Thirty or forty years ago there lay scattered about over Southern New
England a great many quiet inland towns, numbering from a thousand to
two or three thousand inhabitants, which boasted a little old-fashioned
"society" of their own,--which had their important men who were heirs to
some snug country property, and their gambrel-roofed houses odorous with
traditions of old-time visits by some worthies of the Colonial period,
or of the Revolution. The good, prim dames, in starched caps and
spectacles, who presided over such houses, were proud of their tidy
parlors,--of their old India china,--of their beds of thyme and sage in
the garden,--of their big Family Bible with brazen clasps,--and, most
times, of their minister.
One Orthodox Congregational Society extended its benignant patronage
over all the people of such town; or, if a stray Episcopalian or
Seven-Day Baptist were here and there living under the wing of the
parish, they were regarded with a serene and stately gravity, as
necessary exceptions to the law of Divine Providence,--like scattered
instances of red hair or of bow-legs in otherwise well-favored families.
There were no wires stretching over the country to shock the nerves of
the good gossips with the thought that their neighbors knew more than
they. There were no heathenisms of the cities, no tenpins, no travelling
circus, no progressive young men of heretical tendencies. Such towns
were as quiet as a sheepfold. Sauntering down their broad central
street, along which all the houses were clustered with a somewhat dreary
uniformity of aspect, one might of a summer's day hear the rumble of the
town mill in some adjoining valley, busy with the town grist; in autumn,
the flip-flap of the flails came pulsing on the ear from half a score of
wide-open barns that yawned with plenty; and in winter, the clang of
axes on the near hills smote sharply upon the frosty stillness, and
would be straightway followed by the booming crash of some great tree.
But civilization and the railways have debauched all such quiet,
stately, steady towns. There are none of them left. If the iron cordon
of travel, by a little divergence, has spared their quietude, leaving
them stranded upon a beach where the tide of active business never
flows, all their dignities are gone. The men of foresight and enterprise
have drifted away to new centres of influence. The bustling dames in
starched caps have gone down childless to their graves, or, disgusted
with gossip at second hand, have sought more immediate contact with the
world. A German tailor, may be, has hung out his sign over the door of
some mouldering mansion, where, in other days, a doughty judge of the
county court, with a great raft of children, kept his honors and his
family warm. A slatternly "carryall," with a driver who reeks of bad
spirit, keeps up uneasy communication with the outside world, traversing
twice or three times a day the league of drive which lies between the
post-office and the railway-station. A few iron-pated farmers, and a few
gentlemen of Irish extraction who keep tavern and stores, divide among
themselves the official honors of the town.
If, on the other hand, the people maintain their old thrift and
importance by actual contact with some great thoroughfare of travel,
their old quietude is exploded; a mushroom station has sprung up;
mushroom villas flank all the hills; the girls wear mushroom hats. A
turreted monster of a chapel from some flamboyant tower bellows out its
Sunday warning to a new set of church-goers. There is a little coterie
of "superior intelligences," who talk of the humanities, and diffuse
their airy rationalism over here and there a circle of the progressive
town. Even the meeting house, which was the great congregational centre
of the town religion, has lost its venerable air, taken off by some new
fancy of variegated painting. The high, square pews are turned into
low-backed seats, that flame on a summer Sunday with such gorgeous
millinery as would have shocked the grave people of thirty years ago.
The deep bass note which once pealed from the belfry with a solemn and
solitary dignity of sound has now lost it all amid the jangle of a
half-dozen bells of lighter and airier twang. Even the parson himself
will not be that grave man of stately bearing, who met the rarest fun
only benignantly, and to whom all the villagers bowed,--but some new
creature full of the logic of the schools and the latest
conventionalisms of manner. The homespun disciples of other days would
be brought grievously to the blush, if some deep note of the old bell
should suddenly summon them to the presence of so fine a teacher,
encompassed with such pretty appliances of upholstery; and, counting
their chances better in the strait path they knew on uncarpeted floors
and between high pews, they would slink back into their graves
content,--all the more content, perhaps, if they should listen to the
service of the new teacher, and, in their common-sense way, reckon what
chance the dapper talker might have,--as compared with the solemn
soberness of the old pastor,--in opening the ponderous doors for them
upon the courts above.
Into this metamorphosed condition the town of Ashfield has possibly
fallen in these latter days; but in the good year 1819, when the
Reverend Benjamin Johns was invited for the first time to fill its
pulpit of an early autumn Sunday, it was still in possession of all its
palmy quietude and of its ancient cheery importance. And to that old
date we will now transfer ourselves.