MAIN STREET

A respectable-looking individual makes his bow and addresses the

public. In my daily walks along the principal street of my native town,

it has often occurred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward,

and the vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have passed along

this thoroughfare during the more than two centuries of its existence,

could be presented to the eye in a shifting panorama, it would be an

exceedingly effective method of illustrating the march of time. Acting

on this idea, I have contrived a certain pictorial exhibition, somewhat

in the nature of a puppet-show, by means of which I propose to call up

the multiform and many-colored Past before the spectator, and show him

the ghosts of his forefathers, amid a succession of historic incidents,

with no greater trouble than the turning of a crank. Be pleased,

therefore, my indulgent patrons, to walk into the show-room, and take

your seats before yonder mysterious curtain. The little wheels and

springs of my machinery have been well oiled; a multitude of puppets

are dressed in character, representing all varieties of fashion, from

the Puritan cloak and jerkin to the latest Oak Hall coat; the lamps are

trimmed, and shall brighten into noontide sunshine, or fade away in

moonlight, or muffle their brilliancy in a November cloud, as the

nature of the scene may require; and, in short, the exhibition is just

ready to commence. Unless something should go wrong,—as, for instance,

the misplacing of a picture, whereby the people and events of one

century might be thrust into the middle of another; or the breaking of

a wire, which would bring the course of time to a sudden

period,—barring, I say, the casualties to which such a complicated

piece of mechanism is liable,—I flatter myself, ladies and

gentlemen,—that the performance will elicit your generous approbation.

Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold—not,

indeed, the Main Street—but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over

which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.

You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive

wood,—the ever-youthful and venerably old,—verdant with new twigs, yet

hoary, as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have

accumulated upon its intermingled branches. The white man’s axe has

never smitten a single tree; his footstep has never crumpled a single

one of the withered leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have

been harvesting beneath. Yet, see! along through the vista of impending

boughs, there is already a faintly traced path, running nearly east and

west, as if a prophecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen

into the heart of the solemn old wood. Onward goes this hardly

perceptible track, now ascending over a natural swell of land, now

subsiding gently into a hollow; traversed here by a little streamlet,

which glitters like a snake through the gleam of sunshine, and quickly

hides itself among the underbrush, in its quest for the neighboring

cove; and impeded there by the massy corpse of a giant of the forest,

which had lived out its incalculable term of life, and been overthrown

by mere old age, and lies buried in the new vegetation that is born of

its decay. What footsteps can have worn this half-seen path? Hark! Do

we not hear them now rustling softly over the leaves? We discern an

Indian woman,—a majestic and queenly woman, or else her spectral image

does not represent her truly,—for this is the great Squaw Sachem, whose

rule, with that of her sons, extends from Mystic to Agawam. That red

chief, who stalks by her side, is Wappacowet, her second husband, the

priest and magician, whose incantations shall hereafter affright the

pale-faced settlers with grisly phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the

woods, at midnight. But greater would be the affright of the Indian

necromancer, if, mirrored in the pool of water at his feet, he could

catch a prophetic glimpse of the noonday marvels which the white man is

destined to achieve; if he could see, as in a dream, the stone front of

the stately hall, which will cast its shadow over this very spot; if he

could be aware that the future edifice will contain a noble Museum,

where, among countless curiosities of earth and sea, a few Indian

arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials of a vanished race!

No such forebodings disturb the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet. They pass

on, beneath the tangled shade, holding high talk on matters of state

and religion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of affairs

will endure forever. Meanwhile, how full of its own proper life is the

scene that lies around them! The gray squirrel runs up the trees, and

rustles among the upper branches. Was not that the leap of a deer? And

there is the whirr of a partridge! Methinks, too, I catch the cruel and

stealthy eye of a wolf, as he draws back into yonder impervious density

of underbrush. So, there, amid the murmur of boughs, go the Indian

queen and the Indian priest; while the gloom of the broad wilderness

impends over them, and its sombre mystery invests them as with

something preternatural; and only momentary streaks of quivering

sunlight, once in a great while, find their way down, and glimmer among

the feathers in their dusky hair. Can it be that the thronged street of

a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude,—over those soft

heaps of the decaying tree-trunks, and through the swampy places, green

with water-moss, and penetrate that hopeless entanglement of great

trees, which have been uprooted and tossed together by a whirlwind? It

has been a wilderness from the creation. Must it not be a wilderness

forever?

Here an acidulous-looking gentleman in blue glasses, with bows of

Berlin steel, who has taken a seat at the extremity of the front row,

begins, at this early stage of the exhibition, to criticise.

“The whole affair is a manifest catchpenny!” observes he, scarcely

under his breath. “The trees look more like weeds in a garden than a

primitive forest; the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet are stiff in their

pasteboard joints; and the squirrels, the deer, and the wolf move with

all the grace of a child’s wooden monkey, sliding up and down a stick.”

“I am obliged to you, sir, for the candor of your remarks,” replies the

showman, with a bow. “Perhaps they are just. Human art has its limits,

and we must now and then ask a little aid from the spectator’s

imagination.”

“You will get no such aid from mine,” responds the critic. “I make it a

point to see things precisely as they are. But come! go ahead! the

stage is waiting!”

The showman proceeds.

Casting our eyes again over the scene, we perceive that strangers have

found their way into the solitary place. In more than one spot, among

the trees, an upheaved axe is glittering in the sunshine. Roger Conant,

the first settler in Naumkeag, has built his dwelling, months ago, on

the border of the forest-path; and at this moment he comes eastward

through the vista of woods, with his gun over his shoulder, bringing

home the choice portions of a deer. His stalwart figure, clad in a

leathern jerkin and breeches of the same, strides sturdily onward, with

such an air of physical force and energy that we might almost expect

the very trees to stand aside, and give him room to pass. And so,

indeed, they must; for, humble as is his name in history, Roger Conant

still is of that class of men who do not merely find, but make, their

place in the system of human affairs; a man of thoughtful strength, he

has planted the germ of a city. There stands his habitation, showing in

its rough architecture some features of the Indian wigwam, and some of

the log-cabin, and somewhat, too, of the straw-thatched cottage in Old

England, where this good yeoman had his birth and breeding. The

dwelling is surrounded by a cleared space of a few acres, where Indian

corn grows thrivingly among the stumps of the trees; while the dark

forest hems it in, and scenes to gaze silently and solemnly, as if

wondering at the breadth of sunshine which the white man spreads around

him. An Indian, half hidden in the dusky shade, is gazing and wondering

too.

Within the door of the cottage you discern the wife, with her ruddy

English cheek. She is singing, doubtless, a psalm tune, at her

household work; or, perhaps she sighs at the remembrance of the

cheerful gossip, and all the merry social life, of her native village

beyond the vast and melancholy sea. Yet the next moment she laughs,

with sympathetic glee, at the sports of her little tribe of children;

and soon turns round, with the home-look in her face, as her husband’s

foot is heard approaching the rough-hewn threshold. How sweet must it

be for those who have an Eden in their hearts, like Roger Conant and

his wife, to find a new world to project it into, as they have, instead

of dwelling among old haunts of men, where so many household fires have

been kindled and burnt out, that the very glow of happiness has

something dreary in it! Not that this pair are alone in their wild

Eden, for here comes Goodwife Massey, the young spouse of Jeffrey

Massey, from her home hard by, with an infant at her breast. Dame

Conant has another of like age; and it shall hereafter be one of the

disputed points of history which of these two babies was the first

town-born child.

But see! Roger Conant has other neighbors within view. Peter Palfrey

likewise has built himself a house, and so has Balch, and Norman, and

Woodbury. Their dwellings, indeed,—such is the ingenious contrivance of

this piece of pictorial mechanism,—seem to have arisen, at various

points of the scene, even while we have been looking at it. The

forest-track, trodden more and more by the hobnailed shoes of these

sturdy and ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinctness which it never

could have acquired from the light tread of a hundred times as many

Indian moccasins. It will be a street, anon! As we observe it now, it

goes onward from one clearing to another, here plunging into a shadowy

strip of woods, there open to the sunshine, but everywhere showing a

decided line, along which human interests have begun to hold their

career. Over yonder swampy spot, two trees have been felled, and laid

side by side to make a causeway. In another place, the axe has cleared

away a confused intricacy of fallen trees and clustered boughs, which

had been tossed together by a hurricane. So now the little children,

just beginning to run alone, may trip along the path, and not often

stumble over an impediment, unless they stray from it to gather

wood-berries beneath the trees. And, besides the feet of grown people

and children, there are the cloven hoofs of a small herd of cows, who

seek their subsistence from the native grasses, and help to deepen the

track of the future thoroughfare. Goats also browse along it, and

nibble at the twigs that thrust themselves across the way. Not seldom,

in its more secluded portions, where the black shadow of the forest

strives to hide the trace of human-footsteps, stalks a gaunt wolf, on

the watch for a kid or a young calf; or fixes his hungry gaze on the

group of children gathering berries, and can hardly forbear to rush

upon them. And the Indians, coming from their distant wigwams to view

the white man’s settlement, marvel at the deep track which he makes,

and perhaps are saddened by a flitting presentiment that this heavy

tread will find its way over all the land; and that the wild-woods, the

wild wolf, and the wild Indian will alike be trampled beneath it. Even

so shall it be. The pavements of the Main Street must be laid over the

red man’s grave.

Behold! here is a spectacle which should be ushered in by the peal of

trumpets, if Naumkeag had ever yet heard that cheery music, and by the

roar of cannon, echoing among the woods. A procession,—for, by its

dignity, as marking an epoch in the history of the street, it deserves

that name,—a procession advances along the pathway. The good ship

Abigail has arrived from England, bringing wares and merchandise, for

the comfort of the inhabitants, and traffic with the Indians; bringing

passengers too, and, more important than all, a governor for the new

settlement. Roger Conant and Peter Palfrey, with their companions, have

been to the shore to welcome him; and now, with such honor and triumph

as their rude way of life permits, are escorting the sea-flushed

voyagers to their habitations. At the point where Endicott enters upon

the scene, two venerable trees unite their branches high above his

head; thus forming a triumphal arch of living verdure, beneath which he

pauses, with his wife leaning on his arm, to catch the first impression

of their new-found home. The old settlers gaze not less earnestly at

him, than he at the hoary woods and the rough surface of the clearings.

They like his bearded face, under the shadow of the broad-brimmed and

steeple-crowned Puritan hat;—a visage resolute, grave, and thoughtful,

yet apt to kindle with that glow of a cheerful spirit by which men of

strong character are enabled to go joyfully on their proper tasks. His

form, too, as you see it, in a doublet and hose of sad-colored cloth,

is of a manly make, fit for toil and hardship, and fit to wield the

heavy sword that hangs from his leathern belt. His aspect is a better

warrant for the ruler’s office than the parchment commission which he

bears, however fortified it may be with the broad seal of the London

council. Peter Palfrey nods to Roger Conant. “The worshipful Court of

Assistants have done wisely,” say they between themselves. “They have

chosen for our governor a man out of a thousand.” Then they toss up

their hats,—they, and all the uncouth figures of their company, most of

whom are clad in skins, inasmuch as their old kersey and linsey-woolsey

garments have been torn and tattered by many a long month’s wear,—they

all toss up their hats, and salute their new governor and captain with

a hearty English shout of welcome. We seem to hear it with our own

ears, so perfectly is the action represented in this life-like, this

almost magic picture!

But have you observed the lady who leans upon the arm of Endicott?—-a

rose of beauty from an English garden, now to be transplanted to a

fresher soil. It may be that, long years—centuries indeed—after this

fair flower shall have decayed, other flowers of the same race will

appear in the same soil, and gladden other generations with hereditary

beauty. Does not the vision haunt us yet? Has not Nature kept the mould

unbroken, deeming it a pity that the idea should vanish from mortal

sight forever, after only once assuming earthly substance? Do we not

recognize, in that fair woman’s face, a model of features which still

beam, at happy moments, on what was then the woodland pathway, but has

long since grown into a busy street?

“This is too ridiculous!—positively insufferable!” mutters the same

critic who had before expressed his disapprobation. “Here is a

pasteboard figure, such as a child would cut out of a card, with a pair

of very dull scissors; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it

the prototype of hereditary beauty!”

“But, sir, you have not the proper point of view,” remarks the showman.

“You sit altogether too near to get the best effect of my pictorial

exhibition. Pray, oblige me by removing to this other bench, and I

venture to assure you the proper light and shadow will transform the

spectacle into quite another thing.”

“Pshaw!” replies the critic; “I want no other light and shade. I have

already told you that it is my business to see things just as they

are.”

“I would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibition,” observes

a gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much interested,—“I

would suggest that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor Endicott, and

who came with him from England, left no posterity; and that,

consequently, we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any

specimens of feminine loveliness now extant among us.”

Having nothing to allege against this genealogical objection, the

showman points again to the scene.

During this little interruption, you perceive that the Anglo-Saxon

energy—as the phrase now goes—has been at work in the spectacle before

us. So many chimneys now send up their smoke, that it begins to have

the aspect of a village street; although everything is so inartificial

and inceptive, that it seems as if one returning wave of the wild

nature might overwhelm it all. But the one edifice which gives the

pledge of permanence to this bold enterprise is seen at the central

point of the picture. There stands the meeting-house, a small

structure, low-roofed, without a spire, and built of rough timber,

newly hewn, with the sap still in the logs, and here and there a strip

of bark adhering to them. A meaner temple was never consecrated to the

worship of the Deity. With the alternative of kneeling beneath the

awful vault of the firmament, it is strange that men should creep into

this pent-up nook, and expect God’s presence there. Such, at least, one

would imagine, might be the feeling of these forest-settlers,

accustomed, as they had been, to stand under the dim arches of vast

cathedrals, and to offer up their hereditary worship in the old

ivy-covered churches of rural England, around which lay the bones of

many generations of their forefathers. How could they dispense with the

carved altar-work?—how, with the pictured windows, where the light of

common day was hallowed by being transmitted through the glorified

figures of saints?—how, with the lofty roof, imbued, as it must have

been, with the prayers that had gone upward for centuries?—how, with

the rich peal of the solemn organ, rolling along the aisles, pervading

the whole church, and sweeping the soul away on a flood of audible

religion? They needed nothing of all this. Their house of worship, like

their ceremonial, was naked, simple, and severe. But the zeal of a

recovered faith burned like a lamp within their hearts, enriching

everything around them with its radiance; making of these new walls,

and this narrow compass, its own cathedral; and being, in itself, that

spiritual mystery and experience, of which sacred architecture,

pictured windows, and the organ’s grand solemnity are remote and

imperfect symbols. All was well, so long as their lamps were freshly

kindled at heavenly flame. After a while, however, whether in their

time or their children’s, these lamps began to burn more dimly, or with

a less genuine lustre; and then it might be seen how hard, cold, and

confined was their system,—how like an iron cage was that which they

called Liberty.

Too much of this. Look again at the picture, and observe how the

aforesaid Anglo-Saxon energy is now trampling along the street, and

raising a positive cloud of dust beneath its sturdy footsteps. For

there the carpenters are building a new house, the frame of which was

hewn and fitted in England, of English oak, and sent hither on

shipboard; and here a blacksmith makes huge slang and clatter on his

anvil, shaping out tools and weapons; and yonder a wheelwright, who

boasts himself a London workman, regularly bred to his handicraft, is

fashioning a set of wagon-wheels, the track of which shall soon be

visible. The wild forest is shrinking back; the street has lost the

aromatic odor of the pine-trees, and of the sweet-fern that grew

beneath them. The tender and modest wild-flowers, those gentle children

of savage nature that grew pale beneath the ever-brooding shade, have

shrank away and disappeared, like stars that vanish in the breadth of

light. Gardens are fenced in, and display pumpkin-beds and rows of

cabbages and beans; and, though the governor and the minister both view

them with a disapproving eye, plants of broad-leaved tobacco, which the

cultivators are enjoined to use privily, or not at all. No wolf, for a

year past, has been heard to bark, or known to range among the

dwellings, except that single one, whose grisly head, with a plash of

blood beneath it, is now affixed to the portal of the meeting-house.

The partridge has ceased to run across the too-frequented path. Of all

the wild life that used to throng here, only the Indians still come

into the settlement, bringing the skins of beaver and otter, bear and

elk, which they sell to Endicott for the wares of England. And there is

little John Massey, the son of Jeffrey Massey and first-born of

Naumkeag, playing beside his father’s threshold, a child of six or

seven years old. Which is the better-grown infant,—the town or the boy?

The red men have become aware that the street is no longer free to

them, save by the sufferance and permission of the settlers. Often, to

impress them with an awe of English power, there is a muster and

training of the town-forces, and a stately march of the mail-clad band,

like this which we now see advancing up the street. There they come,

fifty of them, or more; all with their iron breastplates and steel caps

well burnished, and glimmering bravely against the sun; their ponderous

muskets on their shoulders, their bandaliers about their waists, their

lighted matches in their hands, and the drum and fife playing cheerily

before them. See! do they not step like martial men? Do they not

manœuvre like soldiers who have seen stricken fields? And well they

may; for this band is composed of precisely such materials as those

with which Cromwell is preparing to beat down the strength of a

kingdom; and his famous regiment of Ironsides might be recruited from

just such men. In everything, at this period, New England was the

essential spirit and flower of that which was about to become uppermost

in the mother-country. Many a bold and wise man lost the fame which

would have accrued to him in English history, by crossing the Atlantic

with our forefathers. Many a valiant captain, who might have been

foremost at Marston Moor or Naseby, exhausted his martial ardor in the

command of a log-built fortress, like that which you observe on the

gently rising ground at the right of the pathway,—its banner fluttering

in the breeze, and the culverins and sakers showing their deadly

muzzles over the rampart.

A multitude of people were now thronging to New England: some, because

the ancient and ponderous framework of Church and State threatened to

crumble down upon their heads; others, because they despaired of such a

downfall. Among those who came to Naumkeag were men of history and

legend, whose feet leave a track of brightness along any pathway which

they have trodden. You shall behold their life-like images—their

spectres, if you choose so to call them—passing, encountering with a

familiar nod, stopping to converse together, praying, bearing weapons,

laboring or resting from their labors, in the Main Street. Here, now,

comes Hugh Peters, an earnest, restless man, walking swiftly, as being

impelled by that fiery activity of nature which shall hereafter thrust

him into the conflict of dangerous affairs, make him the chaplain and

counsellor of Cromwell, and finally bring him to a bloody end. He

pauses, by the meetinghouse, to exchange a greeting with Roger

Williams, whose face indicates, methinks, a gentler spirit, kinder and

more expansive, than that of Peters; yet not less active for what he

discerns to be the will of God, or the welfare of mankind. And look!

here is a guest for Endicott, coming forth out of the forest, through

which he has been journeying from Boston, and which, with its rude

branches, has caught hold of his attire, and has wet his feet with its

swamps and streams. Still there is something in his mild and venerable,

though not aged presence—a propriety, an equilibrium, in Governor

Winthrop’s nature—that causes the disarray of his costume to be

unnoticed, and gives us the same impression as if he were clad in such

rave and rich attire as we may suppose him to have worn in the Council

Chamber of the colony. Is not this characteristic wonderfully

perceptible in our spectral representative of his person? But what

dignitary is this crossing from the other side to greet the governor? A

stately personage, in a dark velvet cloak, with a hoary beard, and a

gold chain across his breast; he has the authoritative port of one who

has filled the highest civic station in the first of cities. Of all men

in the world, we should least expect to meet the Lord Mayor of

London—as Sir Richard Saltonstall has been, once and again—in a

forest-bordered settlement of the western wilderness.

Farther down the street, we see Emanuel Downing, a grave and worthy

citizen, with his son George, a stripling who has a career before him;

his shrewd and quick capacity and pliant conscience shall not only

exalt him high, but secure him from a downfall. Here is another figure,

on whose characteristic make and expressive action I will stake the

credit of my pictorial puppet-show.

Have you not already detected a quaint, sly humor in that face,—an

eccentricity in the manner,—a certain indescribable waywardness,—all

the marks, in short, of an original man, unmistakably impressed, yet

kept down by a sense of clerical restraint? That is Nathaniel Ward, the

minister of Ipswich, but better remembered as the simple cobbler of

Agawam. He hammered his sole so faithfully, and stitched his

upper-leather so well, that the shoe is hardly yet worn out, though

thrown aside for some two centuries past. And next, among these

Puritans and Roundheads, we observe the very model of a Cavalier, with

the curling lovelock, the fantastically trimmed beard, the embroidery,

the ornamented rapier, the gilded dagger, and all other foppishnesses

that distinguished the wild gallants who rode headlong to their

overthrow in the cause of King Charles. This is Morton of Merry Mount,

who has come hither to hold a council with Endicott, but will shortly

be his prisoner. Yonder pale, decaying figure of a white-robed woman,

who glides slowly along the street, is the Lady Arabella, looking for

her own grave in the virgin soil. That other female form, who seems to

be talking—we might almost say preaching or expounding—in the centre of

a group of profoundly attentive auditors, is Ann Hutchinson. And here

comes Vane—

“But, my dear sir,” interrupts the same gentleman who before questioned

the showman’s genealogical accuracy, “allow me to observe that these

historical personages could not possibly have met together in the Main

Street. They might, and probably did, all visit our old town, at one

time or another, but not simultaneously; and you have fallen into

anachronisms that I positively shudder to think of!”

“The fellow,” adds the scarcely civil critic, “has learned a bead-roll

of historic names, whom he lugs into his pictorial puppet-show, as he

calls it, helter-skelter, without caring whether they were

contemporaries or not,—and sets them all by the ears together. But was

there ever such a fund of impudence? To hear his running commentary,

you would suppose that these miserable slips of painted pasteboard,

with hardly the remotest outlines of the human figure, had all the

character and expression of Michael Angelo’s pictures. Well! go on,

sir!”

“Sir, you break the illusion of the scene,” mildly remonstrates the

showman.

“Illusion! What illusion?” rejoins the critic, with a contemptuous

snort. “On the word of a gentleman, I see nothing illusive in the

wretchedly bedaubed sheet of canvas that forms your background, or in

these pasteboard slips that hitch and jerk along the front. The only

illusion, permit me to say, is in the puppet-showman’s tongue,—and that

but a wretched one, into the bargain!”

“We public men,” replies the showman, meekly, “must lay our account,

sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism. But—merely for

your own pleasure, sir—let me entreat you to take another point of

view. Sit farther back, by that young lady, in whose face I have

watched the reflection of every changing scene; only oblige me by

sitting there; and, take my word for it, the slips of pasteboard shall

assume spiritual life, and the bedaubed canvas become an airy and

changeable reflex of what it purports to represent.”

“I know better,” retorts the critic, settling himself in his seat, with

sullen but self-complacent immovableness. “And, as for my own pleasure,

I shall best consult it by remaining precisely where I am.”

The showman bows, and waves his hand; and, at the signal, as if time

and vicissitude had been awaiting his permission to move onward, the

mimic street becomes alive again.

Years have rolled over our scene, and converted the forest-track into a

dusty thoroughfare, which, being intersected with lanes and

cross-paths, may fairly be designated as the Main Street. On the

ground-sites of many of the log-built sheds, into which the first

settlers crept for shelter, houses of quaint architecture have now

risen. These later edifices are built, as you see, in one generally

accordant style, though with such subordinate variety as keeps the

beholder’s curiosity excited, and causes each structure, like its

owner’s character, to produce its own peculiar impression. Most of them

have a huge chimney in the centre, with flues so vast that it must have

been easy for the witches to fly out of them as they were wont to do,

when bound on an aerial visit to the Black Man in the forest. Around

this great chimney the wooden house clusters itself, in a whole

community of gable-ends, each ascending into its own separate peak; the

second story, with its lattice-windows, projecting over the first; and

the door, which is perhaps arched, provided on the outside with an iron

hammer, wherewith the visitor’s hand may give a thundering rat-a-tat.

The timber framework of these houses, as compared with those of recent

date, is like the skeleton of an old giant, beside the frail bones of a

modern man of fashion. Many of them, by the vast strength and soundness

of their oaken substance, have been preserved through a length of time

which would have tried the stability of brick and stone; so that, in

all the progressive decay and continual reconstruction of the street,

to down our own days, we shall still behold these old edifices

occupying their long-accustomed sites. For instance, on the upper

corner of that green lane which shall hereafter be North Street, we see

the Curwen House, newly built, with the carpenters still at work on the

roof nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner

stands another dwelling,—destined, at some period of its existence, to

be the abode of an unsuccessful alchemist,—which shall likewise survive

to our own generation, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through the

medium of these patriarchal edifices, we have now established a sort of

kindred and hereditary acquaintance with the Main Street.

Great as is the transformation produced by a short term of years, each

single day creeps through the Puritan settlement sluggishly enough. It

shall pass before your eyes, condensed into the space of a few moments.

The gray light of early morning is slowly diffusing itself over the

scene; and the bellman, whose office it is to cry the hour at the

street-corners, rings the last peal upon his hand bell, and goes

wearily homewards, with the owls, the bats, and other creatures of the

night. Lattices are thrust back on their hinges, as if the town were

opening its eyes, in the summer morning. Forth stumbles the still

drowsy cowherd, with his horn; putting which to his lips, it emits a

bellowing bray, impossible to be represented in the picture, but which

reaches the pricked-up ears of every cow in the settlement, and tells

her that the dewy pasture-hour is come. House after house awakes, and

sends the smoke up curling from its chimney, like frosty breath from

living nostrils; and as those white wreaths of smoke, though

impregnated with earthy admixtures, climb skyward, so, from each

dwelling, does the morning worship—its spiritual essence, bearing up

its human imperfection—find its way to the heavenly Father’s throne.

The breakfast-hour being passed, the inhabitants do not, as usual, go

to their fields or workshops, but remain within doors; or perhaps walk

the street, with a grave sobriety, yet a disengaged and unburdened

aspect, that belongs neither to a holiday nor a Sabbath. And, indeed,

this passing day is neither, nor is it a common week-day, although

partaking of all the three. It is the Thursday Lecture; an institution

which New England has long ago relinquished, and almost forgotten, yet

which it would have been better to retain, as bearing relations to both

the spiritual and ordinary life, and bringing each acquainted with the

other. The tokens of its observance, however, which here meet our eyes,

are of rather a questionable cast. It is, in one sense, a day of public

shame; the day on which transgressors, who have made themselves liable

to the minor severities of the Puritan law receive their reward of

ignominy. At this very moment, this constable has bound an idle fellow

to the whipping-post, and is giving him his deserts with a cat-o’-nine

tails. Ever since sunrise, Daniel Fairfield has been standing on the

steps of the meeting-house, with a halter about his neck, which he is

condemned to wear visibly throughout his lifetime; Dorothy Talby is

chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun

blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting

her hand against her husband; while, through the bars of that great

wooden cage, in the centre of the scene, we discern either a human

being or a wild beast, or both in one, whom this public infamy causes

to roar, and gnash his teeth, and shake the strong oaken bars, as if he

would break forth, and tear in pieces the little children who have been

peeping at him. Such are the profitable sights that serve the good

people to while away the earlier part of lecture-day. Betimes in the

forenoon, a traveller—the first traveller that has come hitherward this

morning—rides slowly into the street on his patient steed. He seems a

clergyman; and, as he draws near, we recognize the minister of Lynn,

who was pre-engaged to lecture here, and has been revolving his

discourse, as he rode through the hoary wilderness. Behold, now, the

whole town thronging into the meeting-house, mostly with such sombre

visages that the sunshine becomes little better than a shadow when it

falls upon them. There go the Thirteen Men, grim rulers of a grim

community! There goes John Massey, the first town-born child, now a

youth of twenty, whose eye wanders with peculiar interest towards that

buxom damsel who comes up the steps at the same instant. There hobbles

Goody Foster, a sour and bitter old beldam, looking as if she went to

curse, and not to pray, and whom many of her neighbors suspect of

taking an occasional airing on a broomstick. There, too, slinking

shamefacedly in, you observe that same poor do-nothing and

good-for-nothing whom we saw castigated just now at the whipping-post.

Last of all, there goes the tithing-man, lugging in a couple of small

boys, whom he has caught at play beneath God’s blessed sunshine, in a

back lane. What native of Naumkeag, whose recollections go back more

than thirty years, does not still shudder at that dark ogre of his

infancy, who perhaps had long ceased to have an actual existence, but

still lived in his childish belief, in a horrible idea, and in the

nurse’s threat, as the Tidy Man!

It will be hardly worth our while to wait two, or it may be three,

turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion of the lecture.

Therefore, by my control over light and darkness, I cause the dusk, and

then the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth

again the bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his

footsteps, to pace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily

the hour to drowsy or dreaming ears. Happy are we, if for nothing else,

yet because we did not live in those days. In truth, when the first

novelty and stir of spirit had subsided,—when the new settlement,

between the forest-border and the sea, had become actually a little

town,—its daily life must have trudged onward with hardly anything to

diversify and enliven it, while also its rigidity could not fail to

cause miserable distortions of the moral nature. Such a life was

sinister to the intellect, and sinister to the heart; especially when

one generation had bequeathed its religious gloom, and the counterfeit

of its religious ardor, to the next; for these characteristics, as was

inevitable, assumed the form both of hypocrisy and exaggeration, by

being inherited from the example and precept of other human beings, and

not from an original and spiritual source. The sons and grandchildren

of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than

their progenitors had been. The latter were stern, severe, intolerant,

but not superstitious, not even fanatical; and endowed, if any men of

that age were, with a far-seeing worldly sagacity. But it was

impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, in heaven’s freedom,

beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of character had

established; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all the

unfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to

us by our Puritan forefathers. Let us thank God for having given us

such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less

fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.

“What is all this?” cries the critic. “A sermon? If so, it is not in

the bill.”

“Very true,” replies the showman; “and I ask pardon of the audience.”

Look now at the street, and observe a strange people entering it. Their

garments are torn and disordered, their faces haggard, their figures

emaciated; for they have made their way hither through pathless

deserts, suffering hunger and hardship, with no other shelter thin a

hollow tree, the lair of a wild beast, or an Indian wigwam. Nor, in the

most inhospitable and dangerous of such lodging-places, was there half

the peril that awaits them in this thoroughfare of Christian men, with

those secure dwellings and warm hearths on either side of it, and

yonder meeting-house as the central object of the scene. These

wanderers have received from Heaven a gift that, in all epochs of the

world, has brought with it the penalties of mortal suffering and

persecution, scorn, enmity, and death itself;—a gift that, thus

terrible to its possessors, has ever been most hateful to all other

men, since its very existence seems to threaten the overthrow of

whatever else the toilsome ages have built up;—the gift of a new idea.

You can discern it in them, illuminating their faces—their whole

persons, indeed, however earthly and cloddish—with a light that

inevitably shines through, and makes the startled community aware that

these men are not as they themselves are,—not brethren nor neighbors of

their thought. Forthwith, it is as if an earthquake rumbled through the

town, making its vibrations felt at every hearthstone, and especially

causing the spire of the meeting-house to totter. The Quakers have

come. We are in peril! See! they trample upon our wise and

well-established laws in the person of our chief magistrate; for

Governor Endicott is passing, now an aged man, and dignified with long

habits of authority,—and not one of the irreverent vagabonds has moved

his hat. Did you note the ominous frown of the white-bearded Puritan

governor, as he turned himself about, and, in his anger, half uplifted

the staff that has become a needful support to his old age? Here comes

old Mr. Norris, our venerable minister. Will they doff their hats, and

pay reverence to him? No: their hats stick fast to their ungracious

heads, as if they grew there; and—impious varlets that they are, and

worse than the heathen Indians!—they eye our reverend pastor with a

peculiar scorn, distrust, unbelief, and utter denial of his sanctified

pretensions, of which he himself immediately becomes conscious; the

more bitterly conscious, as he never knew nor dreamed of the like

before.

But look yonder! Can we believe our eyes? A Quaker woman, clad in

sackcloth, and with ashes on her head, has mounted the steps of the

meeting-house. She addresses the people in a wild, shrill voice,—wild

and shrill it must be to suit such a figure,—which makes them tremble

and turn pale, although they crowd open-mouthed to hear her. She is

bold against established authority; she denounces the priest and his

steeple-house. Many of her hearers are appalled; some weep; and others

listen with a rapt attention, as if a living truth had now, for the

first time, forced its way through the crust of habit, reached their

hearts, and awakened them to life. This matter must be looked to; else

we have brought our faith across the seas with us in vain; and it had

been better that the old forest were still standing here, waving its

tangled boughs and murmuring to the sky out of its desolate recesses,

instead of this goodly street, if such blasphemies be spoken in it.

So thought the old Puritans. What was their mode of action may be

partly judged from the spectacles which now pass before your eyes.

Joshua Buffum is standing in the pillory. Cassandra Southwick is led to

prison. And there a woman, it is Ann Coleman,—naked from the waist

upward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the Main

Street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a

whip of knotted cords. A strong-armed fellow is that constable; and

each time that he flourishes his lash in the air, you see a frown

wrinkling and twisting his brow, and, at the same instant, a smile upon

his lips. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts

his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfil the injunction of Major

Hawthorne’s warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. There came down a

stroke that has drawn blood! Ten such stripes are to be given in Salem,

ten in Boston, and ten in Dedham; and, with those thirty stripes of

blood upon her, she is to be driven into the forest. The crimson trail

goes wavering along the Main Street; but Heaven grant that, as the rain

of so many years has wept upon it, time after time, and washed it all

away, so there may have been a dew of mercy, to cleanse this cruel

blood-stain out of the record of the persecutor’s life!

Pass on, thou spectral constable, and betake thee to thine own place of

torment. Meanwhile, by the silent operation of the mechanism behind the

scenes, a considerable space of time would seem to have lapsed over the

street. The older dwellings now begin to look weather-beaten, through

the effect of the many eastern storms that have moistened their

unpainted shingles and clapboards, for not less than forty years. Such

is the age we would assign to the town, judging by the aspect of John

Massey, the first town-born child, whom his neighbors now call Goodman

Massey, and whom we see yonder, a grave, almost autumnal-looking man,

with children of his own about him. To the patriarchs of the

settlement, no doubt, the Main Street is still but an affair of

yesterday, hardly more antique, even if destined to be more permanent,

than a path shovelled through the snow. But to the middle-aged and

elderly men who came hither in childhood or early youth, it presents

the aspect of a long and well-established work, on which they have

expended the strength and ardor of their life. And the younger people,

native to the street, whose earliest recollections are of creeping over

the paternal threshold, and rolling on the grassy margin of the track,

look at it as one of the perdurable things of our mortal state,—as old

as the hills of the great pasture, or the headland at the harbor’s

mouth. Their fathers and grandsires tell them how, within a few years

past, the forest stood here, with but a lonely track beneath its

tangled shade. Vain legend! They cannot make it true and real to their

conceptions. With them, moreover, the Main Street is a street indeed,

worthy to hold its way with the thronged and stately avenues of cities

beyond the sea. The old Puritans tell them of the crowds that hurry

along Cheapside and Fleet Street and the Strand, and of the rush of

tumultuous life at Temple Bar. They describe London Bridge, itself a

street, with a row of houses on each side. They speak of the vast

structure of the Tower, and the solemn grandeur of Westminster Abbey.

The children listen, and still inquire if the streets of London are

longer and broader than the one before their father’s door; if the

Tower is bigger than the jail in Prison Lane; if the old Abbey will

hold a larger congregation than our meeting-house. Nothing impresses

them, except their own experience.

It seems all a fable, too, that wolves have ever prowled here; and not

less so, that the Squaw Sachem, and the Sagamore her son, once ruled

over this region, and treated as sovereign potentates with the English

settlers, then so few and storm-beaten, now so powerful. There stand

some school-boys, you observe, in a little group around a drunken

Indian, himself a prince of the Squaw Sachem’s lineage. He brought

hither some beaver-skins for sale, and has already swallowed the larger

portion of their price, in deadly draughts of firewater. Is there not a

touch of pathos in that picture? and does it not go far towards telling

the whole story of the vast growth and prosperity of one race, and the

fated decay of another?—the children of the stranger making game of the

great Squaw Sachem’s grandson!

But the whole race of red men have not vanished with that wild princess

and her posterity. This march of soldiers along the street betokens the

breaking out of King Philip’s war; and these young men, the flower of

Essex, are on their way to defend the villages on the Connecticut;

where, at Bloody Brook, a terrible blow shall be smitten, and hardly

one of that gallant band be left alive. And there, at that stately

mansion, with its three peaks in front, and its two little peaked

towers, one on either side of the door, we see brave Captain Gardner

issuing forth, clad in his embroidered buff-coat, and his plumed cap

upon his head. His trusty sword, in its steel scabbard, strikes

clanking on the doorstep. See how the people throng to their doors and

windows, as the cavalier rides past, reining his mettled steed so

gallantly, and looking so like the very soul and emblem of martial

achievement,—destined, too, to meet a warrior’s fate, at the desperate

assault on the fortress of the Narragansetts!

“The mettled steed looks like a pig,” interrupts the critic, “and

Captain Gardner himself like the Devil, though a very tame one, and on

a most diminutive scale.”

“Sir, sir!” cries the persecuted showman, losing all patience,—for,

indeed, he had particularly prided himself on these figures of Captain

Gardner and his horse,—“I see that there is no hope of pleasing you.

Pray, sir, do me the favor to take back your money, and withdraw!”

“Not I!” answers the unconscionable critic. “I am just beginning to get

interested in the matter. Come! turn your crank, and grind out a few

more of these fooleries!”

The showman rubs his brow impulsively, whisks the little rod with which

he points out the notabilities of the scene, but, finally, with the

inevitable acquiescence of all public servants, resumes his composure

and goes on.

Pass onward, onward, Time! Build up new houses here, and tear down thy

works of yesterday, that have already the rusty moss upon them! Summon

forth the minister to the abode of the young maiden, and bid him unite

her to the joyful bridegroom! Let the youthful parents carry their

first-born to the meeting-house, to receive the baptismal rite! Knock

at the door, whence the sable line of the funeral is next to issue!

Provide other successive generations of men, to trade, talk, quarrel,

or walk in friendly intercourse along the street, as their fathers did

before them! Do all thy daily and accustomed business, Father Time, in

this thoroughfare, which thy footsteps, for so many years, have now

made dusty! But here, at last, thou leadest along a procession which,

once witnessed, shall appear no more, and be remembered only as a

hideous dream of thine, or a frenzy of thy old brain.

“Turn your crank, I say,” bellows the remorseless critic, “and grind it

out, whatever it be, without further preface!”

The showman deems it best to comply.

Then, here comes the worshipful Captain Curwen, sheriff of Essex, on

horseback, at the head of an armed guard, escorting a company of

condemned prisoners from the jail to their place of execution on

Gallows Hill. The witches! There is no mistaking them! The witches! As

they approach up Prison Lane, and turn into the Main Street, let us

watch their faces, as if we made a part of the pale crowd that presses

so eagerly about them, yet shrinks back with such shuddering dread,

leaving an open passage betwixt a dense throng on either side. Listen

to what the people say.

There is old George Jacobs, known hereabouts, these sixty years, as a

man whom we thought upright in all his way of life, quiet, blameless, a

good husband before his pious wife was summoned from the evil to come,

and a good father to the children whom she left him. Ah! but when that

blessed woman went to heaven, George Jacobs’s heart was empty, his

hearth lonely, his life broken tip; his children were married, and

betook themselves to habitations of their own; and Satan, in his

wanderings up and down, beheld this forlorn old man, to whom life was a

sameness and a weariness, and found the way to tempt him. So the

miserable sinner was prevailed with to mount into the air, and career

among the clouds; and he is proved to have been present at a

witch-meeting as far off as Falmouth, on the very same night that his

next neighbors saw him, with his rheumatic stoop, going in at his own

door. There is John Willard, too; an honest man we thought him, and so

shrewd and active in his business, so practical, so intent on every-day

affairs, so constant at his little place of trade, where he bartered

English goods for Indian corn and all kinds of country produce! How

could such a man find time, or what could put it into his mind, to

leave his proper calling, and become a wizard? It is a mystery, unless

the Black Man tempted him with great heaps of gold. See that aged

couple,—a sad sight, truly,—John Proctor, and his wife Elizabeth. If

there were two old people in all the county of Essex who seemed to have

led a true Christian life, and to be treading hopefully the little

remnant of their earthly path, it was this very pair. Yet have we heard

it sworn, to the satisfaction of the worshipful Chief-Justice Sewell,

and all the court and jury, that Proctor and his wife have shown their

withered faces at children’s bedsides, mocking, making mouths, and

affrighting the poor little innocents in the night-time. They, or their

spectral appearances, have stuck pins into the Afflicted Ones, and

thrown them into deadly fainting-fits with a touch, or but a look. And,

while we supposed the old man to be reading the Bible to his old

wife,—she meanwhile knitting in the chimney-corner,—the pair of hoary

reprobates have whisked up the chimney, both on one broomstick, and

flown away to a witch-communion, far into the depths of the chill, dark

forest. How foolish! Were it only for fear of rheumatic pains in their

old bones, they had better have stayed at home. But away they went; and

the laughter of their decayed, cackling voices has been heard at

midnight, aloft in the air. Now, in the sunny noontide, as they go

tottering to the gallows, it is the Devil’s turn to laugh.

Behind these two,—who help another along, and seem to be comforting and

encouraging each other, in a manner truly pitiful, if it were not a sin

to pity the old witch and wizard,—behind them comes a woman, with a

dark proud face that has been beautiful, and a figure that is still

majestic. Do you know her? It is Martha Carrier, whom the Devil found

in a humble cottage, and looked into her discontented heart, and saw

pride there, and tempted her with his promise that she should be Queen

of Hell. And now, with that lofty demeanor, she is passing to her

kingdom, and, by her unquenchable pride, transforms this escort of

shame into a triumphal procession, that shall attend her to the gates

of her infernal palace, and seat her upon the fiery throne. Within this

hour, she shall assume her royal dignity.

Last of the miserable train comes a man clad in black, of small stature

and a dark complexion, with a clerical band about his neck. Many a

time, in the years gone by, that face has been uplifted heavenward from

the pulpit of the East Meeting-House, when the Rev. Mr. Burroughs

seemed to worship God. What!—he? The holy man!—the learned!—the wise!

How has the Devil tempted him? His fellow-criminals, for the most part,

are obtuse, uncultivated creatures, some of them scarcely half-witted

by nature, and others greatly decayed in their intellects through age.

They were an easy prey for the destroyer. Not so with this George

Burroughs, as we judge by the inward light which glows through his dark

countenance, and, we might almost say, glorifies his figure, in spite

of the soil and haggardness of long imprisonment,—in spite of the heavy

shadow that must fall on him, while death is walking by his side. What

bribe could Satan offer, rich enough to tempt and overcome this mail?

Alas! it may have been in the very strength of his high and searching

intellect, that the Tempter found the weakness which betrayed him. He

yearned for knowledge he went groping onward into a world of mystery;

at first, as the witnesses have sworn, he summoned up the ghosts of his

two dead wives, and talked with them of matters beyond the grave; and,

when their responses failed to satisfy the intense and sinful craving

of his spirit, he called on Satan, and was heard. Yet—to look at

him—who, that had not known the proof, could believe him guilty? Who

would not say, while we see him offering comfort to the weak and aged

partners of his horrible crime,—while we hear his ejaculations of

prayer, that seem to bubble up out of the depths of his heart, and fly

heavenward, unawares,—while we behold a radiance brightening on his

features as from the other world, which is but a few steps off,—who

would not say, that, over the dusty track of the Main Street, a

Christian saint is now going to a martyr’s death? May not the

Arch-Fiend have been too subtle for the court and jury, and betrayed

them—laughing in his sleeve, the while—into the awful error of pouring

out sanctified blood as an acceptable sacrifice upon God’s altar? Ah!

no; for listen to wise Cotton Mather, who, as he sits there on his

horse, speaks comfortably to the perplexed multitude, and tells them

that all has been religiously and justly done, and that Satan’s power

shall this day receive its death-blow in New England.

Heaven grant it be so!—the great scholar must be right; so lead the

poor creatures to their death! Do you see that group of children and

half-grown girls, and, among them, an old, hag-like Indian woman,

Tituba by name? Those are the Afflicted Ones. Behold, at this very

instant, a proof of Satan’s power and malice! Mercy Parris, the

minister’s daughter, has been smitten by a flash of Martha Carrier’s

eye, and falls down in the street, writhing with horrible spasms and

foaming at the mouth, like the possessed one spoken of in Scripture.

Hurry on the accursed witches to the gallows, ere they do more

mischief!—ere they fling out their withered arms, and scatter

pestilence by handfuls among the crowd!—ere, as their parting legacy,

they cast a blight over the land, so that henceforth it may bear no

fruit nor blade of grass, and be fit for nothing but a sepulchre for

their unhallowed carcasses! So, on they go; and old George Jacobs has

stumbled, by reason of his infirmity; but Goodman Proctor and his wife

lean on one another, and walk at a reasonably steady pace, considering

their age. Mr. Burroughs seems to administer counsel to Martha Carrier,

whose face and mien, methinks, are milder and humbler than they were.

Among the multitude, meanwhile, there is horror, fear, and distrust;

and friend looks askance at friend, and the husband at his wife, and

the wife at him, and even the mother at her little child; as if, in

every creature that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an

accuser. Never, never again, whether in this or any other shape, may

Universal Madness riot in the Main Street!

I perceive in your eyes, my indulgent spectators, the criticism which

you are too kind to utter. These scenes, you think, are all too sombre.

So, indeed, they are; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of

our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread

of rose-color or gold, and not on me, who have a tropic-love of

sunshine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where

to find so much. That you may believe me, I will exhibit one of the

only class of scenes, so far as my investigation has taught me, in

which our ancestors were wont to steep their tough old hearts in wine

and strong drink, and indulge an outbreak of grisly jollity.

Here it comes, out of the same house whence we saw brave Captain

Gardner go forth to the wars. What! A coffin, borne on men’s shoulders,

and six aged gentlemen as pall-bearers, and a long train of mourners,

with black gloves and black hat-bands, and everything black, save a

white handkerchief in each mourner’s hand, to wipe away his tears

withal. Now, my kind patrons, you are angry with me. You were bidden to

a bridal-dance, and find yourselves walking in a funeral procession.

Even so; but look back through all the social customs of New England,

in the first century of her existence, and read all her traits of

character; and if you find one occasion, other than a funeral feast,

where jollity was sanctioned by universal practice, I will set fire to

my puppet-show without another word. These are the obsequies of old

Governor Bradstreet, the patriarch and survivor of the first settlers,

who, having intermarried with the Widow Gardner, is now resting from

his labors, at the great age of ninety-four. The white-bearded corpse,

which was his spirit’s earthly garniture, now lies beneath yonder

coffin-lid. Many a cask of ale and cider is on tap, and many a draught

of spiced wine and aqua-vitæ has been quaffed. Else why should the

bearers stagger, as they tremulously uphold the coffin?—and the aged

pall-bearers, too, as they strive to walk solemnly beside it?—and

wherefore do the mourners tread on one another’s heels?—and why, if we

may ask without offence, should the nose of the Rev. Mr. Noyes, through

which he has just been delivering the funeral discourse, glow like a

ruddy coal of fire? Well, well, old friends! Pass on, with your burden

of mortality, And lay it in the tomb with jolly hearts. People should

be permitted to enjoy themselves in their own fashion; every man to his

taste; but New England must have been a dismal abode for the man of

pleasure, when the only boon-companion was Death!

Under cover of a mist that has settled over the scene, a few years flit

by, and escape our notice. As the atmosphere becomes transparent, we

perceive a decrepit grandsire, hobbling along the street. Do you

recognize him? We saw him, first, as the baby in Goodwife Massey’s

arms, when the primeval trees were flinging their shadow over Roger

Conant’s cabin; we have seen him, as the boy, the youth, the man,

bearing his humble part in all the successive scenes, and forming the

index-figure whereby to note the age of his coeval town. And here he

is, old Goodman Massey, taking his last walk,—often pausing,—often

leaning over his staff,—and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at

such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of

those more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and

deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic

infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line, in order to

visit every settler’s door. The Main Street is still youthful; the

coeval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of

fourscore, yet shall retain a sort of infantine life in our local

history, as the first town-born child.

Behold here a change, wrought in the twinkling of an eye, like an

incident in a tale of magic, even while your observation has been fixed

upon the scene. The Main Street has vanished out of sight. In its stead

appears a wintry waste of snow, with the sun just peeping over it, cold

and bright, and tingeing the white expanse with the faintest and most

ethereal rose-color. This is the Great Snow of 1717, famous for the

mountain-drifts in which it buried the whole country. It would seem as

if the street, the growth of which we have noted so attentively,

following it from its first phase, as an Indian track, until it reached

the dignity of sidewalks, were all at once obliterated, and resolved

into a drearier pathlessness than when the forest covered it. The

gigantic swells and billows of the snow have swept over each man’s

metes and bounds, and annihilated all the visible distinctions of human

property. So that now the traces of former times and hitherto

accomplished deeds being done away, mankind should be at liberty to

enter on new paths, and guide themselves by other laws than heretofore;

if, indeed, the race be not extinct, and it be worth our while to go on

with the march of life, over the cold and desolate expanse that lies

before us. It may be, however, that matters are not so desperate as

they appear. That vast icicle, glittering so cheerlessly in the

sunshine, must be the spire of the meeting-house, incrusted with frozen

sleet. Those great heaps, too, which we mistook for drifts, are houses,

buried up to their eaves, and with their peaked roofs rounded by the

depth of snow upon them. There, now, comes a gush of smoke from what I

judge to be the chimney of the Ship Tavern;—and another—another—and

another—from the chimneys of other dwellings, where fireside comfort,

domestic peace, the sports of children, and the quietude of age are

living yet, in spite of the frozen crust above them.

But it is time to change the scene. Its dreary monotony shall not test

your fortitude like one of our actual New England winters, which leaves

so large a blank—so melancholy a death-spot—in lives so brief that they

ought to be all summer-time. Here, at least, I may claim to be ruler of

the seasons. One turn of the crank shall melt away the snow from the

Main Street, and show the trees in their full foliage, the rose-bushes

in bloom, and a border of green grass along the sidewalk. There! But

what! How! The scene will not move. A wire is broken. The street

continues buried beneath the snow, and the fate of Herculaneum and

Pompeii has its parallel in this catastrophe.

Alas! my kind and gentle audience, you know not the extent of your

misfortune. The scenes to come were far better than the past. The

street itself would have been more worthy of pictorial exhibition; the

deeds of its inhabitants not less so. And how would your interest have

deepened, as, passing out of the cold shadow of antiquity, in my long

and weary course, I should arrive within the limits of man’s memory,

and, leading you at last into the sunshine of the present, should give

a reflex of the very life that is flitting past us! Your own beauty, my

fair townswomen, would have beamed upon you, out of my scene. Not a

gentleman that walks the street but should have beheld his own face and

figure, his gait, the peculiar swing of his arm, and the coat that he

put on yesterday. Then, too,—and it is what I chiefly regret,—I had

expended a vast deal of light and brilliancy on a representation of the

street in its whole length, from Buffum’s Corner downward, on the night

of the grand illumination for General Taylor’s triumph. Lastly, I

should have given the crank one other turn, and have brought out the

future, showing you who shall walk the Main Street to-morrow, and,

perchance, whose funeral shall pass through it!

But these, like most other human purposes, lie unaccomplished; and I

have only further to say, that any lady or gentlemen who may feel

dissatisfied with the evening’s entertainment shall receive back the

admission fee at the door.

“Then give me mine,” cries the critic, stretching out his palm. “I said

that your exhibition would prove a humbug, and so it has turned out.

So, hand over my quarter!”

ETHAN BRAND:

A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE

Bartram the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, begrimed with

charcoal, sat watching his kiln at nightfall, while his little son

played at building houses with the scattered fragments of marble, when,

on the hill-side below them, they heard a roar of laughter, not

mirthful, but slow, and even solemn, like a wind shaking the boughs of

the forest.

“Father, what is that?” asked the little boy, leaving his play, and

pressing betwixt his father’s knees.

“Oh, some drunken man, I suppose,” answered the lime-burner; “some

merry fellow from the bar-room in the village, who dared not laugh loud

enough within doors lest he should blow the roof of the house off. So

here he is, shaking his jolly sides at the foot of Graylock.”

“But, father,” said the child, more sensitive than the obtuse,

middle-aged clown, “he does not laugh like a man that is glad. So the

noise frightens me!”

“Don’t be a fool, child!” cried his father, gruffly. “You will never

make a man, I do believe; there is too much of your mother in you. I

have known the rustling of a leaf startle you. Hark! Here comes the

merry fellow now. You shall see that there is no harm in him.”

Bartram and his little son, while they were talking thus, sat watching

the same lime-kiln that had been the scene of Ethan Brand’s solitary

and meditative life, before he began his search for the Unpardonable

Sin. Many years, as we have seen, had now elapsed, since that

portentous night when the IDEA was first developed. The kiln, however,

on the mountain-side, stood unimpaired, and was in nothing changed

since he had thrown his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its

furnace, and melted them, as it were, into the one thought that took

possession of his life. It was a rude, round, tower-like structure

about twenty feet high, heavily built of rough stones, and with a

hillock of earth heaped about the larger part of its circumference; so

that the blocks and fragments of marble might be drawn by cart-loads,

and thrown in at the top. There was an opening at the bottom of the

tower, like an over-mouth, but large enough to admit a man in a

stooping posture, and provided with a massive iron door. With the smoke

and jets of flame issuing from the chinks and crevices of this door,

which seemed to give admittance into the hill-side, it resembled

nothing so much as the private entrance to the infernal regions, which

the shepherds of the Delectable Mountains were accustomed to show to

pilgrims.

There are many such lime-kilns in that tract of country, for the

purpose of burning the white marble which composes a large part of the

substance of the hills. Some of them, built years ago, and long

deserted, with weeds growing in the vacant round of the interior, which

is open to the sky, and grass and wild-flowers rooting themselves into

the chinks of the stones, look already like relics of antiquity, and

may yet be overspread with the lichens of centuries to come. Others,

where the lime-burner still feeds his daily and night-long fire, afford

points of interest to the wanderer among the hills, who seats himself

on a log of wood or a fragment of marble, to hold a chat with the

solitary man. It is a lonesome, and, when the character is inclined to

thought, may be an intensely thoughtful occupation; as it proved in the

case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to such strange purpose, in days

gone by, while the fire in this very kiln was burning.

The man who now watched the fire was of a different order, and troubled

himself with no thoughts save the very few that were requisite to his

business. At frequent intervals, he flung back the clashing weight of

the iron door, and, turning his face from the insufferable glare,

thrust in huge logs of oak, or stirred the immense brands with a long

pole. Within the furnace were seen the curling and riotous flames, and

the burning marble, almost molten with the intensity of heat; while

without, the reflection of the fire quivered on the dark intricacy of

the surrounding forest, and showed in the foreground a bright and ruddy

little picture of the hut, the spring beside its door, the athletic and

coal-begrimed figure of the lime-burner, and the half-frightened child,

shrinking into the protection of his father’s shadow. And when, again,

the iron door was closed, then reappeared the tender light of the

half-full moon, which vainly strove to trace out the indistinct shapes

of the neighboring mountains; and, in the upper sky, there was a

flitting congregation of clouds, still faintly tinged with the rosy

sunset, though thus far down into the valley the sunshine had vanished

long and long ago.

The little boy now crept still closer to his father, as footsteps were

heard ascending the hill-side, and a human form thrust aside the bushes

that clustered beneath the trees.

“Halloo! who is it?” cried the lime-burner, vexed at his son’s

timidity, yet half infected by it. “Come forward, and show yourself,

like a man, or I’ll fling this chunk of marble at your head!”

“You offer me a rough welcome,” said a gloomy voice, as the unknown man

drew nigh. “Yet I neither claim nor desire a kinder one, even at my own

fireside.”

To obtain a distincter view, Bartram threw open the iron door of the

kiln, whence immediately issued a gush of fierce light, that smote full

upon the stranger’s face and figure. To a careless eye there appeared

nothing very remarkable in his aspect, which was that of a man in a

coarse brown, country-made suit of clothes, tall and thin, with the

staff and heavy shoes of a wayfarer. As he advanced, he fixed his

eyes—which were very bright—intently upon the brightness of the

furnace, as if he beheld, or expected to behold, some object worthy of

note within it.

“Good evening, stranger,” said the lime-burner; “whence come you, so

late in the day?”

“I come from my search,” answered the wayfarer; “for, at last, it is

finished.”

“Drunk!—or crazy!” muttered Bartram to himself. “I shall have trouble

with the fellow. The sooner I drive him away, the better.”

The little boy, all in a tremble, whispered to his father, and begged

him to shut the door of the kiln, so that there might not be so much

light; for that there was something in the man’s face which he was

afraid to look at, yet could not look away from. And, indeed, even the

lime-burner’s dull and torpid sense began to be impressed by an

indescribable something in that thin, rugged, thoughtful visage, with

the grizzled hair hanging wildly about it, and those deeply sunken

eyes, which gleamed like fires within the entrance of a mysterious

cavern. But, as he closed the door, the stranger turned towards him,

and spoke in a quiet, familiar way, that made Bartram feel as if he

were a sane and sensible man, after all.

“Your task draws to an end, I see,” said he. “This marble has already

been burning three days. A few hours more will convert the stone to

lime.”

“Why, who are you?” exclaimed the lime-burner. “You seem as well

acquainted with my business as I am myself.”

“And well I may be,” said the stranger; “for I followed the same craft

many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. But you are a

newcomer in these parts. Did you never hear of Ethan Brand?”

“The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin?” asked Bartram,

with a laugh.

“The same,” answered the stranger. “He has found what he sought, and

therefore he comes back again.”

“What! then you are Ethan Brand himself?” cried the lime-burner, in

amazement. “I am a new-comer here, as you say, and they call it

eighteen years since you left the foot of Graylock. But, I can tell

you, the good folks still talk about Ethan Brand, in the village

yonder, and what a strange errand took him away from his lime-kiln.

Well, and so you have found the Unpardonable Sin?”

“Even so!” said the stranger, calmly.

“If the question is a fair one,” proceeded Bartram, “where might it

be?”

Ethan Brand laid his finger on his own heart.

“Here!” replied he.

And then, without mirth in his countenance, but as if moved by an

involuntary recognition of the infinite absurdity of seeking throughout

the world for what was the closest of all things to himself, and

looking into every heart, save his own, for what was hidden in no other

breast, he broke into a laugh of scorn. It was the same slow, heavy

laugh, that had almost appalled the lime-burner when it heralded the

wayfarer’s approach.

The solitary mountain-side was made dismal by it. Laughter, when out of

place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling,

may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The laughter of

one asleep, even if it be a little child,—the madman’s laugh,—the wild,

screaming laugh of a born idiot,—are sounds that we sometimes tremble

to hear, and would always willingly forget. Poets have imagined no

utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh.

And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange

man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled

away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.

“Joe,” said he to his little son, “scamper down to the tavern in the

village, and tell the jolly fellows there that Ethan Brand has come

back, and that he has found the Unpardonable Sin!”

The boy darted away on his errand, to which Ethan Brand made no

objection, nor seemed hardly to notice it. He sat on a log of wood,

looking steadfastly at the iron door of the kiln. When the child was

out of sight, and his swift and light footsteps ceased to be heard

treading first on the fallen leaves and then on the rocky

mountain-path, the lime-burner began to regret his departure. He felt

that the little fellow’s presence had been a barrier between his guest

and himself, and that he must now deal, heart to heart, with a man who,

on his own confession, had committed the one only crime for which

Heaven could afford no mercy. That crime, in its indistinct blackness,

seemed to overshadow him, and made his memory riotous with a throng of

evil shapes that asserted their kindred with the Master Sin, whatever

it might be, which it was within the scope of man’s corrupted nature to

conceive and cherish. They were all of one family; they went to and fro

between his breast and Ethan Brand’s, and carried dark greetings from

one to the other.

Then Bartram remembered the stories which had grown traditionary in

reference to this strange man, who had come upon him like a shadow of

the night, and was making himself at home in his old place, after so

long absence, that the dead people, dead and buried for years, would

have had more right to be at home, in any familiar spot, than he. Ethan

Brand, it was said, had conversed with Satan himself in the lurid blaze

of this very kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth heretofore, but

looked grisly now. According to this tale, before Ethan Brand departed

on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from the hot

furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in order to confer with

him about the Unpardonable Sin; the man and the fiend each laboring to

frame the image of some mode of guilt which could neither be atoned for

nor forgiven. And, with the first gleam of light upon the mountain-top,

the fiend crept in at the iron door, there to abide the intensest

element of fire until again summoned forth to share in the dreadful

task of extending man’s possible guilt beyond the scope of Heaven’s

else infinite mercy.

While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these thoughts,

Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of the kiln. The

action was in such accordance with the idea in Bartram’s mind, that he

almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot, from the

raging furnace.

“Hold! hold!” cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he was

ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. “Don’t, for

mercy’s sake, bring out your Devil now!”

“Man!” sternly replied Ethan Brand, “what need have I of the Devil? I

have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners

as you that he busies himself. Fear not, because I open the door. I do

but act by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like a

lime-burner, as I was once.”

He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to

gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce

glow that reddened upon his face. The lime-burner sat watching him, and

half suspected this strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a

fiend, at least to plunge into the flames, and thus vanish from the

sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the

door of the kiln.

“I have looked,” said he, “into many a human heart that was seven times

hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire. But I

found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!”

“What is the Unpardonable Sin?” asked the lime-burner; and then he

shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should

be answered.

“It is a sin that grew within my own breast,” replied Ethan Brand,

standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his

stamp. “A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that

triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God,

and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims! The only sin that

deserves a recompense of immortal agony! Freely, were it to do again,

would I incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution!”

“The man’s head is turned,” muttered the lime-burner to himself. “He

may be a sinner like the rest of us,—nothing more likely,—but, I’ll be

sworn, he is a madman too.”

Nevertheless, he felt uncomfortable at his situation, alone with Ethan

Brand on the wild mountain-side, and was right glad to hear the rough

murmur of tongues, and the footsteps of what seemed a pretty numerous

party, stumbling over the stones and rustling through the underbrush.

Soon appeared the whole lazy regiment that was wont to infest the

village tavern, comprehending three or four individuals who had drunk

flip beside the bar-room fire through all the winters, and smoked their

pipes beneath the stoop through all the summers, since Ethan Brand’s

departure. Laughing boisterously, and mingling all their voices

together in unceremonious talk, they now burst into the moonshine and

narrow streaks of firelight that illuminated the open space before the

lime-kiln. Bartram set the door ajar again, flooding the spot with

light, that the whole company might get a fair view of Ethan Brand, and

he of them.

There, among other old acquaintances, was a once ubiquitous man, now

almost extinct, but whom we were formerly sure to encounter at the

hotel of every thriving village throughout the country. It was the

stage-agent. The present specimen of the genus was a wilted and

smoke-dried man, wrinkled and red-nosed, in a smartly cut, brown,

bobtailed coat, with brass buttons, who, for a length of time unknown,

had kept his desk and corner in the bar-room, and was still puffing

what seemed to be the same cigar that he had lighted twenty years

before. He had great fame as a dry joker, though, perhaps, less on

account of any intrinsic humor than from a certain flavor of

brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke, which impregnated all his ideas and

expressions, as well as his person. Another well-remembered, though

strangely altered, face was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still

called him in courtesy; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled

shirtsleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an

attorney, in what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and

in great vogue among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and

toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night,

had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and degrees

of bodily labor, till at last, to adopt his own phrase, he slid into a

soap-vat. In other words, Giles was now a soap-boiler, in a small way.

He had come to be but the fragment of a human being, a part of one foot

having been chopped off by an axe, and an entire hand torn away by the

devilish grip of a steam-engine. Yet, though the corporeal hand was

gone, a spiritual member remained; for, stretching forth the stump,

Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and fingers

with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were amputated. A

maimed and miserable wretch he was; but one, nevertheless, whom the

world could not trample on, and had no right to scorn, either in this

or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since he had still kept up

the courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in charity, and with his

one hand—and that the left one—fought a stern battle against want and

hostile circumstances.

Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with certain points

of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of difference. It was the

village doctor; a man of some fifty years, whom, at an earlier period

of his life, we introduced as paying a professional visit to Ethan

Brand during the latter’s supposed insanity. He was now a

purple-visaged, rude, and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure, with

something wild, ruined, and desperate in his talk, and in all the

details of his gesture and manners. Brandy possessed this man like an

evil spirit, and made him as surly and savage as a wild beast, and as

miserable as a lost soul; but there was supposed to be in him such

wonderful skill, such native gifts of healing, beyond any which medical

science could impart, that society caught hold of him, and would not

let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro upon his horse,

and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited all the

sick-chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, and sometimes

raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or quite as often, no

doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug many a year too soon.

The doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and, as somebody said,

in allusion to his habit of swearing, it was always alight with

hell-fire.

These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand each

after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the

contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he would

find something far better worth seeking than the Unpardonable Sin. No

mind, which has wrought itself by intense and solitary meditation into

a high state of enthusiasm, can endure the kind of contact with low and

vulgar modes of thought and feeling to which Ethan Brand was now

subjected. It made him doubt—and, strange to say, it was a painful

doubt—whether he had indeed found the Unpardonable Sin, and found it

within himself. The whole question on which he had exhausted life, and

more than life, looked like a delusion.

“Leave me,” he said bitterly, “ye brute beasts, that have made

yourselves so, shrivelling up your souls with fiery liquors! I have

done with you. Years and years ago, I groped into your hearts and found

nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gone!”

“Why, you uncivil scoundrel,” cried the fierce doctor, “is that the way

you respond to the kindness of your best friends? Then let me tell you

the truth. You have no more found the Unpardonable Sin than yonder boy

Joe has. You are but a crazy fellow,—I told you so twenty years

ago,—neither better nor worse than a crazy fellow, and the fit

companion of old Humphrey, here!”

He pointed to an old man, shabbily dressed, with long white hair, thin

visage, and unsteady eyes. For some years past this aged person had

been wandering about among the hills, inquiring of all travellers whom

he met for his daughter. The girl, it seemed, had gone off with a

company of circus-performers, and occasionally tidings of her came to

the village, and fine stories were told of her glittering appearance as

she rode on horseback in the ring, or performed marvellous feats on the

tight-rope.

The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed

unsteadily into his face.

“They tell me you have been all over the earth,” said he, wringing his

hands with earnestness. “You must have seen my daughter, for she makes

a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she

send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?”

Ethan Brand’s eye quailed beneath the old man’s. That daughter, from

whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our

tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan

Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted,

absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.

“Yes,” he murmured, turning away from the hoary wanderer, “it is no

delusion. There is an Unpardonable Sin!”

While these things were passing, a merry scene was going forward in the

area of cheerful light, beside the spring and before the door of the

hut. A number of the youth of the village, young men and girls, had

hurried up the hill-side, impelled by curiosity to see Ethan Brand, the

hero of so many a legend familiar to their childhood. Finding nothing,

however, very remarkable in his aspect,—nothing but a sunburnt

wayfarer, in plain garb and dusty shoes, who sat looking into the fire

as if he fancied pictures among the coals,—these young people speedily

grew tired of observing him. As it happened, there was other amusement

at hand. An old German Jew travelling with a diorama on his back, was

passing down the mountain-road towards the village just as the party

turned aside from it, and, in hopes of eking out the profits of the

day, the showman had kept them company to the lime-kiln.

“Come, old Dutchman,” cried one of the young men, “let us see your

pictures, if you can swear they are worth looking at!”

“Oh yes, Captain,” answered the Jew,—whether as a matter of courtesy or

craft, he styled everybody Captain,—“I shall show you, indeed, some

very superb pictures!”

So, placing his box in a proper position, he invited the young men and

girls to look through the glass orifices of the machine, and proceeded

to exhibit a series of the most outrageous scratchings and daubings, as

specimens of the fine arts, that ever an itinerant showman had the face

to impose upon his circle of spectators. The pictures were worn out,

moreover, tattered, full of cracks and wrinkles, dingy with

tobacco-smoke, and otherwise in a most pitiable condition. Some

purported to be cities, public edifices, and ruined castles in Europe;

others represented Napoleon’s battles and Nelson’s sea-fights; and in

the midst of these would be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand,—which

might have been mistaken for the Hand of Destiny, though, in truth, it

was only the showman’s,—pointing its forefinger to various scenes of

the conflict, while its owner gave historical illustrations. When, with

much merriment at its abominable deficiency of merit, the exhibition

was concluded, the German bade little Joe put his head into the box.

Viewed through the magnifying-glasses, the boy’s round, rosy visage

assumed the strangest imaginable aspect of an immense Titanic child,

the mouth grinning broadly, and the eyes and every other feature

overflowing with fun at the joke. Suddenly, however, that merry face

turned pale, and its expression changed to horror, for this easily

impressed and excitable child had become sensible that the eye of Ethan

Brand was fixed upon him through the glass.

“You make the little man to be afraid, Captain,” said the German Jew,

turning up the dark and strong outline of his visage from his stooping

posture. “But look again, and, by chance, I shall cause you to see

somewhat that is very fine, upon my word!”

Ethan Brand gazed into the box for an instant, and then starting back,

looked fixedly at the German. What had he seen? Nothing, apparently;

for a curious youth, who had peeped in almost at the same moment,

beheld only a vacant space of canvas.

“I remember you now,” muttered Ethan Brand to the showman.

“Ah, Captain,” whispered the Jew of Nuremberg, with a dark smile, “I

find it to be a heavy matter in my show-box,—this Unpardonable Sin! By

my faith, Captain, it has wearied my shoulders, this long day, to carry

it over the mountain.”

“Peace,” answered Ethan Brand, sternly, “or get thee into the furnace

yonder!”

The Jew’s exhibition had scarcely concluded, when a great, elderly

dog—who seemed to be his own master, as no person in the company laid

claim to him—saw fit to render himself the object of public notice.

Hitherto, he had shown himself a very quiet, well-disposed old dog,

going round from one to another, and, by way of being sociable,

offering his rough head to be patted by any kindly hand that would take

so much trouble. But now, all of a sudden, this grave and venerable

quadruped, of his own mere motion, and without the slightest suggestion

from anybody else, began to run round after his tail, which, to

heighten the absurdity of the proceeding, was a great deal shorter than

it should have been. Never was seen such headlong eagerness in pursuit

of an object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such

a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,—as

if one end of the ridiculous brute’s body were at deadly and most

unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went

the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of

his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity;

until, utterly exhausted, and as far from the goal as ever, the foolish

old dog ceased his performance as suddenly as he had begun it. The next

moment he was as mild, quiet, sensible, and respectable in his

deportment, as when he first scraped acquaintance with the company.

As may be supposed, the exhibition was greeted with universal laughter,

clapping of hands, and shouts of encore, to which the canine performer

responded by wagging all that there was to wag of his tail, but

appeared totally unable to repeat his very successful effort to amuse

the spectators.

Meanwhile, Ethan Brand had resumed his seat upon the log, and moved, as

it might be, by a perception of some remote analogy between his own

case and that of this self-pursuing cur, he broke into the awful laugh,

which, more than any other token, expressed the condition of his inward

being. From that moment, the merriment of the party was at an end; they

stood aghast, dreading lest the inauspicious sound should be

reverberated around the horizon, and that mountain would thunder it to

mountain, and so the horror be prolonged upon their ears. Then,

whispering one to another that it was late,—that the moon was almost

down,-that the August night was growing chill,—they hurried homewards,

leaving the lime-burner and little Joe to deal as they might with their

unwelcome guest. Save for these three human beings, the open space on

the hill-side was a solitude, set in a vast gloom of forest. Beyond

that darksome verge, the firelight glimmered on the stately trunks and

almost black foliage of pines, intermixed with the lighter verdure of

sapling oaks, maples, and poplars, while here and there lay the

gigantic corpses of dead trees, decaying on the leaf-strewn soil. And

it seemed to little Joe—a timorous and imaginative child—that the

silent forest was holding its breath until some fearful thing should

happen.

Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door of the

kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner and his son, he

bade, rather than advised, them to retire to rest.

“For myself, I cannot sleep,” said he. “I have matters that it concerns

me to meditate upon. I will watch the fire, as I used to do in the old

time.”

“And call the Devil out of the furnace to keep you company, I suppose,”

muttered Bartram, who had been making intimate acquaintance with the

black bottle above mentioned. “But watch, if you like, and call as many

devils as you like! For my part, I shall be all the better for a

snooze. Come, Joe!”

As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back at the

wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender spirit had

an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in which this man had

enveloped himself.

When they had gone, Ethan Brand sat listening to the crackling of the

kindled wood, and looking at the little spirts of fire that issued

through the chinks of the door. These trifles, however, once so

familiar, had but the slightest hold of his attention, while deep

within his mind he was reviewing the gradual but marvellous change that

had been wrought upon him by the search to which he had devoted

himself. He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,—how the

dark forest had whispered to him,—how the stars had gleamed upon him,—a

simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by, and ever

musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love

and sympathy for mankind and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had

first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the

inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into

the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and,

however desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother; with what

awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed

that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued

that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress, disturbed

the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed

his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on

cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were

susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer

to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth,

laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber

after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,

indeed, had withered,—had contracted,—had hardened,—had perished! It

had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of

the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening

the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy

sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was

now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his

experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets,

and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were

demanded for his study.

Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that

his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his

intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable

development,—as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious

fruit of his life’s labor,—he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!

“What more have I to seek? what more to achieve?” said Ethan Brand to

himself. “My task is done, and well done!”

Starting from the log with a certain alacrity in his gait and ascending

the hillock of earth that was raised against the stone circumference of

the lime-kiln, he thus reached the top of the structure. It was a space

of perhaps ten feet across, from edge to edge, presenting a view of the

upper surface of the immense mass of broken marble with which the kiln

was heaped. All these innumerable blocks and fragments of marble were

redhot and vividly on fire, sending up great spouts of blue flame,

which quivered aloft and danced madly, as within a magic circle, and

sank and rose again, with continual and multitudinous activity. As the

lonely man bent forward over this terrible body of fire, the blasting

heat smote up against his person with a breath that, it might be

supposed, would have scorched and shrivelled him up in a moment.

Ethan Brand stood erect, and raised his arms on high. The blue flames

played upon his face, and imparted the wild and ghastly light which

alone could have suited its expression; it was that of a fiend on the

verge of plunging into his gulf of intensest torment.

“O Mother Earth,” cried he, “who art no more my Mother, and into whose

bosom this frame shall never be resolved! O mankind, whose brotherhood

I have cast off, and trampled thy great heart beneath my feet! O stars

of heaven, that shone on me of old, as if to light me onward and

upward!—farewell all, and forever. Come, deadly element of

Fire,-henceforth my familiar friend! Embrace me, as I do thee!”

That night the sound of a fearful peal of laughter rolled heavily

through the sleep of the lime-burner and his little son; dim shapes of

horror and anguish haunted their dreams, and seemed still present in

the rude hovel, when they opened their eyes to the daylight.

“Up, boy, up!” cried the lime-burner, staring about him. “Thank Heaven,

the night is gone, at last; and rather than pass such another, I would

watch my lime-kiln, wide awake, for a twelvemonth. This Ethan Brand,

with his humbug of an Unpardonable Sin, has done me no such mighty

favor, in taking my place!”

He issued from the hut, followed by little Joe, who kept fast hold of

his father’s hand. The early sunshine was already pouring its gold upon

the mountain-tops, and though the valleys were still in shadow, they

smiled cheerfully in the promise of the bright day that was hastening

onward. The village, completely shut in by hills, which swelled away

gently about it, looked as if it had rested peacefully in the hollow of

the great hand of Providence. Every dwelling was distinctly visible;

the little spires of the two churches pointed upwards, and caught a

fore-glimmering of brightness from the sun-gilt skies upon their gilded

weather-cocks. The tavern was astir, and the figure of the old,

smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen beneath the stoop.

Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered

likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were

heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into

the valley, others high up towards the summits, and still others, of

the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the

upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that

rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed

in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the

heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky that it was a day-dream

to look at it.

To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so

readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling

down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while Echo

caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and

elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to

little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each

contributing a strain of airy sweetness.

Little Joe’s face brightened at once.

“Dear father,” cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, “that strange

man is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem glad of it!”

“Yes,” growled the lime-burner, with an oath, “but he has let the fire

go down, and no thanks to him if five hundred bushels of lime are not

spoiled. If I catch the fellow hereabouts again, I shall feel like

tossing him into the furnace!”

With his long pole in his hand, he ascended to the top of the kiln.

After a moment’s pause, he called to his son.

“Come up here, Joe!” said he.

So little Joe ran up the hillock, and stood by his father’s side. The

marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface,

in the midst of the circle,—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted

into lime,—lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after

long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was

the shape of a human heart.

“Was the fellow’s heart made of marble?” cried Bartram, in some

perplexity at this phenomenon. “At any rate, it is burnt into what

looks like special good lime; and, taking all the bones together, my

kiln is half a bushel the richer for him.”

So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it fall

upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled into

fragments.