It was a comfort to get to a place with something like society, with
residences which had pretensions to elegance, with people of some
breeding, with a newspaper, and "stores" to advertise in it, and with
two or three churches to keep each other alive by wholesome agitation.
Rockland was such a place.
Some of the natural features of the town have been described already.
The Mountain, of course, was what gave it its character, and redeemed
it from wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary
country-villages. Beautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which
belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it
dignity, it had yet closer relations with the town over which it brooded
than the passing stranger knew of. Thus, it made a local climate by
cutting off the northern winds and holding the sun's heat like a
garden-wall. Peach-trees, which, on the northern side of the mountain,
hardly ever came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in Rockland.
But there was still another relation between the mountain and the town
at its foot, which strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and
which was oftener thought of than spoken of by its inhabitants. Those
high-impending forests,--"hangers," as White of Selborne would have
called them,--sloping far upward and backward into the distance, had
always an air of menace blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as
if some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare,
precipitous flanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide
like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest chance-support, and, so
sliding, crush the village out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled
over on the valley of Goldau.
Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short
residence in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought
of this awful green wall piled up into the air over their heads. They
would lie awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffled snapping of
roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break
away, like the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were
clinging with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel
away and crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths. And yet, by
one of those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human
nature, there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or
forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening
mountain-side, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls.
The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction. If the
mountain should ever slide, they had a kind of feeling as if they ought
to be there. It was a fascination like that which the rattlesnake is
said to exert.
This comparison naturally suggests the recollection of that other source
of danger which was an element in the everyday life of the Rockland
people. The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a joke against
them, that a Rocklander couldn't hear a bean-pod rattle without saying,
"The Lord have mercy on us!" It is very true, that many a nervous old
lady has had a terrible start, caused by some mischievous young rogue's
giving a sudden shake to one of these noisy vegetable products in her
immediate vicinity. Yet, strangely enough, many persons missed the
excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite in other regions, where
there were nothing but black and green and striped snakes, mean
ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent without his venom,--
poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag.
Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably experience a certain
gratification in this infinitesimal sense of danger. It was noted that
the old people retained their hearing longer than in other places. Some
said it was the softened climate, but others believed it was owing to
the habit of keeping their ears open whenever they were walking through
the grass or in the woods. At any rate, a slight sense of danger is
often an agreeable stimulus. People sip their _crème de noyau_ with a
peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there is a bare possibility that it
may contain prussic acid enough to knock them over; in which case they
will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had emptied itself into the earth
through their brain and marrow.
But Rockland had other features which helped to give it a special
character. First of all, there was one grand street which was its chief
glory. Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its elms made
a long, pointed-arched gallery of it through most of its extent. No
natural Gothic arch compares, for a moment, with that formed by two
American elms, where their lofty jets of foliage shoot across each
other's ascending curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of green.
When one looks through a long double row of these, as in that lovely
avenue which the poets of Yale remember so well,--
"Oh, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear
As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!"--
he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer than any minster, with
all its clustered stems and flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.
Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its
elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable
creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and
patient. It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and
makes arrangements for coming up by-and-by. So, in spring, one finds a
crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small
compared to those, succulent vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of
them, slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as
Herod's innocents. One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has
established a kind of right to stay. Three generations of carrot and
parsnip-consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let
your great-grandson look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two feet of clean
girth, three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy
circle, it covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed
oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted into the summer skies.
Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not only on account of its
Gothic-arched vista. In this street were most of the great houses, or
"mansion-houses," as it was usual to call them. Along this street,
also, the more nicely kept and neatly painted dwellings were chiefly
congregated. It was the correct thing for a Rockland dignitary to have a
house in Elm Street.
A New England "mansion-house" is naturally square, with dormer windows
projecting from the roof, which has a balustrade with turned posts round
it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard before its door, as its owner
shows a respectable expanse of clean shirt-front. It has a lateral
margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master wears his white
wrist-bands showing beyond his coat-cuffs. It may not have what can
properly be called grounds, but it must have elbow-room, at any rate.
Without it, it is like a man who is always tight-buttoned for want of
any linen to show. The mansion-house which has had to button itself up
tight in fences, for want of green or gravel margin, will be advertising
for boarders presently. The old English pattern of the New England
mansion-house, only on a somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas Abney's
place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers for the family, and
wrote those blessed hymns of his that sing us into consciousness in
our cradles, and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between the
momenta of wandering and of stupor, when we lie dying, and sound over
us when we can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears to the hot,
aching eyes beneath the thick, black veils, and carrying the holy calm
with them which filled the good man's heart, as he prayed and sung under
the shelter of the old English mansion-house.
Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-story, trim, white-painted,
"genteel" houses, which, being more gossipy and less nicely bred,
crowded close up to the street, instead of standing back from it with
arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses. Their little front-yards were very
commonly full of lilac and syringa and other bushes, which were allowed
to smother the lower story almost to the exclusion of light and air, so
that, what with small windows and small windowpanes, and the darkness
made by these choking growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some of
these houses were the most tomb-like, melancholy places that could be
found anywhere among the abodes of the living. Their garnishing was apt
to assist this impression. Large-patterned carpets, which always look
discontented in little rooms, hair-cloth furniture, black and shiny as
beetles' wing-cases, and centre-tables, with a sullen oil-lamp of the
kind called astral by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre,--these
things were inevitable. In set piles round the lamp was ranged the
current literature of the day, in the form of Temperance Documents,
unbound numbers of one of the Unknown Public's Magazines with worn-out
steel engravings and high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a
distinguished British author whom it is unnecessary to mention, a volume
of sermons, or a novel or two, or both, according to the tastes of the
family, and the Good Book, which is always Itself in the cheapest and
commonest company. The father of the family with his hand in the breast
of his coat, the mother of the same in a wide-bordered cap, sometimes a
print of the Last Supper, by no means Morghen's, or the Father of his
Country, or the old General, or the Defender of the Constitution, or an
unknown clergyman with an open book before him,--these were the usual
ornaments of the walls, the first two a matter of rigor, the others
according to politics and other tendencies.
This intermediate class of houses, wherever one finds them in New
England towns, are very apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory. They
have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor the comfort of the
farm-house. They are rarely kept at an agreeable temperature. The
mansion-house has large fireplaces and generous chimneys, and is open
to the sunshine. The farm-house makes no pretensions, but it has a good
warm kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable there with the
rest of the family, without fear and without reproach. These lesser
country-houses of genteel aspirations are much given to patent
subterfuges of one kind and another to get heat without combustion. The
chilly parlor and the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the
warmest welcome. If one would make these places wholesome, happy, and
cheerful, the first precept would be,--The dearest fuel, plenty of it,
and let half the heat go up the chimney. If you can't afford this, don't
try to live in a "genteel" fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest
farm-house.
There were a good many comfortable farm-houses scattered about Rockland.
The best of them were something of the following pattern, which is too
often superseded of late by a more pretentious, but infinitely less
pleasing kind of rustic architecture. A little back from the road,
seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain wooden building, two
stories in front, with a long roof sloping backwards to within a few
feet of the ground. This, like the "mansion-house," is copied from an
old English pattern. Cottages of this model may be seen in Lancashire,
for instance, always with the same honest, homely look, as if their
roofs acknowledged their relationship to the soil out of which they
sprung. The walls were unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun
and air and rain to a quiet dove- or slate-color. An old broken mill-
stone at the door,--a well-sweep pointing like a finger to the heavens,
which the shining round of water beneath looked up at like a dark
unsleeping eye,--a single large elm a little at one side,--a barn twice
as big as the house,--a cattle-yard, with
"The white horns tossing above the wall,"--
some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone walls round them,--a
row of beehives,--a garden-patch, with roots, and currant-bushes, and
many-hued holly-hocks, and swollen-stemmed, globe-headed, seedling
onions, and marigolds, and flower-de-luces, and lady's-delights, and
peonies, crowding in together, with southernwood in the borders,
and woodbine and hops and morning-glories climbing as they got a
chance,--these were the features by which the Rockland-born children
remembered the farm-house, when they had grown to be men. Such are the
recollections that come over poor sailor-boys crawling out on reeling
yards to reef topsails as their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape;
and such are the flitting images that make the eyes of old country-born
merchants look dim and dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm
with the after-dinner flush of the red wave out of which Memory arises,
as Aphrodite arose from the green waves of the ocean.
Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences, facing each other, and
looking like a couple of fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in
the air,--as if they would flap their roofs, the next thing, and crow
out of their upstretched steeples, and peck at each other's glass eyes
with their sharp-pointed weathercocks.
The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned New England
meeting-house. It was a large barn with windows, fronted by a square
tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted and raised on legs,
out of which rose a slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at
its summit. Inside, tall, square pews with flapping seats, and a gallery
running round three sides of the building. On the fourth side the
pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging over it. Here preached
the Reverend Pierrepont Honeywood, D.D., successor, after a number of
generations, to the office and the parsonage of the Reverend Didymus
Bean, before mentioned, but not suspected of any of his alleged
heresies. He held to the old faith of the Puritans, and occasionally
delivered a discourse which was considered by the hard-headed
theologians of his parish to have settled the whole matter fully and
finally, so that now there was a good logical basis laid down for
the Millennium, which might begin at once upon the platform of his
demonstrations. Yet the Reverend Dr. Honeywood was fonder of preaching
plain, practical sermons about the duties of life, and showing his
Christianity in abundant good works among his people. It was noticed by
some few of his flock, not without comment, that the great majority of
his texts came from the Gospels, and this more and more as he became
interested in various benevolent enterprises which brought him into
relations with ministers and kind-hearted laymen of other denominations.
The truth is, that he was a man of a very warm, open, and exceedingly
_human_ disposition, and, although bred by a clerical father, whose
motto was "_Sit anima mea cum Puritanis_," he exercised his human
faculties in the harness of his ancient faith with such freedom that
the straps of it got so loose they did not interfere greatly with the
circulation of the warm blood through his system. Once in a while he
seemed to think it necessary to come out with a grand doctrinal sermon,
and then he would lapse away for while into preaching on men's duties to
each other and to society, and hit hard, perhaps, at some of the actual
vices of the time and place, and insist with such tenderness and
eloquence on the great depth and breadth of true Christian love and
charity, that his oldest deacon shook his head, and wished he had
shown as much interest when he was preaching, three Sabbaths back, on
Predestination, or in his discourse against the Sabellians. But he was
sound in the faith; no doubt of that. Did he not preside at the council
held in the town of Tamarack, on the other side of the mountain, which
expelled its clergyman for maintaining heretical doctrines? As presiding
officer, he did not vote, to be sure, but there was no doubt that he was
all right; he had some of the Edwards blood in him, and that couldn't
very well let him go wrong.
The meeting-house on the other and opposite summit was of a more modern
style, considered by many a great improvement on the old New England
model, so that it is not uncommon for a country parish to pull down its
old meeting-house, which has been preached in for a hundred years or so,
and put up one of these more elegant edifices. The new building was in
what may be called the florid shingle-Gothic manner. Its pinnacles and
crockets and other ornaments were, like the body of the building, all of
pine wood,--an admirable material, as it is very soft and easily worked,
and can be painted of any color desired. Inside, the walls were stuccoed
in imitation of stone,--first a dark-brown square, then two light-brown
squares, then another dark-brown square, and so on, to represent the
accidental differences of shade always noticeable in the real stones of
which walls are built. To be sure, the architect could not help getting
his party-colored squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as those
of a chess-board; but nobody can avoid doing things in a systematic and
serial way; indeed, people who wish to plant trees in natural clumps
know very well that they cannot keep from making regular lines and
symmetrical figures, unless by some trick or other, as that one of
throwing up into the air a peck of potatoes and sticking in a tree
wherever a potato happens to fall. The pews of this meeting-house were
the usual oblong ones, where people sit close together with a ledge
before them to support their hymn-books, liable only to occasional
contact with the back of the next pew's heads or bonnets, and a
place running under the seat of that pew where hats could be
deposited,--always at the risk of the owner, in case of injury by boots
or crickets.
In this meeting-house preached the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather, a
divine of the "Liberal" school, as it is commonly called, bred at that
famous college which used to be thought, twenty or thirty years ago, to
have the monopoly of training young men in the milder forms of heresy.
His ministrations were attended with decency, but not followed with
enthusiasm. "The beauty of virtue" got to be an old story at last.
"The moral dignity of human nature" ceased to excite a thrill of
satisfaction, after some hundred repetitions. It grew to be a dull
business, this preaching against stealing and intemperance, while he
knew very well that the thieves were prowling round orchards and
empty houses, instead of being there to hear the sermon, and that the
drunkards, being rarely church-goers, get little good by the statistics
and eloquent appeals of the preacher. Every now and then, however,
the Reverend Mr. Fairweather let off a polemic discourse against his
neighbor opposite, which waked his people up a little; but it was a
languid congregation, at best,--very apt to stay away from meeting in
the afternoon, and not at all given to extra evening services. The
minister, unlike his rival of the other side of the way, was a
down-hearted and timid kind of man. He went on preaching as he had been
taught to preach, but he bad misgivings at times. There was a little
Roman Catholic church at the foot of the hill where his own was placed,
which he always had to pass on Sundays. He could never look on the
thronging multitudes that crowded its pews and aisles or knelt
bare-headed on its steps, without a longing to get in among them and
go down on his knees and enjoy that luxury of devotional contact which
makes a worshipping throng as different from the same numbers praying
apart as a bed of coals is from a trail of scattered cinders.
"Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor laborers and
working-women!" he would say to himself. "If I could but breathe that
atmosphere, stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient litanies,
and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed incense, for one hour, instead of
droning over these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!"
The intellectual isolation of his sect preyed upon him; for, of all the
terrible things to natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to a
minority. No person that looked at his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken
and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard
his querulous, though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his
life was an uneasy one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His
dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed,
and was all the more striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a
belief which made him a passenger on board a shipwrecked planet, was
yet a most good-humored and companionable gentleman, whose laugh on
week-days did one as much good to listen to as the best sermon he ever
delivered on a Sunday.
A few miles from Rockland was a pretty little Episcopal church, with a
roof like a wedge of cheese, a square tower, a stained window, and
a trained rector, who read the service with such ventral depth of
utterance and rrreduplication of the rrresonant letter, that his own
mother would not have known him for her son, if the good woman had not
ironed his surplice and put it on with her own hands.
There were two public-houses in the place: one dignified with the name
of the Mountain House, somewhat frequented by city-people in the summer
months, large-fronted, three-storied, balconied, boasting a distinct
ladies'-drawing-room, and spreading a _table d'hôte_ of some
pretensions; the other, "Pollard's Tahvern," in the common speech,--a
two-story building, with a bar-room, once famous, where there was a
great smell of hay and boots and pipes and all other bucolic-flavored
elements,--where games of checkers were played on the back of the
bellows with red and white kernels of corn, or with beans and
coffee,--where a man slept in a box-settle at night, to wake up early
passengers,--where teamsters came in, with wooden-handled whips and
coarse frocks, reinforcing the bucolic flavor of the atmosphere,
and middle-aged male gossips, sometimes including the squire of the
neighboring law-office, gathered to exchange a question or two about the
news, and then fall into that solemn state of suspended animation which
the temperance bar-rooms of modern days produce on human beings, as the
Grotta del Cane does on dogs in the well-known experiments related
by travellers. This bar-room used to be famous for drinking and
story-telling, and sometimes fighting, in old times. That was when there
were rows of decanters on the shelf behind the bar, and a hissing vessel
of hot water ready, to make punch, and three or four _loggerheads_ (long
irons clubbed at the end) were always lying in the fire in the cold
season, waiting to be plunged into sputtering and foaming mugs of
flip,---a goodly compound, speaking according to the flesh, made with
beer and sugar, and a certain suspicion of strong waters, over which a
little nutmeg being grated, and in it the hot iron being then allowed to
sizzle, there results a peculiar singed aroma, which the wise regard as
a warning to remove themselves at once out of the reach of temptation.
But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer presented its old
attractions, and the loggerheads had long disappeared from the fire. In
place of the decanters, were boxes containing "lozengers," as they were
commonly called, sticks of candy in jars, cigars in tumblers, a few
lemons, grown hard-skinned and marvellously shrunken by long exposure,
but still feebly suggestive of possible lemonade,--the whole ornamented
by festoons of yellow and blue cut fly-paper. On the front shelf of the
bar stood a large German-silver pitcher of water, and scattered about
were ill-conditioned lamps, with wicks that always wanted picking, which
burned red and smoked a good deal, and were apt to go out without any
obvious cause, leaving strong reminiscences of the whale-fishery in the
circumambient air.
The common school-houses of Rockland were dwarfed by the grandeur of the
Apollinean Institute. The master passed one of them, in a walk he was
taking, soon after his arrival at Rockland. He looked in at the rows of
desks and recalled his late experiences. He could not help laughing, as
he thought how neatly he had knocked the young butcher off his pins.
"'A little _science_ is a dangerous thing.'
as well as a little 'learning,'" he said to himself; "only it's
dangerous to the fellow you try it on." And he cut him a good stick and
began climbing the side of The Mountain to get a look at that famous
Rattlesnake Ledge.