I had not seen the old place for thirty years, when, four years ago, I
found myself in the pretty little town of X----, which had once appeared
so lordly and so proud to my poor rustic eyes, with a vacant half-day on
my hands. I hired a buggy and a boy, and had him drive me down to that
point on the river where our mills at least used to be.
The road was all strange to me, and when I reached my destination that
was stranger still. The timber had been cut from the hill and island,
and where the stately hickories had once towered and the sycamores
drooped there was now a bald knob and a sterile tract of sand, good
hardly for the grazing of the few cows that cropped its scanty herbage.
They were both very much smaller: the hill was not the mountain it had
seemed, the island no longer rivalled the proportions of England.
The grist-mill, whose gray bulk had kept so large a place in my memory,
was sadly dwarfed, and in its decrepitude it had canted backwards, and
seemed tottering to its fall. I explored it from wheel-pit to
cooling-floor; there was not an Indian in it, but, ah! what ghosts!
ghosts of the living and the dead; my brothers’, my playmates’, my own!
At last, it was really haunted. I think no touch of repair had been put
upon it, or upon the old saw-mill, either, on whose roof the shingles
had all curled up like the feathers of a frizzly chicken in the rains
and suns of those thirty summers past. The head-race, once a type of
silent, sullen power, now crept feebly to its work; even the water
seemed to have grown old, and anything might have battled successfully
with the currents where the spool-pig was drowned and the miller’s boy
was carried so near his death.
I had with me for company the boy of the present miller, who silently
followed me about, and answered my questions as he could. The epoch of
our possession was as remote and as unstoried to him as that of the
Mound-Builders. A small frame house, exactly the size and shape of our
log-cabin, occupied its site, and he had never even heard that any other
house had ever stood there. The “new house,” shingled and
weather-boarded with black-walnut, had bleached to a silvery gray, and
had no longer a trace of its rich brown. He let me go into it, and
wander about at will. It was very little, and the small rooms were very
low. It was plastered now; it was even papered; but it was not half so
fine as it used to be.
I asked him if there was a graveyard on top of the hill, and he said,
“Yes; an old one;” and we went up together to look at it, with its
stones all fallen or sunken away, and no memory of the simple, harmless
man and his little children whom I had seen laid there, going down with
each into the dust in terror and desolation of spirit. His widow
probably no longer wears dresses of changeable silk; and where is the
orphan boy in the oil-cloth cap? In Congress, for all I know.
I looked across the bare island to where their cabin had stood, and my
eyes might as well have sought the cities of the plain. The boy at my
elbow could not make out why the gray-mustached, middle-aged man should
care, and when I attempted to tell him that I had once been a boy of his
age there, and that this place had been my home, the boy of whom I have
here written so freely seemed so much less a part of me than the boy to
whom I spoke, that, upon the whole, I had rather a sense of imposing
upon my listener.