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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Main Street, 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: Main Street
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: September 18, 2003 [eBook #9236]
+[Most recently updated: May 18, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN STREET ***
+
+
+
+
+Main Street
+
+by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+
+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.breakforth
+
+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!”
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Main Street, by Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+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 <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. 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.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Main Street</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September 18, 2003 [eBook #9236]<br />
+[Most recently updated: May 18, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Widger</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN STREET ***</div>
+
+<h1>Main Street</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Nathaniel Hawthorne</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p>
+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 bean 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,&mdash;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,&mdash;barring, I say, the casualties to which such a complicated piece
+of mechanism is liable,&mdash;I flatter myself, ladies and
+gentlemen,&mdash;that the performance will elicit your generous approbation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold&mdash;not,
+indeed, the Main Street&mdash;but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over
+which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive
+wood,&mdash;the ever-youthful and venerably old,&mdash;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&rsquo;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,&mdash;a majestic and
+queenly woman, or else her spectral image does not represent her
+truly,&mdash;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The whole affair is a manifest catchpenny!&rdquo; observes he, scarcely
+under his breath. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s wooden monkey, sliding up and down a stick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your remarks,&rdquo; replies
+the showman, with a bow. &ldquo;Perhaps they are just. Human art has its
+limits, and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator&rsquo;s
+imagination.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You will get no such aid from mine,&rdquo; responds the critic. &ldquo;I
+make it a point to see things precisely as they are. But come! go ahead! the
+stage is waiting!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The showman proceeds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;such is the ingenious contrivance of this piece of
+pictorial mechanism,&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;for, by its dignity, as marking an
+epoch in the history of the street, it deserves that name,&mdash;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;&mdash;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&rsquo;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. &ldquo;The worshipful Court of Assistants
+have done wisely,&rdquo; say they between themselves. &ldquo;They have chosen
+for our governor a man out of a thousand.&rdquo; Then they toss up their
+hats,&mdash;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&rsquo;s wear,&mdash;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But have you observed the lady who leans upon the arm of Endicott?&mdash;-a
+rose of beauty from an English garden, now to be transplanted to a fresher
+soil. It may be that, long years&mdash;centuries indeed&mdash;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&rsquo;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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is too ridiculous!&mdash;positively insufferable!&rdquo; mutters
+the same critic who had before expressed his disapprobation. &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, sir, you have not the proper point of view,&rdquo; remarks the
+showman. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pshaw!&rdquo; replies the critic; &ldquo;I want no other light and
+shade. I have already told you that it is my business to see things just as
+they are.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibition,&rdquo;
+observes a gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much
+interested,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having nothing to allege against this genealogical objection, the showman
+points again to the scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During this little interruption, you perceive that the Anglo-Saxon
+energy&mdash;as the phrase now goes&mdash;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&rsquo;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?&mdash;how, with the pictured windows, where the light of
+common day was hallowed by being transmitted through the glorified figures of
+saints?&mdash;how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it must have been, with the
+prayers that had gone upward for centuries?&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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,&mdash;how like
+an iron cage was that which they called Liberty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s threshold,
+a child of six or seven years old. Which is the better-grown infant,&mdash;the
+town or the boy?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;its banner fluttering in the breeze, and the
+culverins and sakers showing their deadly muzzles over the rampart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;their spectres, if you choose so to call
+them&mdash;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&mdash;a propriety, an equilibrium, in
+Governor Winthrop&rsquo;s nature&mdash;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&mdash;as Sir Richard Saltonstall has been, once and
+again&mdash;in a forest-bordered settlement of the western wilderness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Have you not already detected a quaint, sly humor in that face,&mdash;an
+eccentricity in the manner,&mdash;a certain indescribable
+waywardness,&mdash;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&mdash;we might almost say
+preaching or expounding&mdash;in the centre of a group of profoundly attentive
+auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here comes Vane&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, my dear sir,&rdquo; interrupts the same gentleman who before
+questioned the showman&rsquo;s genealogical accuracy, &ldquo;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!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The fellow,&rdquo; adds the scarcely civil critic, &ldquo;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,&mdash;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&rsquo;s
+pictures. Well! go on, sir!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir, you break the illusion of the scene,&rdquo; mildly remonstrates the
+showman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Illusion! What illusion?&rdquo; rejoins the critic, with a contemptuous
+snort. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s tongue,&mdash;and that but a
+wretched one, into the bargain!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We public men,&rdquo; replies the showman, meekly, &ldquo;must lay our
+account, sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism. But&mdash;merely
+for your own pleasure, sir&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know better,&rdquo; retorts the critic, settling himself in his seat,
+with sullen but self-complacent immovableness. &ldquo;And, as for my own
+pleasure, I shall best consult it by remaining precisely where I am.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s curiosity excited, and causes each structure, like its
+owner&rsquo;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&rsquo;s hand may give a
+thundering rat-a-tat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, down to 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,&mdash;destined, at some period of its existence, to be the
+abode of an unsuccessful alchemist,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;its spiritual essence,
+bearing up its human imperfection&mdash;find its way to the heavenly
+Father&rsquo;s throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;-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&mdash;the first traveller that has come
+hitherward this morning&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s threat, as the Tidy Man!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;when the new settlement,
+between the forest-border and the sea, had become actually a little
+town,&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is all this?&rdquo; cries the critic. &ldquo;A sermon? If so, it is
+not in the bill.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Very true,&rdquo; replies the showman; &ldquo;and I ask pardon of the
+audience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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;&mdash;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;&mdash;the gift of a new idea. You can discern it in them, illuminating
+their faces&mdash;their whole persons, indeed, however earthly and
+cloddish&mdash;with a light that inevitably shines through, and makes the
+startled community aware that these men are not as they themselves
+are,&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;impious
+varlets that they are, and worse than the heathen Indians!&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;wild and shrill it must be
+to suit such a figure,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s
+life!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,&mdash;as old as the hills of the great pasture, or the headland
+at the harbor&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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?&mdash;the children of the stranger making
+game of the great Squaw Sachem&rsquo;s grandson!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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,&mdash;destined, too,
+to meet a warrior&rsquo;s fate, at the desperate assault on the fortress of the
+Narragansetts!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The mettled steed looks like a pig,&rdquo; interrupts the critic,
+&ldquo;and Captain Gardner himself like the Devil, though a very tame one, and
+on a most diminutive scale.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sir, sir!&rdquo; cries the persecuted showman, losing all
+patience,&mdash;for, indeed, he had particularly prided himself on these
+figures of Captain Gardner and his horse,&mdash;&ldquo;I see that there is no
+hope of pleasing you. Pray, sir, do me the favor to take back your money, and
+withdraw!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not I!&rdquo; answers the unconscionable critic. &ldquo;I am just
+beginning to get interested in the matter. Come! turn your crank, and grind out
+a few more of these fooleries!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Turn your crank, I say,&rdquo; bellows the remorseless critic,
+&ldquo;and grind it out, whatever it be, without further preface!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The showman deems it best to comply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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,&mdash;a
+sad sight, truly,&mdash;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&rsquo;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,&mdash;she meanwhile knitting in the chimney-corner,&mdash;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&rsquo;s turn to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Behind these two,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!&mdash;he? The holy man!&mdash;the learned!&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;to look at him&mdash;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,&mdash;while we
+hear his ejaculations of prayer, that seem to bubble up out of the depths of
+his heart, and fly heavenward, unawares,&mdash;while we behold a radiance
+brightening on his features as from the other world, which is but a few steps
+off,&mdash;who would not say, that, over the dusty track of the Main Street, a
+Christian saint is now going to a martyr&rsquo;s death? May not the Arch-Fiend
+have been too subtle for the court and jury, and betrayed them&mdash;laughing
+in his sleeve, the while&mdash;into the awful error of pouring out sanctified
+blood as an acceptable sacrifice upon God&rsquo;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&rsquo;s power shall this day receive its death-blow
+in New England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Heaven grant it be so!&mdash;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&rsquo;s
+power and malice! Mercy Parris, the minister&rsquo;s daughter, has been smitten
+by a flash of Martha Carrier&rsquo;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!&mdash;ere they fling out their withered arms, and scatter
+pestilence by handfuls among the crowd!&mdash;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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?&mdash;and the aged pall-bearers, too, as they
+strive to walk solemnly beside it?&mdash;and wherefore do the mourners tread on
+one another&rsquo;s heels?&mdash;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s arms, when the primeval
+trees were flinging their shadow over Roger Conant&rsquo;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,&mdash;often pausing,&mdash;often leaning over his staff,&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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;&mdash;and another&mdash;another&mdash;and another&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&mdash;so melancholy a death-spot&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;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,&mdash;and it is what I chiefly regret,&mdash;I had
+expended a vast deal of light and brilliancy on a representation of the street
+in its whole length, from Buffum&rsquo;s Corner downward, on the night of the
+grand illumination for General Taylor&rsquo;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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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&rsquo;s entertainment shall receive back the admission fee at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then give me mine,&rdquo; cries the critic, stretching out his palm.
+&ldquo;I said that your exhibition would prove a humbug, and so it has turned
+out. So, hand over my quarter!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #9236 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9236)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Main Street, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: Main Street
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Posting Date: December 20, 2010 [EBook #9236]
+Release Date: November, 2005
+First Posted: September 18, 2003
+Last Updated: February 6, 2007
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAIN STREET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger.  HTML version by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE SNOW-IMAGE
+
+                             AND
+
+                     OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES
+
+
+                         MAIN STREET
+
+                              By
+
+                      Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+
+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 bean 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 meets, on what was
+then the woodland pathway, but has out 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 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 Wall 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 manoeuvre 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 Angele'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 karate
+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, 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 breakforth, 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 bat.  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
+me?  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 aims, 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-vitae 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!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Main Street, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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+Project Gutenberg EBook, Main Street, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+From "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales"
+#63 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+
+Title: Main Street
+      (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: Nov, 2005  [EBook #9236]
+[This file was first posted on September 18, 2003]
+[Last updated on February 6, 2007]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MAIN STREET ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE SNOW-IMAGE
+
+                             AND
+
+                     OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES
+
+
+                         MAIN STREET
+
+                              By
+
+                      Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+
+
+
+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 bean 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 meets, on what was
+then the woodland pathway, but has out 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 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 Wall 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 manoeuvre 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 Angele'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 karate
+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, 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 breakforth, 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 bat.
+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
+me?  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 aims, 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-vitae 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!"
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MAIN STREET ***
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