The invitation which Mr. Bernard Langdon had accepted came from the
Board of Trustees of the “Apollinean Female Institute,” a school for the
education of young ladies, situated in the flourishing town of Rockland.
This was an establishment on a considerable scale, in which a hundred
scholars or thereabouts were taught the ordinary English branches,
several of the modern languages, something of Latin, if desired, with a
little natural philosophy, metaphysics, and rhetoric, to finish off with
in the last year, and music at any time when they would pay for it. At
the close of their career in the Institute, they were submitted to a
grand public examination, and received diplomas tied in blue ribbons,
which proclaimed them with a great flourish of capitals to be graduates
of the Apollinean Female Institute.
Rockland was a town of no inconsiderable pretensions. It was ennobled
by lying at the foot of a mountain,--called by the working-folks of
the place “the Maounting,”--which sufficiently showed that it was the
principal high land of the district in which it was situated. It lay to
the south of this, and basked in the sunshine as Italy stretches herself
before the Alps. To pass from the town of Tamarack on the north of
the mountain to Rockland on the south was like crossing from Coire to
Chiavenna.
There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and romance and mystery to
a place like the impending presence of a high mountain. Our beautiful
Northampton with its fair meadows and noble stream is lovely enough, but
owes its surpassing attraction to those twin summits which brood over it
like living presences, looking down into its streets as if they were its
tutelary divinities, dressing and undressing their green shrines,
robing themselves in jubilant sunshine or in sorrowing clouds, and doing
penance in the snowy shroud of winter, as if they had living hearts
under their rocky ribs and changed their mood like the children of the
soil at their feet, who grow up under their almost parental smiles and
frowns. Happy is the child whose first dreams of heaven are blended
with the evening glories of Mount Holyoke, when the sun is firing its
treetops, and gilding the white walls that mark its one human dwelling!
If the other and the wilder of the two summits has a scowl of terror in
its overhanging brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage
solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet,
companionable village.--And how the mountains love their children! The
sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the first comer in any
port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and show their faces
only in the midst of their own families.
The Mountain which kept watch to the north of Rockland lay waste and
almost inviolate through much of its domain. The catamount still glared
from the branches of its old hemlocks on the lesser beasts that strayed
beneath him. It was not long since a wolf had wandered down, famished in
the winter's dearth, and left a few bones and some tufts of wool of what
had been a lamb in the morning. Nay, there were broad-footed tracks in
the snow only two years previously, which could not be mistaken;--the
black bear alone could have set that plantigrade seal, and little
children must come home early from school and play, for he is an
indiscriminate feeder when he is hungry, and a little child would not
come amiss when other game was wanting.
But these occasional visitors may have been mere wanderers, which,
straying along in the woods by day, and perhaps stalking through the
streets of still villages by night, had worked their way along down from
the ragged mountain-spurs of higher latitudes. The one feature of The
Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its woods was the existence
of the terrible region known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted
by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer venom under our cold
northern sky than the cobra himself in the land of tropical spices and
poisons.
From the earliest settlement of the place, this fact had been, next
to the Indians, the reigning nightmare of the inhabitants. It was easy
enough, after a time, to drive away the savages; for “a screeching
Indian Divell,” as our fathers called him, could not crawl into the
crack of a rock to escape from his pursuers. But the venomous population
of Rattlesnake Ledge had a Gibraltar for their fortress that might have
defied the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol. In its deep
embrasures and its impregnable easemates they reared their families,
they met in love or wrath, they twined together in family knots, they
hissed defiance in hostile clans, they fed, slept, hibernated, and in
due time died in peace. Many a foray had the towns-people made, and many
a stuffed skin was shown as a trophy,--nay, there were families where
the children's first toy was made from the warning appendage that once
vibrated to the wrath of one of these “cruel serpents.” Sometimes one of
them, coaxed out by a warm sun, would writhe himself down the hillside
into the roads, up the walks that led to houses,--worse than this, into
the long grass, where the barefooted mowers would soon pass with
their swinging scythes,--more rarely into houses, and on one memorable
occasion, early in the last century, into the meeting-house, where he
took a position on the pulpit-stairs,--as is narrated in the “Account of
Some Remarkable Providences,” etc., where it is suggested that a strong
tendency of the Rev. Didymus Bean, the Minister at that time, towards
the Arminian Heresy may have had something to do with it, and that the
Serpent supposed to have been killed on the Pulpit-Stairs was a false
show of the Daemon's Contrivance, he having come in to listen to a
Discourse which was a sweet Savour in his Nostrils, and, of course,
not being capable of being killed Himself. Others said, however, that,
though there was good Reason to think it was a Damon, yet he did come
with Intent to bite the Heel of that faithful Servant,--etc.
One Gilson is said to have died of the bite of a rattlesnake in
this town early in the present century. After this there was a
great snake-hunt, in which very many of these venomous beasts were
killed,--one in particular, said to have been as big round as a
stout man's arm, and to have had no less than forty joints to his
rattle,--indicating, according to some, that he had lived forty years,
but, if we might put any faith in the Indian tradition, that he had
killed forty human beings,--an idle fancy, clearly. This hunt, however,
had no permanent effect in keeping down the serpent population.
Viviparous, creatures are a kind of specie-paying lot, but oviparous
ones only give their notes, as it were, for a future brood,--an egg
being, so to speak, a promise to pay a young one by and by, if nothing
happen. Now the domestic habits of the rattlesnake are not studied very
closely, for obvious reasons; but it is, no doubt, to all intents and
purposes oviparous. Consequently it has large families, and is not easy
to kill out.
In the year 184-, a melancholy proof was afforded to the inhabitants of
Rockland, that the brood which infested The Mountain was not extirpated.
A very interesting young married woman, detained at home at the time by
the state of her health, was bitten in the entry of her own house by a
rattlesnake which had found its way down from The Mountain. Owing to the
almost instant employment of powerful remedies, the bite did not prove
immediately fatal; but she died within a few months of the time when she
was bitten.
All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of shadow over The Mountain. Yet,
as many years passed without any accident, people grew comparatively
careless, and it might rather be said to add a fearful kind of interest
to the romantic hillside, that the banded reptiles, which had been the
terror of the red men for nobody knows how many thousand years, were
there still, with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at the white
men's service, if they meddled with them.
The other natural features of Rockland were such as many of our pleasant
country-towns can boast of. A brook came tumbling down the mountain-side
and skirted the most thickly settled portion of the village. In the
parts of its course where it ran through the woods, the water looked
almost as brown as coffee flowing from its urn,--to say like smoky
quartz would perhaps give a better idea,--but in the open plain it
sparkled over the pebbles white as a queen's diamonds. There were
huckleberry-pastures on the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty
of the sweet-scented bayberry mingled with the other bushes. In other
fields grew great store of high-bush blackberries. Along the roadside
were bayberry-bushes, hung all over with bright red coral pendants in
autumn and far into the winter. Then there were swamps set thick with
dingy alders, where the three-leaved arum and the skunk's-cabbage grew
broad and succulent, shelving down into black boggy pools here and there
at the edge of which the green frog, stupidest of his tribe, sat waiting
to be victimized by boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy and agile
leopard-frog had taken the six-foot spring that plumped him into the
middle of the pool. And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair spread
its flat disk of embroidered fronds on the wire-like stem that glistened
polished and brown as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets,
cheated by the cold skies of their hues and perfume, sunned themselves
like white-cheeked invalids. Over these rose the old forest-trees,--the
maple, scarred with the wounds which had drained away its sweet
life-blood,--the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to look
like the body of one of those great snakes of old that used to frighten
armies, always the mark of lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora
and her swain,--the yellow birch, rough as the breast of Silenus in old
marbles,--the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying unheeded at its
foot,--and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed,
dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of whose aerial solitudes the crow
brooded on her nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived unharmed till
his incisors grew to look like ram's-horns.
Rockland would have been but half a town without its pond; Guinnepeg
Pond was the name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean
Institute were very anxious that it should be called Crystalline Lake.
It was here that the young folks used to sail in summer and skate in
winter; here, too, those queer, old, rum-scented good-for-nothing, lazy,
story-telling, half-vagabonds, who sawed a little wood or dug a few
potatoes now and then under the pretence of working for their living,
used to go and fish through the ice for pickerel every winter. And
here those three young people were drowned, a few summers ago, by the
upsetting of a sail-boat in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of
these smiling ponds which has not devoured more youths and maidens than
any of those monsters the ancients used to tell such lies about. But it
was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent--so the native “bard”
of Rockland said in his elegy--than on the morning when they found Sarah
Jane and Ellen Maria floating among the lily-pads.
The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly called,
was, in the language of its Prospectus, a “first-class Educational
Establishment.” It employed a considerable corps of instructors to rough
out and finish the hundred young lady scholars it sheltered beneath its
roof. First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the Principal and the Matron of the
school. Silas Peckham was a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of
the coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish. Everybody knows the type of
Yankee produced by this climate and diet: thin, as if he had been split
and dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like the tint of the food
he is made of; and about as sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal
with as the other is to the taste. Silas Peckham kept a young ladies'
school exactly as he would have kept a hundred head of cattle,--for the
simple, unadorned purpose of making just as much money in just as few
years as could be safely done. Mr. Peckham gave very little personal
attention to the department of instruction, but was always busy with
contracts for flour and potatoes, beef and pork, and other nutritive
staples, the amount of which required for such an establishment was
enough to frighten a quartermaster. Mrs. Peckham was from the West,
raised on Indian corn and pork, which give a fuller outline and a more
humid temperament, but may perhaps be thought to render people a little
coarse-fibred. Her specialty was to look after the feathering, cackling,
roosting, rising, and general behavior of these hundred chicks. An
honest, ignorant woman, she could not have passed an examination in the
youngest class. So this distinguished institution was under the charge
of a commissary and a housekeeper, and its real business was making
money by taking young girls in as boarders.
Connected with this, however, was the incidental fact, which the public
took for the principal one, namely, the business of instruction.
Mr. Peckham knew well enough that it was just as well to have good
instructors as bad ones, so far as cost was concerned, and a great deal
better for the reputation of his feeding-establishment. He tried to
get the best he could without paying too much, and, having got them, to
screw all the work out of them that could possibly be extracted.
There was a master for the English branches, with a young lady
assistant. There was another young lady who taught French, of the
ahvaung and baundahng style, which does not exactly smack of the
asphalt of the Boulevards. There was also a German teacher of music, who
sometimes helped in French of the ahfaung and bauntaung style,--so that,
between the two, the young ladies could hardly have been mistaken for
Parisians, by a Committee of the French Academy. The German teacher also
taught a Latin class after his fashion,--benna, a ben, gahboot, ahead,
and so forth.
The master for the English branches had lately left the school for
private reasons, which need not be here mentioned,--but he had gone,
at any rate, and it was his place which had been offered to Mr. Bernard
Langdon. The offer came just in season,--as, for various causes, he was
willing to leave the place where he had begun his new experience.
It was on a fine morning that Mr. Bernard, ushered in by Mr. Peckham,
made his appearance in the great schoolroom of the Apollinean Institute.
A general rustle ran all round the seats when the handsome young man
was introduced. The principal carried him to the desk of the young lady
English assistant, Miss Darley by name, and introduced him to her.
There was not a great deal of study done that day. The young lady
assistant had to point out to the new master the whole routine in which
the classes were engaged when their late teacher left, and which had
gone on as well as it could since. Then Master Langdon had a great many
questions to ask, some relating to his new duties, and some,
perhaps, implying a degree of curiosity not very unnatural under the
circumstances. The truth is, the general effect of the schoolroom, with
its scores of young girls, all their eyes naturally centring on him with
fixed or furtive glances, was enough to bewilder and confuse a young man
like Master Langdon, though he was not destitute of self-possession, as
we have already seen.
You cannot get together a hundred girls, taking them as they come, from
the comfortable and affluent classes, probably anywhere, certainly not
in New England, without seeing a good deal of beauty. In fact, we very
commonly mean by beauty the way young girls look when there is
nothing to hinder their looking as Nature meant them to. And the great
schoolroom of the Apollinean Institute did really make so pretty a show
on the morning when Master Langdon entered it, that he might be pardoned
for asking Miss Darley more questions about his scholars than about
their lessons.
There were girls of all ages: little creatures, some pallid and
delicate-looking, the offspring of invalid parents,--much given to
books, not much to mischief, commonly spoken of as particularly good
children, and contrasted with another sort, girls of more vigorous
organization, who were disposed to laughing and play, and required a
strong hand to manage them; then young growing misses of every shade of
Saxon complexion, and here and there one of more Southern hue: blondes,
some of them so translucent-looking that it seemed as if you could see
the souls in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if souls were objects
of sight; brunettes, some with rose-red colors, and some with that
swarthy hue which often carries with it a heavily-shaded lip, and
which, with pure outlines and outspoken reliefs, gives us some of our
handsomest women,--the women whom ornaments of plain gold adorn more
than any other parures; and again, but only here and there, one with
dark hair and gray or blue eyes, a Celtic type, perhaps, but found in
our native stock occasionally; rarest of all, a light-haired girl with
dark eyes, hazel, brown, or of the color of that mountain-brook spoken
of in this chapter, where it ran through shadowy woodlands. With these
were to be seen at intervals some of maturer years, full-blown flowers
among the opening buds, with that conscious look upon their faces which
so many women wear during the period when they never meet a single man
without having his monosyllable ready for him,--tied as they are, poor
things! on the rock of expectation, each of them an Andromeda waiting
for her Perseus.
“Who is that girl in ringlets,--the fourth in the third row on the
right?” said Master Langdon.
“Charlotte Ann Wood,” said Miss Darley; “writes very pretty poems.”
“Oh!--And the pink one, three seats from her? Looks bright; anything in
her?”
“Emma Dean,--day-scholar,--Squire Dean's daughter,--nice girl,--second
medal last year.”
The master asked these two questions in a careless kind of way, and did
not seem to pay any too much attention to the answers.
“And who and what is that,” he said,--“sitting a little apart
there,--that strange, wild-looking girl?”
This time he put the real question he wanted answered;--the other two
were asked at random, as masks for the third.
The lady-teacher's face changed;--one would have said she was frightened
or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the
master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up;--she was
winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a
kind of reverie.
Miss Darley drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide
her lips. “Don't look at her as if we were talking about her,” she
whispered softly; “that is Elsie Venner.”
CHAPTER V. AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER.
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. Peachtrees, 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 muffed 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
mountainside, 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 every-day life of the Rockland
people. The folks in some of the neighboring towns had a joke against
them, that a Rocklander could n't hear a beanpod 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 creme 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 a 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 moments 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 airy 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, haircloth 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 millstone
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 hollyhocks, 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 kindhearted laymen of other denominations.
He was in fact 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 them he would
lapse away for a 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, of course, 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 chimps
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 a peck of potatoes up into the air 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 had 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
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 mile or two from the centre of 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'hote 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 in human beings, as the Grotta del Cane does in dogs in the
well-known experiments related by travellers. This bar-room used to be
famous for drinking and storytelling, 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 flypaper. 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 schoolhouses 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.