I
The uniform newness of a new country gives peculiar relief to its few
relics of antiquity—a term which, in America, may fairly enough be
applied to any building already above ground when the colony became a
republic.
Groups of such buildings, little settlements almost unmarred by later
accretions, are still to be found here and there in the Eastern states;
and they are always productive of inordinate pride in those who discover
and live in them. A place of the sort, twenty years ago, was Harpledon,
on the New England coast, somewhere between Salem and Newburyport. How
intolerantly proud we all were of inhabiting it! How we resisted modern
improvements, ridiculed fashionable “summer resorts,” fought
trolley-lines, overhead wires and telephones, wrote to the papers
denouncing municipal vandalism, and bought up (those of us who could
afford it) one little heavy-roofed house after another, as the
land-speculator threatened them! All this, of course, was on a very
small scale: Harpledon was, and is still, the smallest of towns, hardly
more than a village, happily unmenaced by industry, and almost too
remote for the week-end “flivver.” And now that civic pride has taught
Americans to preserve and adorn their modest monuments, setting them in
smooth stretches of turf and nursing the elms of the village green, the
place has become far more attractive, and far worthier of its romantic
reputation, than when we artists and writers first knew it.
Nevertheless, I hope I shall never see it again; certainly I shall not
if I can help it....