For two years I have had a most faithful, intimate, and useful friend,
whom I have constantly worn next my heart. I do not know him for a
Spiritualist, but by some mysterious sympathy he hears the incessant,
ghostly foot-falls of Time, and repeats them accurately to my ear.
While I wake he tells me how Time is passing. While I sleep he is still
marking his steps, so that sometimes I have a feeling of awe, as if my
mysterious friend were counting my own life away. Then again I am sure
that in the faint, persistent monotone of his voice I hear the singing
of the old mower's inevitable scythe. The Imagination contemplates this
friend of mine with wonder. But Science sees him holding the hand of a
captain in his ship at sea, or of a conductor in a train on shore, and
honors in him the friend of civilization.
His native place is Waltham, in Massachusetts, and he invited me but a
few days since to accompany him in a little visit thither. I cheerfully
assented, and we took the cars in Boston, at the Worcester Depot, and
after passing a range of unsavory back-yards and ill-favored houses, and
winding beneath streets and by the side of kennels, we emerged upon the
broad meadows and marshes from which rise in the distance the Roxbury
and Brookline hills. The whole region is covered with bright, wooden
houses. The villages have a pert, thrifty, contented air, which no
suburbs in the world surpass. If the houses are very white and a village
looks like a camp, it is because the instinct of the inhabitants assures
them that they may strike their tents to-morrow and move Westward or
elsewhere to a greater prosperity. In older countries the stained and
ancient stone houses are symbols of the inflexible state of society to
which they belong. The dwellers are anchored to that condition. There is
no "Westward ho" for them. Like father, like son. The hod-carrier's son
carries hods. Even the headsman's office is hereditary.
"Yes, yes," hummed my friend, in his patient, persistent monotone,
"the American citizen is an aërial plant. He has no roots. There is no
wrenching, when he changes place. If there were, how could he overrun
the continent in time? He must carry lighter weight than Caesar's
soldiers. What has he to do with old houses? His very inventions would
make his house intolerable to him in twenty or thirty years."
"But we are going at this very moment to see your ancestral halls, are
we not?" I modestly inquired.
"Yes," he replied; "but they are not ten years old, and every year
changes them."
By this time we were gliding through the gardens of Brookline and
Brighton, which have been afflicted of late years with the Mansard
epidemic. It has swept the whole region. Scarcely a house has escaped.
Even the newest are touched,--sometimes only upon the extremities or
outbuildings, but more frequently they are covered all over with the
Mansard.
"That affection of the house-top," whispered I to my friend, "was
originally derived from the dome of the Invalides, and has raged now for
a century and a half."
"Yes," replied my companion, gravely, "we are not very fastidious in our
importations."
He went on murmuring to himself as usual. Then he resumed more
audibly,--
"I suppose that most people, upon looking at me, would take me for a
foreigner. But you know how peculiarly native American I am. I am indeed
only a watch, and," added my modest friend, glancing at the gold chain
which hung from my waistcoat button-hole to the pocket, "if you will
pardon my melancholy joke, I am for putting Americans only upon guard."
This military expression suddenly sent my thoughts elsewhere; and for
some time the rattling of the cars sounded in my ears like another
rattling, and the gentle Charles River was to my eyes the historic
Rapidan or Rappahannock.
"Don't you think," unobtrusively ticked my watch, "that the exhortation
to encourage home-industry has a peculiar force just now? I mean nothing
personal; and I hope you will not think me too forward or fast."
"I have never had reason to think so," I answered; "and I am so used
to look upon your candid face to know exactly what the hour is, that I
shall be very much obliged, if you will tell me the time of day in this
matter also; unless, indeed, you should find the jar of the cars too
much for you, and prefer to stop before you talk."
"If I stopped, I certainly could not talk," my watch answered; "and did
you ever know me to stop on account of any jar?"
I hastened to exculpate myself from any intention of unkind insinuation,
and my watch ticked steadily on.
"If your mill turns only by a stream that flows to you through your
neighbor's grounds, your neighbor has your flour at his mercy. You can
grind your grist when he chooses, not when you will."