was harsh; and all his ways and customs seemed very disagreeable
+to our friend Daffydowndilly. The whole day long, this terrible old
+schoolmaster sat at his desk overlooking the scholars, or stalked about
+the school-room with a certain awful birch rod in his hand. Now came a
+rap over the shoulders of a boy whom Mr. Toil had caught at play; now
+he punished a whole class who were behindhand with their lessons; and,
+in short, unless a lad chose to attend quietly and constantly to his
+book, he had no chance of enjoying a quiet moment in the school-room of
+Mr. Toil.
+
+“This will never do for me,” thought Daffydowndilly.
+
+Now, the whole of Daffydowndilly’s life had hitherto been passed with
+his dear mother, who had a much sweeter face than old Mr. Toil, and who
+had always been very indulgent to her little boy. No wonder, therefore,
+that poor Daffydowndilly found it a woful change, to be sent away from
+the good lady’s side, and put under the care of this ugly-visaged
+schoolmaster, who never gave him any apples or cakes, and seemed to
+think that little boys were created only to get lessons.
+
+“I can’t bear it any longer,” said Daffydowndilly to himself, when he
+had been at school about a week. “I’ll run away, and try to find my
+dear mother; and, at any rate, I shall never find anybody half so
+disagreeable as this old Mr. Toil!”
+
+So, the very next morning, off started poor Daffydowndilly, and began
+his rambles about the world, with only some bread and cheese for his
+breakfast, and very little pocket-money to pay his expenses. But he had
+gone only a short distance, when he overtook a man of grave and sedate
+appearance, who was trudging at a moderate pace along the road.
+
+“Good morning, my fine lad,” said the stranger; and his voice seemed
+hard and severe, but yet had a sort of kindness in it; “whence do you
+come so early, and whither are you going?”
+
+Little Daffydowndilly was a boy of very ingenuous disposition, and had
+never been known to tell a lie in all his life. Nor did he tell one
+now. He hesitated a moment or two, but finally confessed that he had
+run away from school, on account of his great dislike to Mr. Toil; and
+that he was resolved to find some place in the world where he should
+never see or hear of the old schoolmaster again.
+
+“O, very well, my little friend!” answered the stranger. “Then we will
+go together; for I, likewise, have had a good deal to do with Mr. Toil,
+and should be glad to find some place where he was never heard of.”
+
+Our friend Daffydowndilly would have been better pleased with a
+companion of his own age, with whom he might have gathered flowers
+along the roadside, or have chased butterflies, or have done many other
+things to make the journey pleasant. But he had wisdom enough to
+understand that he should get along through the world much easier by
+having a man of experience to show him the way. So he accepted the
+stranger’s proposal, and they walked on very sociably together.
+
+They had not gone far, when the road passed by a field where some
+haymakers were at work, mowing down the tall grass, and spreading it
+out in the sun to dry. Daffydowndilly was delighted with the sweet
+smell of the new-mown grass, and thought how much pleasanter it must be
+to make hay in the sunshine, under the blue sky, and with the birds
+singing sweetly in the neighboring trees and bushes, than to be shut up
+in a dismal school-room, learning lessons all day long, and continually
+scolded by old Mr. Toil. But, in the midst of these thoughts, while he
+was stopping to peep over the stone wall, he started back and caught
+hold of his companion’s hand.
+
+“Quick, quick!” cried he. “Let us run away, or he will catch us!”
+
+“Who will catch us?” asked the stranger.
+
+“Mr. Toil, the old schoolmaster!” answered Daffydowndilly. “Don’t you
+see him amongst the haymakers?”
+
+And Daffydowndilly pointed to an elderly man, who seemed to be the
+owner of the field, and the employer of the men at work there. He had
+stripped off his coat and waistcoat, and was busily at work in his
+shirt-sleeves. The drops of sweat stood upon his brow; but he gave
+himself not a moment’s rest, and kept crying out to the haymakers to
+make hay while the sun shone. Now, strange to say, the figure and
+features of this old farmer were precisely the same as those of old Mr.
+Toil, who, at that very moment, must have been just entering his
+school-room.
+
+“Don’t be afraid,” said the stranger. “This is not Mr. Toil the
+schoolmaster, but a brother of his, who was bred a farmer; and people
+say he is the most disagreeable man of the two. However, he won’t
+trouble you, unless you become a laborer on the farm.”
+
+Little Daffydowndilly believed what his companion said, but was very
+glad, nevertheless, when they were out of sight of the old farmer, who
+bore such a singular resemblance to Mr. Toil. The two travellers had
+gone but little farther, when they came to a spot where some carpenters
+were erecting a house. Daffydowndilly begged his companion to stop a
+moment; for it was a very pretty sight to see how neatly the carpenters
+did their work, with their broad-axes, and saws, and planes, and
+hammers, shaping out the doors, and putting in the window-sashes, and
+nailing on the clapboards; and he could not help thinking that he
+should like to take a broad-axe, a saw, a plane, and a hammer, and
+build a little house for himself. And then, when he should have a house
+of his own, old Mr. Toil would never dare to molest him.
+
+But, just while he was delighting himself with this idea, little
+Daffydowndilly beheld something that made him catch hold of his
+companion’s hand, all in a fright.
+
+“Make haste. Quick, quick!” cried he. “There he is again!”
+
+“Who?” asked the stranger, very quietly.
+
+“Old Mr. Toil,” said Daffydowndilly, trembling. “There! he that is
+overseeing the carpenters. ‘T is my old schoolmaster, as sure as I’m
+alive!”
+
+The stranger cast his eyes where Daffydowndilly pointed his finger; and
+he saw an elderly man, with a carpenter’s rule and compasses in his
+hand. This person went to and fro about the unfinished house, measuring
+pieces of timber, and marking out the work that was to be done, and
+continually exhorting the other carpenters to be diligent. And wherever
+he turned his hard and wrinkled visage, the men seemed to feel that
+they had a task-master over them, and sawed, and hammered, and planed,
+as if for dear life.
+
+“O no! this is not Mr. Toil, the schoolmaster,” said the stranger. “It
+is another brother of his, who follows the trade of carpenter.”
+
+“I am very glad to hear it,” quoth Daffydowndilly; “but if you please,
+sir, I should like to get out of his way as soon as possible.”
+
+Then they went on a little farther, and soon heard the sound of a drum
+and fife. Daffydowndilly pricked up his ears at this, and besought his
+companion to hurry forward, that they might not miss seeing the
+soldiers. Accordingly, they made what haste they could, and soon met a
+company of soldiers, gayly dressed, with beautiful feathers in their
+caps, and bright muskets on their shoulders. In front marched two
+drummers and two fifers, beating on their drums and playing on their
+fifes with might and main, and making such lively music that little
+Daffydowndilly would gladly have followed them to the end of the world.
+And if he was only a soldier, then, he said to himself, old Mr. Toil
+would never venture to look him in the face.
+
+“Quick step! Forward march!” shouted a gruff voice.
+
+Little Daffydowndilly started, in great dismay; for this voice which
+had spoken to the soldiers sounded precisely the same as that which he
+had heard every day in Mr. Toil’s school-room, out of Mr. Toil’s own
+mouth. And, turning his eyes to the captain of the company, what should
+he see but the very image of old Mr. Toil himself, with a smart cap and
+feather on his head, a pair of gold epaulets on his shoulders, a laced
+coat on his back, a purple sash round his waist, and a long sword,
+instead of a birch rod, in his hand. And though he held his head so
+high, and strutted like a turkey-cock, still he looked quite as ugly
+and disagreeable as when he was hearing lessons in the schoolroom.
+
+“This is certainly old Mr. Toil,” said Daffydowndilly, in a trembling
+voice. “Let us run away, for fear he should make us enlist in his
+company!”
+
+“You are mistaken again, my little friend,” replied the stranger, very
+composedly. “This is not Mr. Toil, the schoolmaster, but a brother of
+his, who has served in the army all his life. People say he’s a
+terribly severe fellow; but you and I need not be afraid of him.”
+
+“Well, well,” said little Daffydowndilly, “but, if you please, sir, I
+don’t want to see the soldiers any more.”
+
+So the child and the stranger resumed their journey; and, by and by,
+they came to a house by the roadside, where a number of people were
+making merry. Young men and rosy-checked girls, with smiles on their
+faces, were dancing to the sound of a fiddle. It was the pleasantest
+sight that Daffydowndilly had yet met with, and it comforted him for
+all his disappointments.
+
+“O, let us stop here,” cried he to his companion; “for Mr. Toil will
+never dare to show his face where there is a fiddler, and where people
+are dancing and making merry. We shall be quite safe here!”
+
+But these last words died away upon Daffydowndilly’s tongue; for,
+happening to cast his eyes on the fiddler, whom should be behold again,
+but the likeness of Mr. Toil, holding a fiddle-bow instead of a birch
+rod, and flourishing it with as much ease and dexterity as if he had
+been a fiddler all his life! He had somewhat the air of a Frenchman,
+but still looked exactly like the old schoolmaster; and Daffydowndilly
+even fancied that he nodded and winked at him, and made signs for him
+to join in the dance.
+
+“O dear me!” whispered he, turning pale. “It seems as if there was
+nobody but Mr. Toil in the world. Who could have thought of his playing
+on a fiddle!”
+
+“This is not your old schoolmaster,” observed the stranger, “but
+another brother of his, who was bred in France, where he learned the
+profession of a fiddler. He is ashamed of his family, and generally
+calls himself Monsieur le Plaisir; but his real name is Toil, and those
+who have known him best think him still more disagreeable than his
+brothers.”
+
+“Pray let us go a little farther,” said Daffydowndilly. “I don’t like
+the looks of this fiddler at all.”
+
+Well, thus the stranger and little Daffydowndilly went wandering along
+the highway, and in shady lanes, and through pleasant villages; and
+whithersoever they went, behold! there was the image of old Mr. Toil.
+He stood like a scarecrow in the cornfields. If they entered a house,
+he sat in the parlor; if they peeped into the kitchen, he was there. He
+made himself at home in every cottage, and stole, under one disguise or
+another, into the most splendid mansions. Everywhere there was sure to
+be somebody wearing the likeness of Mr. Toil, and who, as the stranger
+affirmed, was one of the old schoolmaster’s innumerable brethren.
+
+Little Daffydowndilly was almost tired to death, when he perceived some
+people reclining lazily in a shady place, by the side of the road. The
+poor child entreated his companion that they might sit down there, and
+take some repose.
+
+“Old Mr. Toil will never come here,” said he; “for he hates to see
+people taking their ease.”
+
+But, even while he spoke, Daffydowndilly’s eyes fell upon a person who
+seemed the laziest, and heaviest, and most torpid of all those lazy and
+heavy and torpid people who had lain down to sleep in the shade. Who
+should it be, again, but the very image of Mr. Toil!
+
+“There is a large family of these Toils,” remarked the stranger. “This
+is another of the old schoolmaster’s brothers, who was bred in Italy,
+where he acquired very idle habits, and goes by the name of Signor Far
+Niente. He pretends to lead an easy life, but is really the most
+miserable fellow in the family.”
+
+“O, take me back!—take me back!” cried poor little Daffydowndilly,
+bursting into tears. “If there is nothing but Toil all the world over,
+I may just as well go back to the school-house!”
+
+“Yonder it is,—there is the school-house!” said the stranger; for
+though he and little Daffydowndilly had taken a great many steps, they
+had travelled in a circle, instead of a straight line. “Come; we will
+go back to school together.”
+
+There was something in his companion’s voice that little Daffydowndilly
+now remembered; and it is strange that he had not remembered it sooner.
+Looking up into his face, behold! there again was the likeness of old
+Mr. Toil; so that the poor child had been in company with Toil all day,
+even while he was doing his best to run away from him. Some people, to
+whom I have told little Daffydowndilly’s story, are of opinion that old
+Mr. Toil was a magician, and possessed the power of multiplying himself
+into as many shapes as he saw fit.
+
+Be this as it may, little Daffydowndilly had learned a good lesson, and
+from that time forward was diligent at his task, because he knew that
+diligence is not a whit more toilsome than sport or idleness. And when
+he became better acquainted with Mr. Toil, he began to think that his
+ways were not so very disagreeable, and that the old schoolmaster’s
+smile of approbation made his face almost as pleasant as even that of
+Daffydowndilly’s mother.
+
+
+
+
+MY KINSMAN, MAJOR MOLINEUX
+
+
+After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing
+the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the
+ready and generous approbation which had been paid to those of their
+predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most
+jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power which did not emanate from
+themselves, and they usually rewarded their rulers with slender
+gratitude for the compliances by which, in softening their instructions
+from beyond the sea, they had incurred the reprehension of those who
+gave them. The annals of Massachusetts Bay will inform us, that of six
+governors in the space of about forty years from the surrender of the
+old charter, under James II, two were imprisoned by a popular
+insurrection; a third, as Hutchinson inclines to believe, was driven
+from the province by the whizzing of a musket-ball; a fourth, in the
+opinion of the same historian, was hastened to his grave by continual
+bickerings with the House of Representatives; and the remaining two, as
+well as their successors, till the Revolution, were favored with few
+and brief intervals of peaceful sway. The inferior members of the court
+party, in times of high political excitement, led scarcely a more
+desirable life. These remarks may serve as a preface to the following
+adventures, which chanced upon a summer night, not far from a hundred
+years ago. The reader, in order to avoid a long and dry detail of
+colonial affairs, is requested to dispense with an account of the train
+of circumstances that had caused much temporary inflammation of the
+popular mind.
+
+It was near nine o’clock of a moonlight evening, when a boat crossed
+the ferry with a single passenger, who had obtained his conveyance at
+that unusual hour by the promise of an extra fare. While he stood on
+the landing-place, searching in either pocket for the means of
+fulfilling his agreement, the ferryman lifted a lantern, by the aid of
+which, and the newly risen moon, he took a very accurate survey of the
+stranger’s figure. He was a youth of barely eighteen years, evidently
+country-bred, and now, as it should seem, upon his first visit to town.
+He was clad in a coarse gray coat, well worn, but in excellent repair;
+his under garments were durably constructed of leather, and fitted
+tight to a pair of serviceable and well-shaped limbs; his stockings of
+blue yarn were the incontrovertible work of a mother or a sister; and
+on his head was a three-cornered hat, which in its better days had
+perhaps sheltered the graver brow of the lad’s father. Under his left
+arm was a heavy cudgel formed of an oak sapling, and retaining a part
+of the hardened root; and his equipment was completed by a wallet, not
+so abundantly stocked as to incommode the vigorous shoulders on which
+it hung. Brown, curly hair, well-shaped features, and bright, cheerful
+eyes were nature’s gifts, and worth all that art could have done for
+his adornment.
+
+The youth, one of whose names was Robin, finally drew from his pocket
+the half of a little province bill of five shillings, which, in the
+depreciation in that sort of currency, did but satisfy the ferryman’s
+demand, with the surplus of a sexangular piece of parchment, valued at
+three pence. He then walked forward into the town, with as light a step
+as if his day’s journey had not already exceeded thirty miles, and with
+as eager an eye as if he were entering London city, instead of the
+little metropolis of a New England colony. Before Robin had proceeded
+far, however, it occurred to him that he knew not whither to direct his
+steps; so he paused, and looked up and down the narrow street,
+scrutinizing the small and mean wooden buildings that were scattered on
+either side.
+
+“This low hovel cannot be my kinsman’s dwelling,” thought he, “nor
+yonder old house, where the moonlight enters at the broken casement;
+and truly I see none hereabouts that might be worthy of him. It would
+have been wise to inquire my way of the ferryman, and doubtless he
+would have gone with me, and earned a shilling from the Major for his
+pains. But the next man I meet will do as well.”
+
+He resumed his walk, and was glad to perceive that the street now
+became wider, and the houses more respectable in their appearance. He
+soon discerned a figure moving on moderately in advance, and hastened
+his steps to overtake it. As Robin drew nigh, he saw that the passenger
+was a man in years, with a full periwig of gray hair, a wide-skirted
+coat of dark cloth, and silk stockings rolled above his knees. He
+carried a long and polished cane, which he struck down perpendicularly
+before him at every step; and at regular intervals he uttered two
+successive hems, of a peculiarly solemn and sepulchral intonation.
+Having made these observations, Robin laid hold of the skirt of the old
+man’s coat just when the light from the open door and windows of a
+barber’s shop fell upon both their figures.
+
+“Good evening to you, honored sir,” said he, making a low bow, and
+still retaining his hold of the skirt. “I pray you tell me whereabouts
+is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux.”
+
+The youth’s question was uttered very loudly; and one of the barbers,
+whose razor was descending on a well-soaped chin, and another who was
+dressing a Ramillies wig, left their occupations, and came to the door.
+The citizen, in the mean time, turned a long-favored countenance upon
+Robin, and answered him in a tone of excessive anger and annoyance. His
+two sepulchral hems, however, broke into the very centre of his rebuke,
+with most singular effect, like a thought of the cold grave obtruding
+among wrathful passions.
+
+“Let go my garment, fellow! I tell you, I know not the man you speak
+of. What! I have authority, I have—hem, hem—authority; and if this be
+the respect you show for your betters, your feet shall be brought
+acquainted with the stocks by daylight, tomorrow morning!”
+
+Robin released the old man’s skirt, and hastened away, pursued by an
+ill-mannered roar of laughter from the barber’s shop. He was at first
+considerably surprised by the result of his question, but, being a
+shrewd youth, soon thought himself able to account for the mystery.
+
+“This is some country representative,” was his conclusion, “who has
+never seen the inside of my kinsman’s door, and lacks the breeding to
+answer a stranger civilly. The man is old, or verily—I might be tempted
+to turn back and smite him on the nose. Ah, Robin, Robin! even the
+barber’s boys laugh at you for choosing such a guide! You will be wiser
+in time, friend Robin.”
+
+He now became entangled in a succession of crooked and narrow streets,
+which crossed each other, and meandered at no great distance from the
+water-side. The smell of tar was obvious to his nostrils, the masts of
+vessels pierced the moonlight above the tops of the buildings, and the
+numerous signs, which Robin paused to read, informed him that he was
+near the centre of business. But the streets were empty, the shops were
+closed, and lights were visible only in the second stories of a few
+dwelling-houses. At length, on the corner of a narrow lane, through
+which he was passing, he beheld the broad countenance of a British hero
+swinging before the door of an inn, whence proceeded the voices of many
+guests. The casement of one of the lower windows was thrown back, and a
+very thin curtain permitted Robin to distinguish a party at supper,
+round a well-furnished table. The fragrance of the good cheer steamed
+forth into the outer air, and the youth could not fail to recollect
+that the last remnant of his travelling stock of provision had yielded
+to his morning appetite, and that noon had found and left him
+dinnerless.
+
+“Oh, that a parchment three-penny might give me a right to sit down at
+yonder table!” said Robin, with a sigh. “But the Major will make me
+welcome to the best of his victuals; so I will even step boldly in, and
+inquire my way to his dwelling.”
+
+He entered the tavern, and was guided by the murmur of voices and the
+fumes of tobacco to the public-room. It was a long and low apartment,
+with oaken walls, grown dark in the continual smoke, and a floor which
+was thickly sanded, but of no immaculate purity. A number of
+persons—the larger part of whom appeared to be mariners, or in some way
+connected with the sea—occupied the wooden benches, or leatherbottomed
+chairs, conversing on various matters, and occasionally lending their
+attention to some topic of general interest. Three or four little
+groups were draining as many bowls of punch, which the West India trade
+had long since made a familiar drink in the colony. Others, who had the
+appearance of men who lived by regular and laborious handicraft,
+preferred the insulated bliss of an unshared potation, and became more
+taciturn under its influence. Nearly all, in short, evinced a
+predilection for the Good Creature in some of its various shapes, for
+this is a vice to which, as Fast Day sermons of a hundred years ago
+will testify, we have a long hereditary claim. The only guests to whom
+Robin’s sympathies inclined him were two or three sheepish countrymen,
+who were using the inn somewhat after the fashion of a Turkish
+caravansary; they had gotten themselves into the darkest corner of the
+room, and heedless of the Nicotian atmosphere, were supping on the
+bread of their own ovens, and the bacon cured in their own
+chimney-smoke. But though Robin felt a sort of brotherhood with these
+strangers, his eyes were attracted from them to a person who stood near
+the door, holding whispered conversation with a group of ill-dressed
+associates. His features were separately striking almost to
+grotesqueness, and the whole face left a deep impression on the memory.
+The forehead bulged out into a double prominence, with a vale between;
+the nose came boldly forth in an irregular curve, and its bridge was of
+more than a finger’s breadth; the eyebrows were deep and shaggy, and
+the eyes glowed beneath them like fire in a cave.
+
+While Robin deliberated of whom to inquire respecting his kinsman’s
+dwelling, he was accosted by the innkeeper, a little man in a stained
+white apron, who had come to pay his professional welcome to the
+stranger. Being in the second generation from a French Protestant, he
+seemed to have inherited the courtesy of his parent nation; but no
+variety of circumstances was ever known to change his voice from the
+one shrill note in which he now addressed Robin.
+
+“From the country, I presume, sir?” said he, with a profound bow. “Beg
+leave to congratulate you on your arrival, and trust you intend a long
+stay with us. Fine town here, sir, beautiful buildings, and much that
+may interest a stranger. May I hope for the honor of your commands in
+respect to supper?”
+
+“The man sees a family likeness! the rogue has guessed that I am
+related to the Major!” thought Robin, who had hitherto experienced
+little superfluous civility.
+
+All eyes were now turned on the country lad, standing at the door, in
+his worn three-cornered hat, gray coat, leather breeches, and blue yarn
+stockings, leaning on an oaken cudgel, and bearing a wallet on his
+back.
+
+Robin replied to the courteous innkeeper, with such an assumption of
+confidence as befitted the Major’s relative. “My honest friend,” he
+said, “I shall make it a point to patronize your house on some
+occasion, when”—here he could not help lowering his voice—“when I may
+have more than a parchment three-pence in my pocket. My present
+business,” continued he, speaking with lofty confidence, “is merely to
+inquire my way to the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux.”
+
+There was a sudden and general movement in the room, which Robin
+interpreted as expressing the eagerness of each individual to become
+his guide. But the innkeeper turned his eyes to a written paper on the
+wall, which he read, or seemed to read, with occasional recurrences to
+the young man’s figure.
+
+“What have we here?” said he, breaking his speech into little dry
+fragments. “‘Left the house of the subscriber, bounden servant,
+Hezekiah Mudge,—had on, when he went away, gray coat, leather breeches,
+master’s third-best hat. One pound currency reward to whosoever shall
+lodge him in any jail of the providence.’ Better trudge, boy; better
+trudge!”
+
+Robin had begun to draw his hand towards the lighter end of the oak
+cudgel, but a strange hostility in every countenance induced him to
+relinquish his purpose of breaking the courteous innkeeper’s head. As
+he turned to leave the room, he encountered a sneering glance from the
+bold-featured personage whom he had before noticed; and no sooner was
+he beyond the door, than he heard a general laugh, in which the
+innkeeper’s voice might be distinguished, like the dropping of small
+stones into a kettle.
+
+“Now, is it not strange,” thought Robin, with his usual shrewdness, “is
+it not strange that the confession of an empty pocket should outweigh
+the name of my kinsman, Major Molineux? Oh, if I had one of those
+grinning rascals in the woods, where I and my oak sapling grew up
+together, I would teach him that my arm is heavy though my purse be
+light!”
+
+On turning the corner of the narrow lane, Robin found himself in a
+spacious street, with an unbroken line of lofty houses on each side,
+and a steepled building at the upper end, whence the ringing of a bell
+announced the hour of nine. The light of the moon, and the lamps from
+the numerous shop-windows, discovered people promenading on the
+pavement, and amongst them Robin had hoped to recognize his hitherto
+inscrutable relative. The result of his former inquiries made him
+unwilling to hazard another, in a scene of such publicity, and he
+determined to walk slowly and silently up the street, thrusting his
+face close to that of every elderly gentleman, in search of the Major’s
+lineaments. In his progress, Robin encountered many gay and gallant
+figures. Embroidered garments of showy colors, enormous periwigs,
+gold-laced hats, and silver-hilted swords glided past him and dazzled
+his optics. Travelled youths, imitators of the European fine gentlemen
+of the period, trod jauntily along, half dancing to the fashionable
+tunes which they hummed, and making poor Robin ashamed of his quiet and
+natural gait. At length, after many pauses to examine the gorgeous
+display of goods in the shop-windows, and after suffering some rebukes
+for the impertinence of his scrutiny into people’s faces, the Major’s
+kinsman found himself near the steepled building, still unsuccessful in
+his search. As yet, however, he had seen only one side of the thronged
+street; so Robin crossed, and continued the same sort of inquisition
+down the opposite pavement, with stronger hopes than the philosopher
+seeking an honest man, but with no better fortune. He had arrived about
+midway towards the lower end, from which his course began, when he
+overheard the approach of some one who struck down a cane on the
+flag-stones at every step, uttering at regular intervals, two
+sepulchral hems.
+
+“Mercy on us!” quoth Robin, recognizing the sound.
+
+Turning a corner, which chanced to be close at his right hand, he
+hastened to pursue his researches in some other part of the town. His
+patience now was wearing low, and he seemed to feel more fatigue from
+his rambles since he crossed the ferry, than from his journey of
+several days on the other side. Hunger also pleaded loudly within him,
+and Robin began to balance the propriety of demanding, violently, and
+with lifted cudgel, the necessary guidance from the first solitary
+passenger whom he should meet. While a resolution to this effect was
+gaining strength, he entered a street of mean appearance, on either
+side of which a row of ill-built houses was straggling towards the
+harbor. The moonlight fell upon no passenger along the whole extent,
+but in the third domicile which Robin passed there was a half-opened
+door, and his keen glance detected a woman’s garment within.
+
+“My luck may be better here,” said he to himself.
+
+Accordingly, he approached the doors and beheld it shut closer as he
+did so; yet an open space remained, sufficing for the fair occupant to
+observe the stranger, without a corresponding display on her part. All
+that Robin could discern was a strip of scarlet petticoat, and the
+occasional sparkle of an eye, as if the moonbeams were trembling on
+some bright thing.
+
+“Pretty mistress,” for I may call her so with a good conscience thought
+the shrewd youth, since I know nothing to the contrary,—“my sweet
+pretty mistress, will you be kind enough to tell me whereabouts I must
+seek the dwelling of my kinsman, Major Molineux?”
+
+Robin’s voice was plaintive and winning, and the female, seeing nothing
+to be shunned in the handsome country youth, thrust open the door, and
+came forth into the moonlight. She was a dainty little figure with a
+white neck, round arms, and a slender waist, at the extremity of which
+her scarlet petticoat jutted out over a hoop, as if she were standing
+in a balloon. Moreover, her face was oval and pretty, her hair dark
+beneath the little cap, and her bright eyes possessed a sly freedom,
+which triumphed over those of Robin.
+
+“Major Molineux dwells here,” said this fair woman.
+
+Now, her voice was the sweetest Robin had heard that night, yet he
+could not help doubting whether that sweet voice spoke Gospel truth. He
+looked up and down the mean street, and then surveyed the house before
+which they stood. It was a small, dark edifice of two stories, the
+second of which projected over the lower floor, and the front apartment
+had the aspect of a shop for petty commodities.
+
+“Now, truly, I am in luck,” replied Robin, cunningly, “and so indeed is
+my kinsman, the Major, in having so pretty a housekeeper. But I prithee
+trouble him to step to the door; I will deliver him a message from his
+friends in the country, and then go back to my lodgings at the inn.”
+
+“Nay, the Major has been abed this hour or more,” said the lady of the
+scarlet petticoat; “and it would be to little purpose to disturb him
+to-night, seeing his evening draught was of the strongest. But he is a
+kind-hearted man, and it would be as much as my life’s worth to let a
+kinsman of his turn away from the door. You are the good old
+gentleman’s very picture, and I could swear that was his rainy-weather
+hat. Also he has garments very much resembling those leather
+small-clothes. But come in, I pray, for I bid you hearty welcome in his
+name.”
+
+So saying, the fair and hospitable dame took our hero by the hand; and
+the touch was light, and the force was gentleness, and though Robin
+read in her eyes what he did not hear in her words, yet the
+slender-waisted woman in the scarlet petticoat proved stronger than the
+athletic country youth. She had drawn his half-willing footsteps nearly
+to the threshold, when the opening of a door in the neighborhood
+startled the Major’s housekeeper, and, leaving the Major’s kinsman, she
+vanished speedily into her own domicile. A heavy yawn preceded the
+appearance of a man, who, like the Moonshine of Pyramus and Thisbe,
+carried a lantern, needlessly aiding his sister luminary in the
+heavens. As he walked sleepily up the street, he turned his broad, dull
+face on Robin, and displayed a long staff, spiked at the end.
+
+“Home, vagabond, home!” said the watchman, in accents that seemed to
+fall asleep as soon as they were uttered. “Home, or we’ll set you in
+the stocks by peep of day!”
+
+“This is the second hint of the kind,” thought Robin. “I wish they
+would end my difficulties, by setting me there to-night.”
+
+Nevertheless, the youth felt an instinctive antipathy towards the
+guardian of midnight order, which at first prevented him from asking
+his usual question. But just when the man was about to vanish behind
+the corner, Robin resolved not to lose the opportunity, and shouted
+lustily after him, “I say, friend! will you guide me to the house of my
+kinsman, Major Molineux?”
+
+The watchman made no reply, but turned the corner and was gone; yet
+Robin seemed to hear the sound of drowsy laughter stealing along the
+solitary street. At that moment, also, a pleasant titter saluted him
+from the open window above his head; he looked up, and caught the
+sparkle of a saucy eye; a round arm beckoned to him, and next he heard
+light footsteps descending the staircase within. But Robin, being of
+the household of a New England clergyman, was a good youth, as well as
+a shrewd one; so he resisted temptation, and fled away.
+
+He now roamed desperately, and at random, through the town, almost
+ready to believe that a spell was on him, like that by which a wizard
+of his country had once kept three pursuers wandering, a whole winter
+night, within twenty paces of the cottage which they sought. The
+streets lay before him, strange and desolate, and the lights were
+extinguished in almost every house. Twice, however, little parties of
+men, among whom Robin distinguished individuals in outlandish attire,
+came hurrying along; but, though on both occasions, they paused to
+address him such intercourse did not at all enlighten his perplexity.
+They did but utter a few words in some language of which Robin knew
+nothing, and perceiving his inability to answer, bestowed a curse upon
+him in plain English and hastened away. Finally, the lad determined to
+knock at the door of every mansion that might appear worthy to be
+occupied by his kinsman, trusting that perseverance would overcome the
+fatality that had hitherto thwarted him. Firm in this resolve, he was
+passing beneath the walls of a church, which formed the corner of two
+streets, when, as he turned into the shade of its steeple, he
+encountered a bulky stranger muffled in a cloak. The man was proceeding
+with the speed of earnest business, but Robin planted himself full
+before him, holding the oak cudgel with both hands across his body as a
+bar to further passage.
+
+“Halt, honest man, and answer me a question,” said he, very resolutely.
+“Tell me, this instant, whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman,
+Major Molineux!”
+
+“Keep your tongue between your teeth, fool, and let me pass!” said a
+deep, gruff voice, which Robin partly remembered. “Let me pass, or I’ll
+strike you to the earth!”
+
+“No, no, neighbor!” cried Robin, flourishing his cudgel, and then
+thrusting its larger end close to the man’s muffled face. “No, no, I’m
+not the fool you take me for, nor do you pass till I have an answer to
+my question. Whereabouts is the dwelling of my kinsman, Major
+Molineux?” The stranger, instead of attempting to force his passage,
+stepped back into the moonlight, unmuffled his face, and stared full
+into that of Robin.
+
+“Watch here an hour, and Major Molineux will pass by,” said he.
+
+Robin gazed with dismay and astonishment on the unprecedented
+physiognomy of the speaker. The forehead with its double prominence the
+broad hooked nose, the shaggy eyebrows, and fiery eyes were those which
+he had noticed at the inn, but the man’s complexion had undergone a
+singular, or, more properly, a twofold change. One side of the face
+blazed an intense red, while the other was black as midnight, the
+division line being in the broad bridge of the nose; and a mouth which
+seemed to extend from ear to ear was black or red, in contrast to the
+color of the cheek. The effect was as if two individual devils, a fiend
+of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this
+infernal visage. The stranger grinned in Robin’s face, muffled his
+party-colored features, and was out of sight in a moment.
+
+“Strange things we travellers see!” ejaculated Robin.
+
+He seated himself, however, upon the steps of the church-door,
+resolving to wait the appointed time for his kinsman. A few moments
+were consumed in philosophical speculations upon the species of man who
+had just left him; but having settled this point shrewdly, rationally,
+and satisfactorily, he was compelled to look elsewhere for his
+amusement. And first he threw his eyes along the street. It was of more
+respectable appearance than most of those into which he had wandered,
+and the moon, creating, like the imaginative power, a beautiful
+strangeness in familiar objects, gave something of romance to a scene
+that might not have possessed it in the light of day. The irregular and
+often quaint architecture of the houses, some of whose roofs were
+broken into numerous little peaks, while others ascended, steep and
+narrow, into a single point, and others again were square; the pure
+snow-white of some of their complexions, the aged darkness of others,
+and the thousand sparklings, reflected from bright substances in the
+walls of many; these matters engaged Robin’s attention for a while, and
+then began to grow wearisome. Next he endeavored to define the forms of
+distant objects, starting away, with almost ghostly indistinctness,
+just as his eye appeared to grasp them, and finally he took a minute
+survey of an edifice which stood on the opposite side of the street,
+directly in front of the church-door, where he was stationed. It was a
+large, square mansion, distinguished from its neighbors by a balcony,
+which rested on tall pillars, and by an elaborate Gothic window,
+communicating therewith.
+
+“Perhaps this is the very house I have been seeking,” thought Robin.
+
+Then he strove to speed away the time, by listening to a murmur which
+swept continually along the street, yet was scarcely audible, except to
+an unaccustomed ear like his; it was a low, dull, dreamy sound,
+compounded of many noises, each of which was at too great a distance to
+be separately heard. Robin marvelled at this snore of a sleeping town,
+and marvelled more whenever its continuity was broken by now and then a
+distant shout, apparently loud where it originated. But altogether it
+was a sleep-inspiring sound, and, to shake off its drowsy influence,
+Robin arose, and climbed a window-frame, that he might view the
+interior of the church. There the moonbeams came trembling in, and fell
+down upon the deserted pews, and extended along the quiet aisles. A
+fainter yet more awful radiance was hovering around the pulpit, and one
+solitary ray had dared to rest upon the open page of the great Bible.
+Had nature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the house which
+man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the visible sanctity of the
+place,—visible because no earthly and impure feet were within the
+walls? The scene made Robin’s heart shiver with a sensation of
+loneliness stronger than he had ever felt in the remotest depths of his
+native woods; so he turned away and sat down again before the door.
+There were graves around the church, and now an uneasy thought obtruded
+into Robin’s breast. What if the object of his search, which had been
+so often and so strangely thwarted, were all the time mouldering in his
+shroud? What if his kinsman should glide through yonder gate, and nod
+and smile to him in dimly passing by?
+
+“Oh that any breathing thing were here with me!” said Robin.
+
+Recalling his thoughts from this uncomfortable track, he sent them over
+forest, hill, and stream, and attempted to imagine how that evening of
+ambiguity and weariness had been spent by his father’s household. He
+pictured them assembled at the door, beneath the tree, the great old
+tree, which had been spared for its huge twisted trunk and venerable
+shade, when a thousand leafy brethren fell. There, at the going down of
+the summer sun, it was his father’s custom to perform domestic worship
+that the neighbors might come and join with him like brothers of the
+family, and that the wayfaring man might pause to drink at that
+fountain, and keep his heart pure by freshening the memory of home.
+Robin distinguished the seat of every individual of the little
+audience; he saw the good man in the midst, holding the Scriptures in
+the golden light that fell from the western clouds; he beheld him close
+the book and all rise up to pray. He heard the old thanksgivings for
+daily mercies, the old supplications for their continuance to which he
+had so often listened in weariness, but which were now among his dear
+remembrances. He perceived the slight inequality of his father’s voice
+when he came to speak of the absent one; he noted how his mother turned
+her face to the broad and knotted trunk; how his elder brother scorned,
+because the beard was rough upon his upper lip, to permit his features
+to be moved; how the younger sister drew down a low hanging branch
+before her eyes; and how the little one of all, whose sports had
+hitherto broken the decorum of the scene, understood the prayer for her
+playmate, and burst into clamorous grief. Then he saw them go in at the
+door; and when Robin would have entered also, the latch tinkled into
+its place, and he was excluded from his home.
+
+“Am I here, or there?” cried Robin, starting; for all at once, when his
+thoughts had become visible and audible in a dream, the long, wide,
+solitary street shone out before him.
+
+He aroused himself, and endeavored to fix his attention steadily upon
+the large edifice which he had surveyed before. But still his mind kept
+vibrating between fancy and reality; by turns, the pillars of the
+balcony lengthened into the tall, bare stems of pines, dwindled down to
+human figures, settled again into their true shape and size, and then
+commenced a new succession of changes. For a single moment, when he
+deemed himself awake, he could have sworn that a visage—one which he
+seemed to remember, yet could not absolutely name as his kinsman’s—was
+looking towards him from the Gothic window. A deeper sleep wrestled
+with and nearly overcame him, but fled at the sound of footsteps along
+the opposite pavement. Robin rubbed his eyes, discerned a man passing
+at the foot of the balcony, and addressed him in a loud, peevish, and
+lamentable cry.
+
+“Hallo, friend! must I wait here all night for my kinsman, Major
+Molineux?”
+
+The sleeping echoes awoke, and answered the voice; and the passenger,
+barely able to discern a figure sitting in the oblique shade of the
+steeple, traversed the street to obtain a nearer view. He was himself a
+gentleman in his prime, of open, intelligent, cheerful, and altogether
+prepossessing countenance. Perceiving a country youth, apparently
+homeless and without friends, he accosted him in a tone of real
+kindness, which had become strange to Robin’s ears.
+
+“Well, my good lad, why are you sitting here?” inquired he. “Can I be
+of service to you in any way?”
+
+“I am afraid not, sir,” replied Robin, despondingly; “yet I shall take
+it kindly, if you’ll answer me a single question. I’ve been searching,
+half the night, for one Major Molineux, now, sir, is there really such
+a person in these parts, or am I dreaming?”
+
+“Major Molineux! The name is not altogether strange to me,” said the
+gentleman, smiling. “Have you any objection to telling me the nature of
+your business with him?”
+
+Then Robin briefly related that his father was a clergyman, settled on
+a small salary, at a long distance back in the country, and that he and
+Major Molineux were brothers’ children. The Major, having inherited
+riches, and acquired civil and military rank, had visited his cousin,
+in great pomp, a year or two before; had manifested much interest in
+Robin and an elder brother, and, being childless himself, had thrown
+out hints respecting the future establishment of one of them in life.
+The elder brother was destined to succeed to the farm which his father
+cultivated in the interval of sacred duties; it was therefore
+determined that Robin should profit by his kinsman’s generous
+intentions, especially as he seemed to be rather the favorite, and was
+thought to possess other necessary endowments.
+
+“For I have the name of being a shrewd youth,” observed Robin, in this
+part of his story.
+
+“I doubt not you deserve it,” replied his new friend, good-naturedly;
+“but pray proceed.”
+
+“Well, sir, being nearly eighteen years old, and well grown, as you
+see,” continued Robin, drawing himself up to his full height, “I
+thought it high time to begin in the world. So my mother and sister put
+me in handsome trim, and my father gave me half the remnant of his last
+year’s salary, and five days ago I started for this place, to pay the
+Major a visit. But, would you believe it, sir! I crossed the ferry a
+little after dark, and have yet found nobody that would show me the way
+to his dwelling; only, an hour or two since, I was told to wait here,
+and Major Molineux would pass by.”
+
+“Can you describe the man who told you this?” inquired the gentleman.
+
+“Oh, he was a very ill-favored fellow, sir,” replied Robin, “with two
+great bumps on his forehead, a hook nose, fiery eyes; and, what struck
+me as the strangest, his face was of two different colors. Do you
+happen to know such a man, sir?”
+
+“Not intimately,” answered the stranger, “but I chanced to meet him a
+little time previous to your stopping me. I believe you may trust his
+word, and that the Major will very shortly pass through this street. In
+the mean time, as I have a singular curiosity to witness your meeting,
+I will sit down here upon the steps and bear you company.”
+
+He seated himself accordingly, and soon engaged his companion in
+animated discourse. It was but of brief continuance, however, for a
+noise of shouting, which had long been remotely audible, drew so much
+nearer that Robin inquired its cause.
+
+“What may be the meaning of this uproar?” asked he. “Truly, if your
+town be always as noisy, I shall find little sleep while I am an
+inhabitant.”
+
+“Why, indeed, friend Robin, there do appear to be three or four riotous
+fellows abroad to-night,” replied the gentleman. “You must not expect
+all the stillness of your native woods here in our streets. But the
+watch will shortly be at the heels of these lads and—”
+
+“Ay, and set them in the stocks by peep of day,” interrupted Robin
+recollecting his own encounter with the drowsy lantern-bearer. “But,
+dear sir, if I may trust my ears, an army of watchmen would never make
+head against such a multitude of rioters. There were at least a
+thousand voices went up to make that one shout.”
+
+“May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions?”
+said his friend.
+
+“Perhaps a man may; but Heaven forbid that a woman should!” responded
+the shrewd youth, thinking of the seductive tones of the Major’s
+housekeeper.
+
+The sounds of a trumpet in some neighboring street now became so
+evident and continual, that Robin’s curiosity was strongly excited. In
+addition to the shouts, he heard frequent bursts from many instruments
+of discord, and a wild and confused laughter filled up the intervals.
+Robin rose from the steps, and looked wistfully towards a point whither
+people seemed to be hastening.
+
+“Surely some prodigious merry-making is going on,” exclaimed he “I have
+laughed very little since I left home, sir, and should be sorry to lose
+an opportunity. Shall we step round the corner by that darkish house
+and take our share of the fun?”
+
+“Sit down again, sit down, good Robin,” replied the gentleman, laying
+his hand on the skirt of the gray coat. “You forget that we must wait
+here for your kinsman; and there is reason to believe that he will pass
+by, in the course of a very few moments.”
+
+The near approach of the uproar had now disturbed the neighborhood;
+windows flew open on all sides; and many heads, in the attire of the
+pillow, and confused by sleep suddenly broken, were protruded to the
+gaze of whoever had leisure to observe them. Eager voices hailed each
+other from house to house, all demanding the explanation, which not a
+soul could give. Half-dressed men hurried towards the unknown commotion
+stumbling as they went over the stone steps that thrust themselves into
+the narrow foot-walk. The shouts, the laughter, and the tuneless bray
+the antipodes of music, came onwards with increasing din, till
+scattered individuals, and then denser bodies, began to appear round a
+corner at the distance of a hundred yards.
+
+“Will you recognize your kinsman, if he passes in this crowd?” inquired
+the gentleman.
+
+“Indeed, I can’t warrant it, sir; but I’ll take my stand here, and keep
+a bright lookout,” answered Robin, descending to the outer edge of the
+pavement.
+
+A mighty stream of people now emptied into the street, and came rolling
+slowly towards the church. A single horseman wheeled the corner in the
+midst of them, and close behind him came a band of fearful wind
+instruments, sending forth a fresher discord now that no intervening
+buildings kept it from the ear. Then a redder light disturbed the
+moonbeams, and a dense multitude of torches shone along the street,
+concealing, by their glare, whatever object they illuminated. The
+single horseman, clad in a military dress, and bearing a drawn sword,
+rode onward as the leader, and, by his fierce and variegated
+countenance, appeared like war personified; the red of one cheek was an
+emblem of fire and sword; the blackness of the other betokened the
+mourning that attends them. In his train were wild figures in the
+Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the
+whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some
+feverish brain, and were sweeping visibly through the midnight streets.
+A mass of people, inactive, except as applauding spectators, hemmed the
+procession in; and several women ran along the sidewalk, piercing the
+confusion of heavier sounds with their shrill voices of mirth or
+terror.
+
+“The double-faced fellow has his eye upon me,” muttered Robin, with an
+indefinite but an uncomfortable idea that he was himself to bear a part
+in the pageantry.
+
+The leader turned himself in the saddle, and fixed his glance full upon
+the country youth, as the steed went slowly by. When Robin had freed
+his eyes from those fiery ones, the musicians were passing before him,
+and the torches were close at hand; but the unsteady brightness of the
+latter formed a veil which he could not penetrate. The rattling of
+wheels over the stones sometimes found its way to his ear, and confused
+traces of a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted into the
+vivid light. A moment more, and the leader thundered a command to halt:
+the trumpets vomited a horrid breath, and then held their peace; the
+shouts and laughter of the people died away, and there remained only a
+universal hum, allied to silence. Right before Robin’s eyes was an
+uncovered cart. There the torches blazed the brightest, there the moon
+shone out like day, and there, in tar-and-feathery dignity, sat his
+kinsman, Major Molineux!
+
+He was an elderly man, of large and majestic person, and strong, square
+features, betokening a steady soul; but steady as it was, his enemies
+had found means to shake it. His face was pale as death, and far more
+ghastly; the broad forehead was contracted in his agony, so that his
+eyebrows formed one grizzled line; his eyes were red and wild, and the
+foam hung white upon his quivering lip. His whole frame was agitated by
+a quick and continual tremor, which his pride strove to quell, even in
+those circumstances of overwhelming humiliation. But perhaps the
+bitterest pang of all was when his eyes met those of Robin; for he
+evidently knew him on the instant, as the youth stood witnessing the
+foul disgrace of a head grown gray in honor. They stared at each other
+in silence, and Robin’s knees shook, and his hair bristled, with a
+mixture of pity and terror. Soon, however, a bewildering excitement
+began to seize upon his mind; the preceding adventures of the night,
+the unexpected appearance of the crowd, the torches, the confused din
+and the hush that followed, the spectre of his kinsman reviled by that
+great multitude,—all this, and, more than all, a perception of
+tremendous ridicule in the whole scene, affected him with a sort of
+mental inebriety. At that moment a voice of sluggish merriment saluted
+Robin’s ears; he turned instinctively, and just behind the corner of
+the church stood the lantern-bearer, rubbing his eyes, and drowsily
+enjoying the lad’s amazement. Then he heard a peal of laughter like the
+ringing of silvery bells; a woman twitched his arm, a saucy eye met
+his, and he saw the lady of the scarlet petticoat. A sharp, dry
+cachinnation appealed to his memory, and, standing on tiptoe in the
+crowd, with his white apron over his head, he beheld the courteous
+little innkeeper. And lastly, there sailed over the heads of the
+multitude a great, broad laugh, broken in the midst by two sepulchral
+hems; thus, “Haw, haw, haw,—hem, hem,—haw, haw, haw, haw!”
+
+The sound proceeded from the balcony of the opposite edifice, and
+thither Robin turned his eyes. In front of the Gothic window stood the
+old citizen, wrapped in a wide gown, his gray periwig exchanged for a
+nightcap, which was thrust back from his forehead, and his silk
+stockings hanging about his legs. He supported himself on his polished
+cane in a fit of convulsive merriment, which manifested itself on his
+solemn old features like a funny inscription on a tombstone. Then Robin
+seemed to hear the voices of the barbers, of the guests of the inn, and
+of all who had made sport of him that night. The contagion was
+spreading among the multitude, when all at once, it seized upon Robin,
+and he sent forth a shout of laughter that echoed through the
+street,—every man shook his sides, every man emptied his lungs, but
+Robin’s shout was the loudest there. The cloud-spirits peeped from
+their silvery islands, as the congregated mirth went roaring up the
+sky! The Man in the Moon heard the far bellow. “Oho,” quoth he, “the
+old earth is frolicsome to-night!”
+
+When there was a momentary calm in that tempestuous sea of sound, the
+leader gave the sign, the procession resumed its march. On they went,
+like fiends that throng in mockery around some dead potentate, mighty
+no more, but majestic still in his agony. On they went, in
+counterfeited pomp, in senseless uproar, in frenzied merriment,
+trampling all on an old man’s heart. On swept the tumult, and left a
+silent street behind.
+
+
+“Well, Robin, are you dreaming?” inquired the gentleman, laying his
+hand on the youth’s shoulder.
+
+Robin started, and withdrew his arm from the stone post to which he had
+instinctively clung, as the living stream rolled by him. His cheek was
+somewhat pale, and his eye not quite as lively as in the earlier part
+of the evening.
+
+“Will you be kind enough to show me the way to the ferry?” said he,
+after a moment’s pause.
+
+“You have, then, adopted a new subject of inquiry?” observed his
+companion, with a smile.
+
+“Why, yes, sir,” replied Robin, rather dryly. “Thanks to you, and to my
+other friends, I have at last met my kinsman, and he will scarce desire
+to see my face again. I begin to grow weary of a town life, sir. Will
+you show me the way to the ferry?”
+
+“No, my good friend Robin,—not to-night, at least,” said the gentleman.
+“Some few days hence, if you wish it, I will speed you on your journey.
+Or, if you prefer to remain with us, perhaps, as you are a shrewd
+youth, you may rise in the world without the help of your kinsman,
+Major Molineux.”
+
+
+
+
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