VILLAGE LIFE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.
“I think I shall start for New Hampshire to-morrow,” I said. “Do you know anything about L——, in Cheshire County?”
Jones, who had been meditatively examining the coloring of a richly-tinted meerschaum, sat up erect at this question, with a sudden access of vigor.
“L——?” he said. “By George! there’s where Agnes Cortland lives now in the summer.”
It was the middle week of July. Aspirations for one whiff of the breeze among the hills had become irresistible. We were sitting together, Jones and I, in my room up-town after luncheon. Jones was a young New York artist in his first season after his return from Italy the previous autumn. He, too, was about to start on a sketching tour through Vermont, in which State his people lived. He was late leaving town, but money was not easy with him—a handsome young fellow of that golden age between twenty-three and twenty-four, when one is apt to think he needs only a very short-handled lever to move the world. He was of medium height, but squarely and powerfully built; with a face good-natured, but very resolute, in expression. A stranger would not be likely to take a liberty with him. I had a strong notion that Jones would make a better soldier than artist, if there were any question of blows being struck for the country, which happily there is not. But hitherto I had shrewdly kept that opinion to myself. Considerably older than he was, and engaged in another occupation, circumstances had thrown us a good deal together. Intimacy had brought confidence, and confidence, at his age, meant—nothing more nor less than it always does under such circumstances—the unbosoming of his love affairs. How few there are who have not found themselves in the same position, either as actors or sympathetic chorus, or in time as both! What countless dramas of passion are continually being put upon the private stage before this limited audience!
Now, it is not the purpose of this paper to pursue the history of Jones’ captivity at the hands of the tender goddess through all the infinitesimal and transcendental chapters a first romance runs into. More placid emotions and observations, befitting the serenity of approaching middle age, are in store for the reader. And in fact the history of Jones’ passion is still incomplete. But so much of it may be given as fell within the purview of our New Hampshire observations.
Jones was poor—prosaic fact, which robs life of so many compensations as we grow old. But at twenty-three we spurn the mastery of the glittering dross—that is, if Congress gives us any to spurn! Let us say rather of the flimsy paper. At that age of our flowing life we coin money at our own mint; or, more truly, draw limitless drafts on the Bank of the Future. Happy the man who meets them when they fall due! Jones, at least, had no doubts as to his future solvency. But his plans were vague—very!
Agnes Cortland was the daughter of a railroad director—or two or three directors rolled into one—and had the world, or at least the New York world, to choose from. Poor Jones! his story might almost be predicted from the start. Yet this inheritor of the (latent) genius of any half-dozen masters, ancient or modern, you choose to name, believed, perhaps with some reason, that this daughter of Dives liked him; and as for himself, he vowed with hyperbole that he adored her. They had frequently met—their families then being neighbors in the country—before he went to Italy, where he had spent two years studying and wandering about. No avowal of affection had been made between them, but he had gone away with the consciousness many little signs and tokens give that he was not disliked. Since his return a year ago some meetings had taken place—at rarer intervals—in society. At an evening party some months before she had given him, he said, a slight but unmistakable opportunity of declaring himself, if he had wished to do so.
“But I did not take it,” said Jones, who, spite of his being in love, was as manly a young fellow as one could meet. “She knows I am poor; and I don’t want to be thought a fortune-hunter.”
I laughed at this quixotic declaration.
“My dear fellow,” I said, “you fly at high game. But I should not let the auri sacra fames interfere, one way or the other, with my tender emotions. If I did so at all, Plutus would have his due weight in the scale, believe me!”
“What would you do?” said Jones. This was in one of those “tobacco parliaments” in early spring—if so they might be called, where one, only, smoked, and the other looked on with sympathy; for I had abandoned the “weed” some years before—hardly of such profundity, nor yet so silent, as those Mr. Carlyle speaks of. Jones had recurred to his usual topic of hopes and perplexities.
“Do?” I answered, looking at him retrospectively, as it were, as if contemplating my own departed youth, as he sat there in his favorite attitude after dinner, gracefully balancing one leg over the arm of my chintz-covered easy-chair, while I was stretched out on the sofa. “Ah! that is an easy question to propound, but not so easy to answer. At your age I should not think you would need much prompting. But if you ask me, I would say, leave it alone! Love is a luxury for the rich or the evenly-mated poor. But you are not likely to take that advice. A good deal would depend on the reinforcements she might bring to the struggle. A woman is not always a passive instrument in those affairs, but sometimes has a will of her own. I have never seen your fair one, and know nothing about her. But if she be a girl of some strength of character, and her love do not prove a mere school-girl’s fancy, she might possibly gain her father’s consent. But it is not a promising adventure, at the best; and I would not recommend you to embark your hopes in it. Keep clear of serious entanglements until you see your way before you. Above all, avoid anything like a clandestine engagement. It will not add to your happiness or hers. I don’t suppose you will think this a very encouraging opinion. But there may be circumstances in your favor I know nothing of. Marry her, if you can, and can get the father’s consent; and go into “railroading” with him in his office. You will make more money at that than you are ever likely to do sticking little dabs of color on a piece of canvas.”
I saw Jones wince at this mercenary view of his art. But he bore it like a man, and continued silent. The suggestion of such a change of vocation did not appear to surprise him, though it was plain no active intention of throwing up his art had yet entered his mind. The fact is, Jones is one of those young men—not inconsiderable in numbers in the profession—who “have a studio,” but are not likely ever to send many master-pieces out of it. Developing some precocious talent for drawing when they are boys, and seizing with boyish eagerness upon the suggestion of being “an artist,” they are offered by fond but undiscerning parents upon the altar of art. But they never advance beyond a mechanical dexterity in putting conventional scenes upon canvas. They haven’t a spark of that genius that is often observed where other pursuits have prevented a devotion to the profession. Eventually they abandon altogether the study or practice of their art, or sink into drudges for the picture or chromo dealers, or grind out a living as drawing-masters, or—Heaven knows how. I will not say that Jones was altogether deficient in talent, but the talent that makes an agreeable accomplishment for the rich amateur is a different thing from that which will pay the piper or win eminence in the art. Jones painted his pictures for the autumn and spring exhibitions, and had one or two on view in one of the up-town windows. But at Du Vernet’s big sale I know that a clever little bit of coloring on which he had spent some time was knocked down to a chromo-dealer for sixteen dollars! How was he going to live on such prices? And as for marrying Agnes Cortland—it was simply preposterous to think of it. Nor is this redundancy of young native artists on whom neither genius nor fashion smiles confined to New York alone. In Boston, which is the only other city boasting of a native school of art, the same low prices prevail. It is disheartening; but a more disheartening thing still is that those prices often represented the actual value of the picture.
Jones was imperfectly educated, though his continental travel had made him a fair linguist. He certainly drew very little inspiration from the antique, for he knew next to nothing about it; nor had he much of that sympathy with the undercurrent of life, and its relations with nature, which gives significance to common things. He had a fondness for pleasure which, of course, did not contribute to his success. Yet he was one of those young fellows whom it is impossible to meet without liking. He was frank, honorable, and spirited, and had a robust shrewdness about him in dealing with men and things that made him a pleasant companion. That he would eventually choose a more active kind of life—and probably succeed in it—I was half-convinced, and my advice about “railroading,” though spoken partly in jest, was inwardly meant in good faith.
On this particular July evening on which our paper opens Jones followed up the announcement of my proposed trip to L—— by expressing a wish that he were going there too, so that he might come to a definite understanding with Agnes Cortland; and the wish was soon followed by the determination to act on it.
“How long do you intend to stay there?” he asked.
“Till the first week in September,” I said.
“Then I will come back that way, and join you for a few days about the first of September. The Cortlands don’t leave there till October. We can come back to New York together.”
It would have been ungracious on my part to have objected to this proposal, though I had a good many doubts about its wisdom. So it happened that my little excursion to L——, which I had innocently designed to be a season of simple lotus-eating such as Mr. Tennyson ascribes to his Olympian deities, “reclined upon the hills together, careless of mankind,” was complicated by a subordinate interest in a comedy from real life which had that quiet village for a stage.
The next day I started, taking Boston en route. That staid, quiet, cleanly city seems always to be, compared with New York, like a good school-boy by the side of a big, blustering brother fonder of a street row than his books. Then to Fitchburg, where I stopped over night, as some stage travelling was to be done from our “jumping-off” place, and riding over the country roads in the morning was more promising than on a dark and cloudy night. In the morning the Fitchburg Railroad again, and one of its branches to L——. The unwonted coolness of the morning breeze, as the train entered the New Hampshire hills, already began to refresh mind and body alike. The pines and hemlocks extending back into deep, dim recesses carpeted with moss and ferns; the cattle moving slowly over the pastures in the distance; the pastures themselves stretching up the sides of the highest hills, still of the freshest green, without a hint of the yellow undertone that I watched gradually overspread them as the summer ripened into autumn; a lake in the foreground, silent, unvisited, its clear waters unpolluted by the dregs of commerce or the drainage of a vast metropolis; even the caw! caw! of the ravens flying off from the tops of the pine stumps, send a novel and delicious feeling of freedom through the breast of the city traveller who has put care and work behind him for a season. Nor is this feeling altogether evanescent. Even now, as winter approaches and the north winds from the same hills come sweeping down over the great city, sending us chattering and freezing to our cosey firesides, the glory of the July foliage moves our memory like a far-off dream of youth. Yet, after all, it may be doubted whether the charm of country scenes is not due in great part to their novelty and the feeling that we are not bound to them longer than we please. Of all that has been written in praise of country life, how much is the work of the city resident; how little, comparatively speaking, springs from the country itself! There drudgery too often takes the place of sentiment. It is the Epicurean poet, Horace, satiated with the noise of the Forum and the gossip of the baths, who sings sweetest of rural contentment, of the “lowing herds,” the “mellow fruits of autumn,” and the “brooks murmuring over stony beds.” But when he gives play to his satiric vein, none pictures more truthfully than the Venusian the grumbling of the husbandman, who “turns the heavy clay with the hard plough.” Embowered in some shady arbor on the windings of the Digentia through his Sabine farm, or doing a little amateur farming, to the amusement, as he confesses, of his blunt country neighbors, who laughed at the dandy poet with a hoe in his hand, it was easy for Horace to chant the smooth and sunny side of country life. But the eight laborers on his estate, chained literally to the soil, as many a New England farmer morally is by the burden of debt or family, no doubt saw things differently. And the bailiff of his woodlands we know to have despised those “desert and inhospitable wilds,” and to have longed for the streets and shows of Rome. It is amazing upon what inattentive ears the music of our wild birds falls in a secluded farm-house. Often it seems absolutely unheard; while the clatter of the long street of the country town that the farmer visits once a month is for ever in his mind.
But we delay too long at the way station at L——. Let us onwards.
The carrier of the United States mail, who is at the same time the Jehu of the passenger stage, slings our impedimenta up behind with an energy to be envied by a veteran “baggage-smasher” at some of our big depots, straps it down, and jumps upon the box. We mount more slowly beside him, disdaining to be shut up in the close interior, and intent upon looking at the country we pass through this lovely morning. The two stout grays breast the hill leading to L—— Centre, eight miles distant.
The surface of the country is hilly and broken; as we approach L——, mountainous. Mounting the crest of the first steep hill, a beautiful natural panorama spreads out before us: long, narrow, intersecting lines of timber, like giant hedges, dividing the hill farms from each other. A rolling country spreads toward the east, bounded on the horizon by a low range of mountains wooded to the summit, and with a white steeple flashing out here and there among the trees at their base. The effects of light and shade, caused by the clouds on a brilliant day, on one of those white steeples, standing out solitarily against the side of a mountain eight or ten miles distant, are peculiar. Sometimes it becomes invisible, as the circle of the shadow is projected upon that area of the mountain which includes it. Then, as the dark veil moves slowly, with a sliding motion, up the side and over the crest of the mountain, the white spire flashes out from the obscure background of the forest with a sudden brilliancy. On this side patches of blue water among the trees in the hollows revealed the presence of numerous ponds, as the small lakes, and some of the large ones, are universally called in New England.
To the northwest what seemed to be a level plain from the height over which we rode, but which was in reality broken and undulating ground, stretched beneath us for ten or twelve miles to the base of Mt. Monadnock. The mountain, grand, massive, and still veiled by a thin mist, rose boldly from the low country at its foot to a height of nearly four thousand feet.
A ride of an hour and a half brought us to the top of the hill on the side of which stands L——. A dozen scattered houses flank the broad village green, and a Congregational meeting-house, with white belfry tower and green blinds, stands half-way down the incline.
The post-office and country store combined is at the cross-roads as you drive down the hill, and some ancient elms on the green seem to nod at the stranger with a friendly air as he enters the village. “Here,” said I to myself, “is rural quiet and simplicity. Farewell for many slumberous weeks the busy haunts of men.” L—— is quite out of the beaten track of summer travel, and had been recommended me by a friend who had spent some seasons there, on the ground of economy, charming scenery, good fishing, and repose. Nor did I find any reason to regret having listened to him. A country tavern offers entertainment to man and beast, and is resorted to by the drummers and sample men who invade L——, as elsewhere, with their goods. But I was not forced to be dependent on it, as a letter from my friend opened to me the hospitable doors of the comfortable farm-house where he had boarded two years before.
Here let it be said at the outset that whatever the other drawbacks of village life in New Hampshire, there is among the farming class a natural courtesy, and, among the women, even an inherited refinement of manner, especially in their treatment of strangers, which speaks well for the native stock. Prejudices there are among both men and women—deep-rooted, as we shall see—and narrow-minded opinions in plenty; but even these are concealed where to manifest them might give offence. The family in which I was domiciled consisted of Mr. Allen and his wife, their married daughter—who, together with her husband, resided with them—an unmarried daughter, and a pretty little girl, the grandchild. Mr. Allen kept a country store—for L—— boasted of two—and traded also in cattle with Canada, making a journey sometimes as far as Montreal in the spring to buy stock, which he fattened on his pastures through the summer and autumn, and sold in the early part of the winter. These various ventures, which were on the whole successful—as the command of a little ready money enabled him to take his time and buy and sell to advantage—had made him more “forehanded” than most of his neighbors. He was one of the selectmen of L——. His dwelling-house, a large, white, well-kept two-story edifice, with a garden-plot facing the village street, a piazza on the sunny side, and two beautiful maples dividing the carriage yard from the road, was one of the handsomest in L——. Mrs. Allen was one of those energetic housewives whose sound sense and domestic capacity had evidently contributed not a little to her husband’s present prosperity.
They were a sturdy couple, intelligent, honest, and knowing what was due to themselves and others; now going down the hill together with mutual dependence and confidence in each other. I consider them a good example of the best type of the New Hampshire farming class.
The married daughter did not compare favorably with the mother. One could not say of her in any sense:
“O matre pulchra filia pulchrior!”
for, as to the question of female beauty, I will not say, as far as my observations extend, that the New Hampshire, or indeed the New England women generally, outside the radius of Boston and some of the large towns, are very generously endowed by nature with that gracious but dangerous gift. The lines of the face are too strongly marked; they are sallow, the form angular; or, where the figure is fuller, it is apt to be as redundant as the old Flemish painters make the women at a village fair.
But this absence of feminine beauty is not universal. I have seen a young mother with her babe in her lap—a visitor sitting in Mrs. Allen’s parlor—who made a picture of beautiful maternity as dignified and simple as Murillo ever painted. As for that more lasting moral beauty which, where it is feminine, puts on its most delightful and engaging charm, Mrs. Harley, the married daughter, was too much engaged with her own little cares and gossip—poor woman!—to think much of so intangible a possession. Brought up, probably, in habits of more leisure and pleasure-seeking than her mother, who still took all the household work upon herself, she was a victim of ennui and of that blight of too many American homes—only one child to care for. Her health was delicate and uncertain, and she bade fair to sink eventually into that class of invalid wives which forms such an unhappily large percentage of American women. How often have I heard her complain of the dreadful dulness of the day! “But,” I asked, “what will you do in the winter, if you find the summer so unbearable?” Her answer was that they generally enjoyed themselves enough in the summer-time to be able to get through the winter. I don’t know whether this was a covert thrust at my lack of entertaining power; but I laughed at the stroke of satire at my expense, innocent or intended. That long dreary, snow-shrouded New Hampshire winter—it demanded indeed a stout heart to face it in one of those isolated villages. Mrs. Harley had given up her music when she married; the piano stood idle in the best room. She read nothing—unless looking at the fashion-plates in a ladies’ magazine be considered reading. A Sunday-school picnic, a day’s shopping in the nearest country town, were white days in her calendar. Is such a picture of life cheerless? Yet too many women are forced to endure it elsewhere. Happy they if the abounding resources of the faith and its literature come to their aid! Mrs. Harley was a kind woman withal, if her attention were drawn for a moment from herself; and an affectionate and anxious wife. This and her love for her child—fretful and over-indulgent as the latter sentiment was apt to be—were her redeeming qualities. Placed in a large city, with means equal in proportion to those within her reach in L——, she would have made a more agreeable woman, and would have been tenfold happier herself. The influence of semi-solitary life—where a religious vocation does not exalt and sanctify it—is more unfavorable in its effects upon women than upon men. The latter commonly have work to do which keeps their faculties from rusting. Woman’s nature is essentially social.
Mr. Harley assisted his father-in-law in the store—a tall, handsome young man with a city air, who, at that season, sat in the store the whole afternoon with perhaps one customer. Such a life for youth, with its superabundant energies ready to pour like a torrent into any channel, is stagnation. The highest of man’s natural powers rust and decay. But natural forces have their sway in the great majority of such cases, and force an outlet for themselves. The youth of these villages leave their homes for the great cities, or take Horace Greeley’s advice and “go West.” Life is hard, and it is monotonous, which adds a new slavery to hardship. The exodus is constant. L—— has less population and fewer inhabited houses now than it had forty years ago. The same is true of other villages—a striking fact in a comparatively new country. One rambles along some by-road overgrown with grass, and presently comes upon a deserted and ruined house and barn, the rafters only standing, or perhaps nothing more than a heap of bricks in the cellar. He asks about the people, and is told that they have “gone away.” The answer is vague and uncertain as their fate. I spoke to an old man of eighty-seven, seated in the shade on the long bench before the country store, where he could hear the news in the morning. He remembered with distinctness the events of the war of 1812. He spoke with regret of the flourishing times of his youth in L—— and its dulness to-day. This roving disposition of the American youth is the result of immense elbow-room, and has been providential in building up new States and subduing the virgin wilderness. The manufacturing cities of New Hampshire also gain yearly at the expense of the small villages. The township—or town, as it is most commonly called—embraces three or four of such villages, and is subject to the same reciprocal movement. Comparatively few new farms have been broken in during the last twenty or thirty years; and too rarely it happens on the old farms that fresh ground is taken in from the pasture for cultivation. The son tills what his father or grandfather cleared.
The first few days in L—— I spent rambling about the pastures—some of them literally red with the raspberry, which, though it has not the delicacy or fragrance of the wild strawberry, is not to be disdained by the city palate—or climbing to the tops of the highest neighboring hills. What a sense of elastic joy and freedom to me, who had not spent a summer in the country for three years, to lie stretched at full length on the top of a new-mown hill, and let the eye wander over the valley beneath, with its intervening woods and ponds, till it rested upon the distant mountains, the cloud-shadows chasing each other over their sides and summits! If this were not in truth an Arcadia to those who lived and died there, and were buried in the white-stoned churchyard among the elms—if to them life brought its cares, its jealousies, and sorrows—to the stranger who sought nothing more than to enjoy its natural beauties it renewed all the associations of rural happiness and simplicity. Not that one might hope to see a Corydon and Phillis issue from the New Hampshire woods—for there is a sternness among those northern scenes, even in the brightest bloom of summer, foreign to the poetry of the South—but that in its dark pine groves and on its windy hills fancy might picture an eclogue or a romance not less sweet and tender because more real.
L—— is on the height of land between the valleys of the Connecticut and Merrimac, between twenty and thirty miles distant from each. It is from one thousand to one thousand three hundred feet above the sea level. It is said of the rain that falls on the roof of the village church that part of it eventually runs into the Connecticut, part into the Merrimac, so evenly does its roof-tree divide the water-shed of those rivers. But as the same story is told of other churches in the central belt of Cheshire County, it may be regarded rather in the light of a rhetorical illustration than as a fact of physical geography. The scenery is not of the grand or sublime order to be seen further north among the White Mountains, except where Mt. Monadnock raises its dark and solemn front above the surrounding landscape; but it is beautiful and picturesque. Its greatest charm is its variety. In the morning, when the sun was well towards the zenith—for the fresh air of those hills made the day at all hours delightful—I would stroll out over the pastures to a hill a quarter of a mile distant from the farm-house. There would I seat myself, protected from the sun’s ardent rays, under a young maple bush, the elastic branches of which, with the sloping ground thick with ferns, made a natural easy-chair. The valley is below me, the farms stretch along the nearer hills, and in the further distance the blue-veiled mountains define the skyline. I bend down a branch of the maple, and before me is the upper half of Mt. Monadnock, a thin gray mist still enveloping it. The base of the mountain is hidden by an intervening hill. Leaving this pasture, and walking a few hundred rods further on, I enter a field where the hay has just been cut, and which is now as smooth as a croquet lawn, but not so level; for it is the crest of one of the highest hills. Here a new scene awaits me. To the north and west the hill has the shape almost of a perfect dome. Stretched on the top, I cannot see the declivities of the sides, but only the tops of the trees at some distance. One has the sensation of being on the roof of a high building with a deep drop between him and the surrounding country. The view is superb. The whole mass of Mt. Monadnock, from its base to the highest elevation, rises from the valley ten miles distant. At its foot is the village of West Jaffrey, a fashionable watering place. The white spire of the church is conspicuous among the trees. Further south is Gap Mountain and Attleborough Mountain; and sweeping round to the east, the view stretches along the New Ipswich Mountains to Watatick Hill. The circuit extends about twenty or thirty miles, making a picture of great natural beauty. The English hay, as the timothy and red clover are generally called, was still standing in many of the fields, but here and there the whirr of the mowing-machine could be heard, and the eye, following the direction of the sound, could discern the mower in his shirt-sleeves driving his pair of horses in the distant field. The meadow-grass of the lowlands was still in most places untouched. On the sides of the hills the scattered fields of wheat, barley, and oats, still green, made darker patches of verdure on the yellowish ground-color.
But the view I most preferred was from a hill a little to the south of the village near some deserted buildings. Here the scene was wilder and more extensive. To the west Mt. Monadnock could be seen through a gorge between two hills; to the east was a wild and broken country; while to the south the woods seemed to extend as far as the eye could reach, and over the furthest range of hills the great dome of Mt. Wachusett in Massachusetts, nearly thirty miles distant, was plainly seen, gray and massive, with the naked eye. It was only when one turned to Mt. Monadnock, ten miles distant, and observed how plainly he could distinguish the different colors of the mountain—the dark woods, the brown, bare surfaces, and the slate-colored rocks—that, looking at Mt. Wachusett, and noting its uniform pale gray outline, he was able to estimate the real distance of the latter, so comparatively close at hand did it appear.
Seated at ease on the smooth turf on the summit of this “heaven-kissing” hill, and looking at this wide and beautiful prospect, one might repeat to himself Mr. Longfellow’s lines:
“Pleasant it was, when woods were green
And winds were soft and low,
To lie amid some sylvan scene,
Where, the long, drooping boughs between,
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen
Alternate come and go;”
substituting only for “drooping boughs” the irregular ranges of hills.
But descriptions of natural scenery, if long continued, are wearisome. Even a Ruskin is read best in snatches. The mind otherwise becomes clogged with images. Let us return, therefore, to animated life.
As Sunday approached, I made inquiries about the nearest Catholic church. I found it was at W——, eight or nine miles distant. I had no means of getting there the first Sunday. I retired to my room and read some chapters of that sublime and affecting work, the Imitation of Christ, the gift of a good and beloved mother.
A Catholic is still almost a being from another moral world in some of the isolated New Hampshire villages. Nowhere are the traditions of Puritanism more zealously or rigidly maintained. These good folk seem hardly yet to have emerged from a fog of wild amazement that “popish” priests and their followers should be tolerated by the selectmen. Not that any overt or offensive change of manner follows the announcement that one is a Catholic—as I have elsewhere said, there is a natural or inherited vein of good manners among the people that forbids it—but a momentary silence reveals to the speaker that he has stated something strange and unlooked for. There is an unmistakable tone of intolerance manifest, however, in any allusion to the poorer class of Irish and French that congregate in the larger towns, and are sometimes found in the villages in a wooden-ware factory, or cutting wood or hemlock-bark, or doing an odd job of haymaking. They are looked upon with dislike and distrust, mixed with a feeling of contempt. Curious it is that the native-born New Englander, with his mind saturated with hereditary theories of personal liberty, equality, and fraternity, should yet evince a more unconquerable aversion to the foreign element, which has contributed so largely to the greatness of the country, than is shown in European countries to men of a different race, unless war has temporarily embittered national feeling. Yet the explanation is not hard to find. This descendant of the Puritan, chained to the rocky and ungrateful soil his forefathers won from the Indians and the wilderness, sees with sullen indignation and jealousy the same rights and privileges which he enjoys under our free institutions extended so largely to those of a different nationality and religion. In revenge he draws himself more jealously into his shell. Nor is this feeling confined to the rich and refined; it penetrates the mass of the native-born New England population.
To speak of lighter things. Society in L—— is eminently aristocratic. Better, perhaps, it would be to say that the lines of society are very strongly marked, and that the aristocratic element is essentially conservative.
Mrs. Cortland, the wife of the New York capitalist, who resides there three months in the summer, a stout, refined, tight-gloved, graciously condescending lady, gives a metropolitan tone to L—— society. Mr. Cortland, an easy-going, easy-tempered man in private life, but reported to be hard as flint in business matters, seldom finds time to leave New York, and his visits to L—— are uncertain. His country house, a large, handsome mansion with well-kept grounds, croquet-lawn, coach-house, and stables, is on the highest ground in the village; and Mrs. Cortland occupies without dispute the highest ground socially. It is an imperial elevation, after the manner of the saying attributed to Cæsar. A call on Mrs. Cortland is the event of a week, and a return call from her is a matter not to be lightly treated. How have I seen this good Mrs. Allen, my landlady, prepare her best room for the grand occasion, and Mrs. Harley speculate about it with well-assumed indifference a whole afternoon. One or two other magnates from Boston, scattered through L—— and adjacent townships, save Mrs. Cortland from complete exhaustion by contact with the village people during the summer.
Then there is the local aristocracy, consisting of the wife of the Congregational pastor ex-officio, and Mrs. Parsons, the wife of “Squire” Parsons, who owns a small bucket-factory near L——. These two ladies maintain a strict alliance, offensive and defensive, with Mrs. Cortland during the summer. Then come the middle classes, comprising Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Harley, the young doctor’s wife—a stranger and somewhat snubbed by the autochthonous élite—and the well-to-do farmers’ wives. Finally, we have the profanum vulgus, the tail of L—— society, or, to speak more correctly, those whom society does not recognize—some farmers’ wives whose husbands were too much in debt to allow them to keep up appearances; one or two hapless women who sold milk in a wagon to the neighboring towns, and drove the wagon themselves; and the village washerwoman, who went around doing “chores.” I think I have exhausted the classification of the social strata of L——. I observed that the men eschewed as much as possible the aristocratic distinctions made by their wives, and were apt to resent by silence or the assumption of an unwonted bluntness the empty airs and loud voice with which some vulgar rich man from a neighboring large town would sometimes stride through the village.
Wanderers and waifs, destined apparently to be at some time drawn into the great caldron of city life—perhaps to their own destruction—were not wanting in L——. I have said that the women were not remarkable for beauty. But there was one exception. A girl belonging to one of the most destitute families in the village, by one of those whims of nature which are not uncommon, was gifted with a face and figure to attract even an unobservant eye, and which seemed out of place in that quiet and homely neighborhood. The mother, a poor, struggling woman with a growing-up family of all ages, managed to live somehow by the days’ work and occasional assistance given her by the well-to-do families. The father was living, but spent most of his time in the county jail for drunkenness. The daughter of whom I speak was about nineteen or twenty years of age; tall, of fair complexion, with a naturally elegant carriage and a proud and almost defiant air, as if she resented the caprice of fortune which had placed her in that lowly station. She had the art of dressing well with limited means, which some women possess to the envy of others. On Sundays and at picnics she outshone the more expensively-dressed daughters of the farmers. She had been, and perhaps still is, the maid at the village inn. It may be imagined that gossip was not idle about this poor girl, thus singularly placed and dangerously gifted. Dreadful quarrels had taken place between the father and mother about the girl’s staying at the hotel; the drunken father, with a true sense of what was becoming, insisting that she should leave, the mother as strenuously maintaining that she should remain. The beauty of the girl herself was not of that domestic type I have elsewhere noticed in the mother and her babe I saw in Mrs. Allen’s parlor, but of that showy, restless, naturally haughty stamp which presaged storm, perhaps disaster. It is this class misfortune follows and the great cities sweep into their net. Poverty often makes vice of that which, under happier fortunes, might have been attractive virtue. Absit omen. May this rustic beauty find a happier, if more homely, destiny as the wife of some honest farmer in L——!
The summer passed, week after week. I fished, I walked, I rode, I read, I loitered. The barley ripened on the hill behind the farm-house, and a golden tint began to spread over the distant fields. The apples grew large and ruddy on one side where the sun struck the laden branch in the orchard. The tassels of the corn showed purple. August blazed. The doves flew thirstily to the large blue pump, and perched on the edges of the horse-trough after the farmer watered his horse at mid-day. The bees hummed three at a time in the big yellow cups of the squash-vines. Have you ever observed of that homely vegetable how ingeniously and dexterously it fastens its daring and aggressive vines to the ground as it shoots out over the close-cut grass? Stoop down among the after-math, or rowen, as it is called in New Hampshire, and you will see that at the inosculation of each successive joint of the vine, where it throws out its tendrils and blossoms, it also thrusts forth slender, white, curling ligaments that twist, each of them, tightly around a tiny tuft of the short grass. Thus it moors itself, as if by so many delicate living cables, to the bosom of the life-giving earth.
I might, if space allowed, tell of my fishing ventures, and how one glorious morning we rode out of L—— in a big yellow wagon with three horses—a party of seven of us, ladies and gentlemen, from the village—to make the ascent of Mt. Monadnock. This is the lion of all the country round. Parties are made up every week to climb its rugged summit. Over the hills and rolling ground we gaily rattled. Through the sandy country roads, where the branches of the trees met overhead and made dim aisles of verdure, we smoothly sped. And then what panting, laughing, climbing, shrill screaming, as we toiled up the winding path from the half-way house to the top of the mountain! What a magnificent, boundless view repaid us! The day was clear. To the north, Mt. Kearsarge and rolling ranges of mountains; to the southeast, a diversified surface of country spreading onwards far as the eye could reach towards the unseen ocean; to the south, Mt. Wachusett; below us woods, valleys, and lakes. A feeling of awe creeps over one in these mountain solitudes.
As to the fishing, I will confess that to me, who had thrown a fly over more than one Canadian river, and had killed my twenty-pound salmon on the Nipisiquit, loafing with a pole in a boat over a lily-covered pond for a half-pound pickerel was not tremendously exciting sport. But what mattered it? The mornings were soft and wooing; the woods were full of mysterious shadows; the water was limpid as if Diana and her nymphs bathed there in the spectral moonlight. Life passed smoothly and agreeably. I sought no more.
The blackberries began to ripen, first one by one and then in sable clusters, in the pastures. The days were growing shorter. The twilight sank more quickly into night. September approached, and I began to look for the appearance of my friend Jones. I had seen Miss Cortland two or three times coming from or going to the meeting-house on Sunday mornings, when all the beauty and fashion of L—— for miles around rode up in buggies, carryalls, or open wagons; but I had never met her to be introduced to her—a little imperial beauty, with a fresh and rosy color, and a mouth shaped like Cupid’s bow, that needed only to smile to conquer.
On a bright September morning, when the surrounding atmosphere was clear as a bell, but a thin haze still clung about Mt. Monadnock and the far-off mountains, Jones rode over on the stage-coach from the railroad station and joined me at L——. He asked eagerly about Miss Cortland.
Was she in the village?
Yes.
Had I met her?
No; but I had seen her two or three times.
What did I think of her?
Well, I thought her pretty enough to excuse a little wildness of imagination on his part. He would be a lucky fellow if he got her and some of her father’s money or a position in his business!
Did I think he would give up his Art so easily?
“My dear Jones,” I replied, “I don’t want to appear cold-blooded, or to dash your enthusiasm for your art in the least; but, to speak candidly, I should not be surprised if you did some day under sufficient temptation—the prospect of marrying Miss Cortland, for example.”
Jones declared his intention of calling on Miss Cortland that very day. He had a sketch-book full of studies, spirited, but many of them mere hints. He came back before dinner, full of life, and proposing a score of schemes for to-morrow. He made a sort of small whirlwind in my quiet life. Mrs. Cortland had received him civilly, but he thought a little coolly. But he had seen Agnes, and had spoken a few words to her that might mean much or little as they were taken, and he was happy—rather boisterously happy, perhaps, as a young fellow will be at such times—full of jokes, and refusing to see a cloud on his horizon.
Jones fell easily into our farm-house ways, though he was apt to steal off in the mornings to play croquet on the Cortlands’ lawn with Miss Cortland and Miss Parsons, and any other friend they could get to join them.
One afternoon, when the sun was getting low and a southerly wind blowing, we started to try for some fish at a pond about half an hour’s walk from the house. As we turned off the highway into a by-road covered with grass that led to the pond, I saw Miss Cortland standing on the rising ground some distance before us. She was looking from us towards the sinking sun, now veiled in quick-drifting clouds. Her dog, a large, powerful animal, a cross between a Newfoundland and Mount St. Bernard, was crouched at her feet. Some vague thoughts about Una and her lion flitted through my mind. But I was more struck by the way the light touched her figure, standing out motionless against the gray sky. It reminded me very much of the general effect of a painting by a foreign artist—Kammerer, I think it was—that I saw at the exhibition of the Boston Art Club last year. It was the picture of a girl standing on a pier on the French coast, looking out to sea. Her golden hair was slightly stirred by the breeze, her lips a little parted, and there was a far-away look in her eyes, as if she may have expected a lover to be coming over the sea in one of the yachts that lined the horizon. The dress of the girl and the stone-work of the pier were both white. It was a good example of the striking effects produced by the free use of a great deal of almost staring white, which is a favorite device of the latest school of French art.
As we advanced, the dog growled and rose, but, recognizing Jones, wagged his tail inoffensively as we drew nearer. Miss Cortland turned towards us.
“Shall I introduce you?” said Jones.
“No,” I said. “I’ll go on to the pond. I’ll see you to-night.”
Jones advanced, hat in hand. “What happy fortune,” he said, addressing her, “has led me to meet the goddess of these woods?” Then, altering his tone, he added in a bantering way: “I see you have been poaching on our preserves, Miss Cortland. But I do wonder at your taste, fishing for eels!” pointing to a small basket on her arm from which hung some of the long stems of the pond-lily. This he said to vex her, knowing her horror of those creatures. “Eels?” she exclaimed indignantly, with a tone and gesture of aversion at the thought. “They are pond-lilies.”
“Oh! that is very well to say,” replied Jones, “when you have the lid of the basket down to hide them; but I insist upon their being eels unless you show them to me.”
By this time I was out of hearing. I left them together, and kept on down the road to the pond.
That night Jones came into my room with a quieter manner than usual. He was evidently very happy, but his happiness had a sobering effect upon him. He told me that he had made a plain avowal of his feelings to Agnes Cortland as they walked home together, and that he had won from her the confession that she loved him and had not been indifferent to him before he left for Europe. I wished him joy of his good-fortune, though I could foresee plainly enough that his difficulties had only begun. For a little time these two innocent young souls—for Jones I knew to be singularly unsullied by the world for a man of his age—would enjoy their paradise undisturbed together. Then would come maternal explanations, and the father’s authority would be invoked. A solemn promise would be exacted from her to see him no more. Miss Cortland was much attached to her parents, who would be sincerely anxious for her welfare. She would not make much resistance. Some day there would come a storm of tears, and poor Jones’s letters and the ring he gave her would be returned to him by a faithful messenger, and a little note, blotted with tears, asking him to forgive her and praying for his happiness. This must be the end. A year or two of separation and a summer and winter in Europe with her parents would leave nothing more than a little sad memory of her brief New Hampshire romance; and in five years she would be married to some foreigner of distinction or successful man of business, and would be a happy wife and mother. As for poor Jones, he would probably be heard of at rare intervals for a year or two as a trader on the Pacific coast or prospecting a claim in Nevada. But men like him, vigorous, powerful, well equipped in body and temper for the struggle with the world, are not kept down long by such disappointments. The storm is fierce, and leaves its scars after it; but the man rises above it, and is more closely knit thereafter. Jones will make his mark in the world of business, if not of art.
No unwelcome prophecies of mine, however, disturbed his happiness for those few days. I let events take their course. Why should I interrupt his dream by Cassandra-like anticipations of woe, which would have been resented as a reflection upon the constancy of his idol? I know that they met frequently for the following three or four days. Then came the packing up for departure. My long holiday was over.
On a foggy morning in September we steamed up the Sound on a Fall River boat. Through Hell Gate the stately boat sped on her way, past Blackwell’s Island, and across the bows of the Brooklyn ferry-boats, crowded with passengers for the city in the early morning. Around the Battery we swept, into the North River, and slowly swung alongside of Pier 28. Then the hackmen yelled at us; our coach stuck at the corner of the street; a jam followed; the drivers swore; the policemen shouted and threatened; the small boys grinned and dodged between the horses; and a ward politician, with a ruby nose, looked on complacently from the steps of a corner “sample” room. In one word, we were in New York, and our village life in Hampshire was a thing of the past.