bustle for satchels and bundles, and the car is soon almost without a
passenger; and, indeed, it would really seem as though the whole train
had landed its entire human burden upon this platform; for Hometown is a
popular place, and every Saturday evening brings just such an exodus as
this: Husbands and fathers who fly from the hot and crowded city for a
Sunday of quiet and content with their families, who year after year
have found a refuge of peace and comfort in this charming New England
town. Where is it? Talk with almost any one familiar with the
picturesque boroughs of the Housatonic, and your curiosity will be
gratified, for this village will be among the first to be described.
From the platform of the car we step into the midst of a motley
assemblage, rustic peasantry and fashionable aristocracy intermingled.
Anxious and eager faces meet you at every turn. For a few minutes the
air fairly rings with kisses, as children welcome fathers, and fathers
children. Strange vehicles crowd the depot--vehicles of all sizes and
descriptions, from the veritable “one-hoss shay” to the dainty
basket-phaeton of fashion. One by one the merry loads depart, while I, a
pilgrim to my old home, stand almost unrecognized by the familiar faces
around me. Leaning up against the porch near by, stands a character
which, once seen, could never be forgotten. His face is turned from me,
but the old straw hat I recognize as the hat of ten years ago, with brim
pulled down to a slope in front, and pushed up vertically behind, and
the identical hole in the side with the long hair sticking through. Yes,
there he stands--Amos Shoopegg. I step up to him and lay my hand upon
his shoulder. With creditable skill he unwinds the twist of his
intricate legs, and with an inquiring gaze turns his good-natured face
toward me.
“Is it possible that you don’t remember me, Shoop?”
With an expression of surprise he raises both his arms. “Wa’al, thar! I
swaiou! I didn’t cal’late on runnin’ agin yeu. I was jes drivin’ hum
from taown-meetin’, an’ thought as haow I’d take a turn in, jest out o’
cur’osity. Wa’al, naow, it’s pesky good to see yeu agin arter sech a
long spell. I didn’t re_cog_nize ye at fust, but I swan when ye began
a-talkin’, that was enuf fer me. Hello! fetched yer woman ’long tew,
hey? Haow air yeu, ma’am? hope ye’er perty tol’ble. Don’t see but what
yeu look’s nateral’s ever; but yer man here, I declar for’t, he got the
best on me at fust;” and after having thus delivered himself, he
swallowed up our hands in his ample fists.
“Yes, Shoop, I thought I’d just run up to the old home for a few days.”
“Wa’al, I swar! I’m tarnal glad to see ye, and that’s a fact. Anybody
cum up arter ye? No? Well, then, s’posin’ ye jest highst into my team.”
So saying, he unhitched a corrugated shackle-jointed steed, and backed
around his indescribable impromptu covered wagon--a sort of a hybrid
between a “one-hoss shay” and a truck.
“’Tain’t much of a kerridge fer city folks to ride in, that’s a fact,”
he continued, “but I cal’late it’s a little better’n shinnin’ it.” After
some little manœuvring in the way of climbing over the front seat, we
were soon wedged in the narrow compass, and, with an old horse-blanket
over our knees, we went rattling down the hill toward the village and
home of my boyhood.
Years have passed since those days when, as a united family, we dwelt
under that old roof; but those who once were children are now men and
women, with divided interests and individual homes. The old New England
mansion is now a homestead only in name, known so only in recollections
of the past and the possibilities of the future.
“Wa’al, thar’s the old house,” presently exclaimed Amos, as we neared
the brow of a declivity looking down into the valley below. “Don’t look
quite so spruce as’t did in the old times, but Warner’s a good keerful
tenant, ’tain’t no use talkin’. I cal’late yeu might dig a pleggy long
spell afore yeu could git another feller like him in this ’ere patch.”
In the vale below, in its nest of old maples and elms, almost screened
from view by the foliage, we look upon the familiar outlines of the old
mansion, its diamond window in the gable peering through the branches at
us. “Skedup!” cried Amos, as he urged his pet nag into a jog-trot down
the hill, through the main street of the town. The long fence in front
of the homestead is soon reached, a sharp turn into the drive, a “Whoa,
January!” and we are extricated from the wagon.
“Wa’al, I’ll leave ye naow. I guess ye kin find yer way around,” said
Shoop, as with one outlandish geometrical stride he lifted himself into
the wagon. Cordially greeted by our hostess, with repeated urgings to
“make ourselves at home,” we were shown to our room. The house, though
clad in a new dress, still retained the same hospitable and cosy look as
of old.
[Illustration: OLD HOMESTEAD AND GARRET.]
Hometown, owing to some early local faction, is divided into two
sections, forming two distinct towns. One, Newborough, a hill-top
hamlet, with its picturesque long street, a hundred feet in width, and
shaded with great weeping elms that almost meet overhead; and the other,
Hometown proper, a picturesque little village in the valley, cuddling
close around the foot of a precipitous bluff, known as Mount Pisgah. A
mile’s distance separates the two centres. The old homestead is
situated in the heart of Hometown, fronting on the main street. The
house itself is a series of after-thoughts, wing after wing and gable
after gable having clustered around the old nucleus, as the growth of
new generations necessitated increased accommodation. Its outward aspect
is rather modern, but the interior, with its broad open fireplaces, and
accessaries in the shape of cranes and fire-dogs, is rich with all the
features of typical New England; and the two gables of the main roof
enclose the dearest old garret imaginable--at present an asylum for the
quaint possessions of antique furniture and bric-à-brac, removed from
their accustomed quarters on the advent of the new host. It is to this
sanctuary that my footsteps first lead me, and, with a longing that will
not be withstood, I find myself in front of the great white door. I lift
the latch; a cool pungent odor of oak wood greets me as I ascend the
steep stairs--an odor that awakens, like magic, a hundred fancies, and
recalls a host of memories long forgotten. Every stair seems to creak a
welcome, as when, on the rainy days of long ago, we sought the cosy
refuge to hear the patter on the roof, or to nestle in the dark, obscure
corners in our childish games. At the head of the stairs rises the
ancient chimney, cleft in twain at the foot, with the quaint little
cuddy between. Above me stretch the great beams of oak, like iron in
their hardness. Yonder is the queer old diamond window looking out upon
the village church, its panes half obscured by the dusty maze of webs.
To the left, in a shadowy corner, stands the antiquated wheel--a relic
of past generations. Long gray cobwebs festoon the rafters overhead, and
the low buzzing of a wasp betrays its mud nest in the gable above. A
sense of sadness steals over me as I sit gazing into this still chamber.
On every side are mementos of a happy past, and all, though mute,
speaking to me in a language whose power stirs the depths of my soul.
Wherever the eye may turn, it meets with a silent greeting from an old
friend, and the whole shrouded in a weird gloom that lends to the most
common object an air of melancholy mystery. And yet it is only a garret.
There are some, no doubt, for whom this word finds its fitting synonyme
in the dictionary, but there are others to whom it sings a poem of
infinite sweetness.
Looking through the dingy window between the maple boughs, my eye
extends over lawn and shrubberies, three acres in extent--a little park,
overrun with paths in every direction, through ancient orchard and
embowered dells, while far beyond are glimpses of the wooded knolls, the
winding brook, and meadows dotted with waving willows, and farther still
the ample undulating farm.
[Illustration: AMONG THE GRASSES.]
It is in such a place as this that I have sought recreation and change
of scene. My wife and I have run away from the city for a month or so. A
vacation we call it; but to an artist such a thing is rarely known in
its ordinary sense, and often, indeed, it means an increase of labor
rather than a respite. My first week, however, I had consecrated to
luxurious idleness. Together we wandered through the old familiar
rambles where as boy and girl in earlier days we had been so oft
together. Day after day found us in some new retreat. There were dark
cool nooks by sheltered streams, spicy groves of pine and spruce,
wooded slopes and rocky dells, and meadows rich with summer bloom, where
idle butterflies flitted lazily on the wing; where meadow lilies nodded
in billowing fields, and the daisies and red clover waved about our
knees half screened in feathery purple grasses that spread their cloudy
mist all through the blossoming maze. We heard the music of the scythe,
and, sitting in the deep cool grass beneath the maple shade, we watched
the circling motion of the mowers in the field--saw the forkfuls of the
hay tossed in the drying sun, and breathed the perfumed air that floated
from the windrows. We sauntered by the meadow brook where willows
gleamed along the bank, and overhanging alders threw their sombre
shadows in the quiet pools: where the ground-nut, and the meadow-rue,
and the creeping madder fringed the tangled brink, and every footstep
started up some agile frog that plunged into the unseen water. We stood
where rippling shallows gurgled under festooned canopies of fox-grape,
and the leaning linden-trees shut out the sky o’erhead and intertwined
their drooping branches above the gliding current. Here, too, the
weather-beaten crossing-pole makes its tottering span across the stream,
and deep down beneath the bank the rainbow-tinted sunfish floats on
filmy fins above his yellow bed of gravel, and we catch a flashing gleam
of a silvery dace or shiner turning in the water.
Now we confront a rude slab fence, an ancient landmark, that terminates
its length at the edge of the stream, where its gray and crumbling
boards are secured with rusty nails against the trunk of a tall
buttonwood-tree. A loosened slab is easily found, and we are soon upon
the other side; and after picking our way through a forest of
bush-elders, we emerge upon an open lot of low flat pasture-land, known
always as the “old swamp meadow.” No other five acres on the face of the
earth are so dear to me as this neglected field. I know its every rise
and fall of ground, its every bog, and its lush greenness is refreshing
even to the thought.
It is a luxuriant garden of all manner of succulent and juicy
vegetation; an outbursting extravagance of plant life of almost tropical
exuberance. All New England’s most majestic and ornamental flora seem
congregated in its congenial soil; and even when a boy I learned to know
and love them all, and even call them by their names.
Here are towering stems of iron-weed lifting high their scattered purple
crowns, and in their midst the woolly clumps of boneset, its white
flowered cushions intermingling with the dense pink tufts of
thorough-wort.
On every side we overlook whole patches of these splendid blossoms, with
their crests closely crowded in a mosaic of pink and white. And here’s a
bed of peppermint and spearmint, interspersed with flaming spikes of
cardinal lobelia; and here a lusty plant of Indian mallow, entangled in
a maze of gold-thread and smart-weed. Here are massive burdocks six feet
high, and great trees of jimson-weed, with their large spiral flowers
and thorny pods.
High fronds of chain-fern rise up on every side from a jungle of
bur-marigolds and clotburs, and tear-thumbs, with their saw-toothed
stems and tiny bunches of pink blossoms.
No inch of ground in the old swamp lot but which does its tenfold duty;
and what it lacks in quality of produce it amply makes up in quantity.
Even a neighboring bed of clean-washed gravel is overrun with creeping
mallow, with its rounded leaves and little “cheeses” down among their
shadows.
[Illustration: EVEN-TIDE.]
Farther on we see the lily-pond, with its surrounding swamp and its
legion of crowded water-plants. Here are rank, massive beds of
swamp-cabbage, and lofty cat-tails by the thousand among the bristling
bogs of tussock-sedge and bulrush. Here are calamus patches, and alder
thickets, and sedges without number; and the prickly carex and blue-flag
abound on every side. There are galingales and reeds, and tall and
graceful rushes, turtle-head and jointed scouring grass, and horse-tail,
besides a host of other old acquaintances, whose faces are familiar, but
whose names I never knew. But they were all my friends in boyhood. I
knew them in the bud and in the blossom, and even in their winter
skeletons, brown and broken in the snow. Near by there is a ditch: you
never would know it, for it is completely hidden from view beneath an
interlacing growth of jewel-weed. But see that gorgeous mass of deep
scarlet that floods the farther bank! Nowhere within a circuit of miles
around is there such a regal display of cardinal flowers as this:
skirting the borders of the ditch for rods and rods, clustering about a
ruined, tumbling fence, whose moss-grown pickets are almost hidden in
the dense profusion of bloom.
Then there is its airy companion, the “touch-me-not,” with its
translucent, juicy stem, and its queer little golden flowers with
spotted throats--the “jewel-weed” we used to call it. I know not why,
unless from the magic of its leaf, which, when held beneath the water,
was transformed to iridescent frosted silver. We all remember its
sensitive, jumping seed-pods, that burst even at our approach for fear
that we should touch them; but no one can fully appreciate the beauty of
the plant who has not seen its silvery leaf beneath the water. Here it
justifies its name, for it is indeed a jewel.
How often in those olden times have I lain down among these bulrushes
and sedges near the lily pond, and listened to the buzzing songs of the
crickets and the tiny katydids that swarmed the growth about me, and
filled the air with their incessant din. I remember the little colony of
ants that picked their way among the rushes; that gauzy dragon-fly too,
that circled and dodged about the water’s edge, now skimming close upon
the surface, now darting out of sight, or perhaps alighting on an
overhanging sedge, as motionless as a mounted specimen, with wings
aslant and fully spread. “Devil’s darning-needles” they were called. The
devil may well be proud of them; for darning-needles of such precious
metals and such exquisite design are rare indeed. They were of several
sizes too. Some were large, and flashed the azure of the sapphire;
others fluttered by with smoky, pearly wings, and slender bodies
glittering in the light like animated emeralds: and another I well
remember, a little airy thing, with a glistening sunbeam for a body, and
wings of tiny rainbows.
[Illustration]
I remember how I watched the disturbed motion of the arrow-heads out in
the water, as the cautious turtles worked their way among them, and
crawled out upon the stump close by.
Here they huddled together, a dozen or more, with heads erect, and
turning from side to side as they surveyed the surrounding carpet of
lily-pads, or listened to the bass-drum chorus of the great green
bull-frogs among the pickerel-weed; and when I jumped and yelled at
them, what a rolling, sprawling, splashing in the mud! It fairly makes
me laugh to think of it. But there is hardly a leaf or wisp of grass in
this old swamp lot but what brings back some old association or pleasant
reminiscence.
[Illustration]
For a week thus we idled, now on the mountain, now in the meadow, while
I, with my sketch-book and collecting-box, either whiled away the hours
with my pencil, or left the unfinished work to pursue the tantalizing
butterfly, or search for unsuspecting caterpillars among the weeds and
bushes.
[Illustration: SOME ART CONNOISSEURS.]
[Illustration: PROFESSOR WIGGLER.]
On a sprig of black alder I found one--the same little fellow as of old,
afflicted with the peculiarities of all his progenitors. We used to call
him “Professor Wiggler,” owing to an hereditary nervous habit of
wiggling his head from side to side when not otherwise employed. To
this little humpbacked creature I am indebted for a great deal of past
amusement. Distinctly I remember the whack-whack-whack on the inside of
the old pasteboard box as the captive pets threatened to dash out their
brains in their demonstrations at my approach. Professor Wiggler is
really a most remarkable insect, as one might readily imagine from his
scientific name, for in learned circles this individual is known as Mr.
Gramatophora Trisignata. He has many strange eccentricities. At each
moult of the skin he retains the shell of his former head on a long
vertical filament. Two or three thus accumulate, and, as a consequence,
in his maturer years he looks up to the head he wore when he was a
youngster, and ponders on the flight of time and the hollowness of
earthly things, or perhaps congratulates himself on the increased
contents of his present shell. When fully grown, he stops eating, and
goes into a new business. Selecting a suitable twig, he gnaws a
cylindrical hole to its centre and follows the pith, now and then
backing out of the tunnel, and dropping the excavated material in the
form of little balls of sawdust. At length he emerges from the hollow,
and again drawing himself in backward, spins a silken disk across the
opening, and tints it with the color of the surrounding bark. Here he
spends the winter, and comes out in a new spring suit in the following
May. Only recently I had in my possession several of these twigs with
their enclosed caterpillars, and in every one the color of the silken
lid so closely matched the tint of the adjacent bark, although
different in each, that several of my friends, even with the most
careful scrutiny, failed to detect the deceptive spot. Whether the
result of chance or of the instincts of the insect, I do not know; but
certain it is that he paints with different colors under varying
circumstances.
Insect-hunting had always been a passion with me. Large collections of
moths and butterflies had many times accumulated under my hands, only to
meet destruction through boyish inexperience; and even in childhood the
love for the insect and the passion for the pencil strove hard for the
ascendency, and were only reconciled by a combination which filled my
sketch-book with studies of insect life.
There was one inhabitant of our fields which had always been to me a
never-failing source of entertainment. There he is, the gilded tyrant. I
see him now swinging to and fro on his glistening nest of silken
threads, his golden yellow form glowing in bold relief against the dark
recess in the brambles. My sketch is left in the grass, and I am soon
seated in front of the gossamer maze. A festive grasshopper jumps up
into my face, and makes a carom on the web. With a spasmodic snap of one
hind leg he extricates it from its entanglement, and in another instant
would fall from the meshes; but the agile spider is too quick for him.
With a movement so swift as almost to elude the eye, he draws from his
body a silver cloud of floss, and with his long hind legs throws it over
his captive. The head and tail of the grasshopper are now further
secured, after which the spider carefully straddles around the
struggling insect, and bites off the other radiating webs in close
proximity. The unlucky prey now hangs suspended across the opening. With
business-like coolness his tormentor dangles himself from the edge of
the torn web, and another cataract of glistening floss is thrown up and
attached to the under side of the prisoner, after which he is turned
round and round, as if on a spit. The stream of floss is carried from
head to foot, and in less time than it takes to describe it the victim
is wrapped in a silken winding-sheet, and soon meets his death from the
poisoned fangs of his captor. Here is but one of the thousands of
tragedies that are taking place every hour of the day in our fields.
While deeply interested in the closing scenes of this one, I suddenly
become aware of a shadow passing over the bushes. I turn my head, and
meet the puzzled and pleasant gaze of Amos Shoopegg, as he stands there,
hands in pockets, and milk-pail swinging from his wrist.
[Illustration: THE TYRANT OF THE FIELDS.]
“Wa’al, thar,” he exclaims, banging down one brawny fist on his uplifted
knee. “Buggin’ agin, I swaow! Hain’t yeu got over thet yit? What yeu kin
find so mighty fine in them ’ere bugs beats me.”
“Amos,” I replied, “there’s a great deal more in these bugs than you
imagine.”
“A pleggy sight, I suppose,” he resumed. “What specie o’ critter ye got
hold on naow?” and he stretched forward his fringed and weather-beaten
neck, and peered over the brambles. “What is’t ye got
thar--straddle-bug?” He came still nearer, and looked at the spider.
“Wa’al, darn my pictur ef ’tain’t an old yeller-belly! P’r’aps you don’t
know that them critters is pizen. Why, Eben Sanford’s gal got all chawed
up by one on ’em. Great Sneezer!” he exclaimed, taking three or four
strides backward, with both hands uplifted. I had merely raised my hand
and gently smoothed the spider.
“Wa’al,” he continued, “yen kin rub ’em daown ef yeu pleze; but fer _my_
part, I’d ruther keep off abaout a good spittin’ distance”--which was
the Shoopegg way of expressing a length of about fifteen feet. Amos was
crossing lots for his “caow,” he said; but in spite of his plea that the
“old heiffer” was “bellerin’” like “Sam Hill,” and was “gittin’ ’tarnal
on-easy,” I made him tarry sufficiently long to enable me to send him
off a wiser man.
Amos Shoopegg is a type of a large class of the native element of
Hometown. Of course, “Shoopegg” is not his actual name. In the long line
of his prided Puritan ancestry no one ever bore it before him. This is
only an affectionate epithet given him by the village boys full twenty
years ago, and it has stuck to him closer than a brother ever since, as
those festive surnames always do. Nominally, Amos was a farmer. In
summer he was one in fact, and could swing off as pretty a swath in
haying as any man in town. But in the winter he changed his vocation,
and became a disciple of the “waxed-end.” All day long he could be seen,
closeted with a little red-hot stove, plying his trade in his small,
square shop, up near the old red school-house. Here he pounded on the
big lapstone on his knees, or, with strap and foot-stick in position,
punched and tugged around the edge of those marvellous brogans. He made
slings and leather “suckers” for the boys, and furnished them with all
the black-wax they could chew--or stow-away, to stick between the lining
of their pockets. And the huge wooden shoe-pegs that he drove beneath
his hammer were a sight to behold. The man who used his “cheap line of
goods” might verily say he walked upon a wood-pile.
So they dubbed him “Shoe-peg,” or “Shoop” for brevity. There are others
among his neighbors who would furnish an inexhaustible source of study
to the student of character. There’s old Rufus Fairchild, known as
“Roof,” a rotund specimen of rural jollity, his round face set in
dishevelled locks of gray, with a twinkle in his eye and a good word for
everybody. And there’s Father Tomlinson, who keeps the post-office down
by the dam, as genial an old fellow as ever wrapped up his throat in a
white stock. And I might almost continue the list indefinitely. But
there is one I must especially mention; and, now that I think of it, he
really should have headed the list, for he stands alone--or at least he
does _sometimes_. If you are in search of the embodiment of typical
Erin, you need go no farther; here he is. This individual represents
another nationality which swells the population of Hometown--the
hard-working laborers who toil in the great factory down in the glen,
called “Satan’s Misery.” The above personage is one of the best-hearted
creatures in the town; but it is the old story, and the world to him is
enclosed in the compass of a barrel-hoop. When last I saw him he was in
an evident decline, but as I put my finger on his wrist I could still
feel the pulsations of the whiskey coursing through his veins.