The old people had been living in their village home long before I went
there to become their neighbor. They had reared their family of five
children in the old house, and they had all married and gone elsewhere to
live. The old people were now past 65, and rather old for transplanting
in a new home, but the death of a relative brought to their door a small
fortune, and the children insisted that they must remove to the city and
live in better style, as becomes people in affluent circumstances.
We called on them in the evening of their last day in the old home and
found them sitting on the front porch, resting and dreaming after a day
of packing up goods for the removal. The old lady had been silently
weeping, and her heart was so full of going away that she broke down and
tearfully assured us that going away was breaking ties that affect her
heart for all time to come.
“Jim and me are too old to be torn up by the roots and transplanted to
a town lot. We’ve lived here so long that we can’t ever make ourselves
believe that a grander house and a stylish lot of neighbors is to become
our home for all time.
“Why, every nook and corner of this old place is peopled with loving
memories. The house seems to be a store-house filled with the echoes of
our children’s happy voices and their merry laughter. I sometimes even
imagine that I hear the prattling echo of little Ruth’s baby voice, the
child who died when four years old.
“It may be foolish, Mr. Haiden, but no other house can ever produce the
same pleasant illusions. I hear them all, when I listen, just as I heard
their real voices in the long ago. But it won’t be so in the new home.
They ain’t going to let me take any of the old furniture along—the chairs
and the sideboard and the bureau that are all scratched with the hands
of the children. And the old pictures of George Washington crossing the
Delaware, and the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, and the
Soldier’s Dream, and the Soldier’s Farewell—they say they’re out of date,
and must be packed away on the garret.
“If these old things are out of date, what’s to be said of Jim and me?
We love those old pictures and scratched pieces of furniture better than
anything that’s new and has no history connected with it. We don’t want
to be separated from the past so ruthlessly and violently. It’s bad
enough to be torn away from our old friends and acquaintances, and taken
so far away and stored away in such a grand house that none of the old
neighbors will ever come to see us, and will finally grow indifferent
toward us, and blame us for being stuck up and proud, and declare we were
glad and willing to move away and sever the ties of love and friendship
between us and our rustic neighbors.
“And if our money leaves us as suddenly as it came, and we are obliged to
come back here, it will be like a spirit forced to come back to its dead
and deserted body. For all these old memories and childish echoes must
surely die after we are no longer here to hear them, and the house will
become as dead to us as the memories that died of loneliness after we
went away.
“For memories live on our love, Jim,
On the heartstrings tied to them;
They’ll die when we once remove, Jim,
And break them off love’s stem;
For they lie on my breast,
Like children at rest,
And nurse at love’s fountain brim.
And all have a beautiful head, Jim,
With faces upturned for a kiss;
I feel in my heart they’re not dead, Jim,
But living in innocent bliss;
But when we depart;
They’ll die in my heart—
And, oh, their presence I’ll miss!
They are echoes of voices so dear, Jim,
They are whispering now in my heart.
Come closer, and put your ear, Jim,
Just over the place—don’t start!
Ah, you hear the song,
That is all the day long
Singing the mournful part.”