The two adjoining districts of Ridgefield and Weir's Mills lie about ten
miles to the east of us, in level and fertile farm country, between two
ridges of hills. Ridgefield is an old Roman Catholic settlement.
Twenty-five years ago it still had a prosperous convent, and children
educated in the convent school have gone out all over the country; but
the centre of the farming population shifted, and at last the convent
was closed. The cheerful-faced, black-gowned sisters are all gone. The
bell has been silent for years now, and its tower stands up with blank
windows, nothing more than a strange landmark in the open farming
landscape.
The Ridgefield Irish were a noted community. They all came from one
county, and were marked to a surprising degree by their personal beauty.
There were Esmonds and Desmonds, Considines, Burkes, and McCanns, and
two names now gone (except for one old representative) Guilfoyles and
Guilshannons. Four lovely Esmond girls of one family are now growing up,
bearing four saints' names--Agatha, Ursula, Patricia, Cecily.
Honoria Considine walks down our street, beautiful creature that she is,
with a port and carriage that a princess might envy. She has brought up
an orphaned nephew and niece to capability and prosperity, supporting
them entirely by her sewing. The Considines have possessions which show
that they came to this country as something more than farmers. They have
a little old silver, two finely inlaid card-tables in the farm
"best-room," and two larger mahogany tables. They are great
prohibitionists, and would be shocked, good souls, to know that what
they call the "old refrigerator" is a beautifully carved wine-cooler!
Lawrence McCann and Joe Fitzgerald were two as handsome creatures as
ever were seen, with great dark blue eyes, delicate brows, dark curls,
and mantling Irish color.
Lawrence died of consumption at twenty-four, as did his cousin,
delightful Con Guilshannon, but Joe did well and married. The other day
I saw him out walking with three little rosy children, all with penciled
eyebrows and very dark blue eyes.
There lives an old lady in a great western city (I don't give its name)
who ought to wear a crown instead of a bonnet. The town trembles before
her masterful benevolence. Her magnificent house dominates the "best
community," and her six middle-aged married children, established
near-by in houses of equal magnificence, do not dare call their souls
their own.
A neighbor of mine was in her city last year, and was taken to see her.
The old lady seemed to know an amazing amount, not only about our
far-away eastern State, but about our actual county. She finally showed
such an absorbing interest in particular households that my friend said:
"But how can you know? How _can_ you have heard about so-and-so?"
"Child," said the old chieftainess, her fine eyes twinkling and filling,
"My name is no guide to you now, except that it's Irish, but I was born
and brought up in your county. I was an Esmond from Ridgefield, and had
my schooling at the convent, not six miles from your door."
After Ridgefield, with its deserted convent, you come presently to where
the rolling country is suddenly flung amazingly apart in the chasm-like
valley of the Winding River. Weir's Mills, the village at the head of
navigation, is a pleasant peaceful little place, a very old settlement,
with a noted old church.
A neighbor of ours, a man now of eighty, has told me that in his
childhood at Weir's Mills, the school had neither paper nor blackboard
nor slates for the children to write on. The teacher smoothed the ashes
of the hearthstone out flat with a shingle, and the children did their
figuring on that. Farmers going into town chalked the figures of their
sales on their beaver hats, and the assessor chalked the taxes up on the
doors.
The school-teachers were taken to board in turn, two weeks at a time, by
different families; and a friend, now an elderly woman, has told me that
when teaching, as a young girl, she had as a rule to share her bed with
three or four children of the family. In several places the hens slept
in the room too. The schools of course were ungraded. After her teaching
hours she helped in the housework, but she liked it, and made warm
friends. She found the life vigorous and hardy--"It was life that was
every bit of it alive," she has told me.
It is sometimes said that marriage and divorce are taken lightly in the
country districts, and certainly the Jingroes and their like, of whom
more later, make their gipsy marriages, which bind only at will; but
even among some of our outlying communities of far higher standing than
the forest settlements, it is true that a curious, primitive view of
wedlock often obtains. Marriages in the country are deep as the rock,
enduring as the hills, _once the real mate is found_. The fine,
toil-worn faces of man and wife, in Golden-Wedding and Four-generations
groups in local newspapers, show a thing before which one puts off the
shoes from off one's feet. But, when husband and wife find only misery
in their marriage, find themselves fundamentally at variance, they
quietly "get a bill," (_i. e._ of divorce,) and each is considered free
to marry again. The adjustment, according to their lights, is made
decently and in order; and all cases come quickly before the final court
of public opinion, which in these clear-eyed country districts metes out
an inexorable judgment to lightness, to cowardice or selfishness.
It is difficult not to mis-state, about so subtle a matter; but the
attitude of these neighborhoods is not a lax one. It is rather as if, in
places so small, where the margin of everything is so narrow, the
tremendous exigencies of life enforce a tolerance which is no conscious
action of men's minds, but a thing larger than themselves, before which
they must bow. Life is so simple and vital, so cleared by necessity of a
million extraneous complexities, that people are able, as one of the
Saints says, to judge the action by the person, not the person by the
action.
Long ago there was plenty of shipping direct from Weir's Mills to
Boston, and even to-day scows, and a few small schooners, come up
between the hills for hay and wood, up all the windings of the Winding
River, slipping through the draws at the peaceful, pretty hamlets of
Upper, Middle, and Lower Bridge.
The country about Weir's Mills shows in indefinable ways that you are
approaching the sea. You get the taste of salt, with a south wind, more
often than with us. The roads show sandy, and you see an occasional
clump of sweet bay in the pastures. The pines grow more and more
dwarfed, and so maritime in look that you expect to see blue water and
the masts of ships ten miles before you come to them. We came on another
indication one day, in asking our way of a young girl at a farm door.
"The second turn to the _west_," she told us. In our part of the county
we do not often think of the points of the compass. "The second turn on
your left," it would have been.
This is one of our older districts, and a certain amount of
old-fashioned speech remains. Many persons still speak of _ninepence_
(twelve and a half cents) and a _shilling_ (sixteen and two-thirds
cents). A High School pupil (one of the many boys who walk three or four
miles in to our Town, in all weathers, to get their schooling) brought
in some Mountain Ash berries to the botanical class. _Round-Tree
berries_, he called them, and the master was puzzled, until he realized
that this meant _Rowan Tree_, and that the name had come down straight
from the boy's English forefathers, who picked the rowan berries by
their home streams.
[Illustration: THE PEACEFUL, PRETTY HAMLET OF UPPER BRIDGE]
All through our county, and in our Town itself, among the homelier
neighbors, many of the old strong preterites, which have become obsolete
elsewhere, are still in use. "I _wed_ the garden," for "I _weeded_," "I
_bet_ the carpet"; _riz_ for _raised_, _hove_ for _heaved_; and among
our old established families of substance you may still hear _shew_ for
_showed_ and _clim_ for _climbed_.
"I _clim_ a little ways up into the rigging," one of our magnates said
to me this very week, speaking of an adventure of his seafaring youth.
After the Revolution certain of the unfortunate Hessians drifted to the
southern part of our county, and being stranded, poor souls, they made
the best of it, settled and married. They named our town of Dresden. The
Theobalds come from this Hessian stock, the Vannahs, who started as
Werners, the Dockendorffs, and we have a precious although extremely
local seashore name, _Winkiepaw_, which began life as Wenckebach. But
the adaptation of surnames is in process all around us. Uriah Briery's
people used to be _Brieryhurst_; and Samuel Powers has told me that his
grandfather wrote his name in "a queer Frenchy sort of way, he spelled
it _de la Poer_"(!) The Goslines, of whom we have a good sized family,
were _du Gueslins_, not long since, and Alec Duffy, who sounds entirely
Irish, was born _Alexis D'Urfeé_.
A queer old person lived on the Weir's Mills road when we were children.
He had prospered in farming and trade, and was quite a rich man for
those parts. He wanted to be richer still, and all his last years he was
ridden by two chimerical dreams; one, that a piece of his land was to be
bought for a monster hotel, at a fabulous price, and the other that
Captain Kidd's treasure was buried in a small island he owned in the
river. He dug and he dug for it. He had absolute faith in the
superstition that a fork of green wood--perhaps of witch-hazel only, but
I am not sure about this--held firmly in both hands, will point straight
to buried water or buried treasure. He has led us all over his island,
holding the forked stick.
"There! See him! See him turn!" he would cry out excitedly. "Wild oxen
won't hold him!" The stick certainly turned in his hands, and in ours,
when he placed it right for us. I suppose the wood is so elastic and
springy that, holding it in a certain way you unconsciously turn it
yourself; but it gave a queer feeling.
This whole district is fragrant with the memory of a saint, Mary Scott.
She was a cripple her whole life. Her shoulders and the upper part of
her body were those of a powerful woman, but her feet and legs were
those of a child, and were withered and useless. She lived all alone
when I knew her, in a tiny neat house. She spent her days in a child's
cart, which she could move about by the wheels with her hands, and she
was most active and busy.
No one could go through a life of such affliction without untellable
suffering; but Mary's sweet faith never seemed to know that she had a
self at all, still less a crippled self. She had quick skillful hands,
and her absorbing pleasure all through the year was her work for her
Christmas tree. She saved, and her neighbors saved for her, every bit of
tinfoil and silver or gold paper that could be found, and fashioned out
of it bright stars and spangles for trimming. She knitted and knitted,
mittens and stockings and comforters, and when the time came near she
made candy, and corn-balls, and strung popcorn into garlands. The
neighbors all helped her, and good Jacob Damren, at Tresumpscott, always
cut her a tree from his woods and set it up for her; and then on
Christmas Eve the door of her cottage stood open, and the light streamed
out from the bright lighted tree, and the children of the whole district
came thronging in with their parents.
The tributary streams from this eastern side of our river come in very
quietly. Worromontogus, the largest, is dammed just as it emerges from
its hills, to turn the Wilsons' saw-mill, which was once owned and run
by Mary Scott's father. The mill and mill-pond are in an open, sunny
pocket of the woods. The winding lane which leads in to them is bordered
with elms and willows, and the road is soft underfoot with bark and
sawdust. Feathery elms stand all about the stream's basin, and after you
have followed the road in you reach the weather-stained mill, the logs,
the new-cut lumber, as fragrant as can be, and the great heap of
bright-colored sawdust. Worromontogus drains the pond of the same name,
five miles long, some distance back in the country.