I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night,
but I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous;
the effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already
tucked away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The
tombs were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of
some were true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to
require even women to be pretty.
[Illustration: THE RIVER AT EVENING]
We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went
a long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church,
under which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the
dimness, after we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there
seemed shipyards along the river’s course, but at one place there was
a large building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the
windows we decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and
near our own Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning
to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette
making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are
really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always
advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our
Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are
the ironies of life.
What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember.
The Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay
twenty feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny
ferry which the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest
ferries, near the tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the
town through streets of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to
dignify their course. Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and
at one place a little excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to
come in and float it for the fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten
o’clock. We idly longed to make its voyage with it, and if the chance
were offering now, I certainly should not forego it as I did then. But
when you are in a foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled
and how well you know that it will not offer soon again, you reject the
most smiling chance because you think you can take it any time.
The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather
commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get
a Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o’clock I found the
fruiterer’s locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered for
the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other fruiterers,
but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different it would
have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the market
people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls with
vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and knotty
apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of that
idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale later,
and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the
markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place
found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping
with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which,
once for all, I must own was not an impressive place.
The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to,
is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the
forenoon. We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its
tower from the brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat
land to a sea no flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English
coast, merely the sea come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater
convenience of the fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we
saw about the town, lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging
bare-armed upon the parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church
had about its foot a population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat
gravestones, it had been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated
bells, while the Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty,
and money, and culture, and all the good things of this world, and
getting them in a measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within
the church we saw again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and
others like them, and again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we
could make out a little better than at first, because its garlands were
a little more withered and shrunken away. But better than either we
realized the perfection of the church interior as a whole, so ample, so
simple, such a comfortable and just sufficient eyeful.