Beyond the shop the road ran into a great common which we called a square. This really was a wonderful affair,—about the size of Rhode Island, as it seemed to us. Here we boys often gathered on Saturday afternoons, and, when I grew older, on the few nights that my father was away from home, or on some special occasion when I prevailed on him to let me go there and play.
On one side of the square was the country store,—a mammoth establishment, kept by a very rich man, who had everything that was ever heard of on his shelves. I used to marvel how he could possibly think to buy all the things that he had to sell. Across the road from the store was the country tavern, and alongside it was a long low barn with a big shed at the end. A fierce dog was kept chained inside the barn. We hardly dared to look into the tavern door, for we had all heard that it was a very wicked place. It was said that down in the cellar, in some secret corner, was a barrel of whiskey; and the tavern-keeper had once been sent for three months to the county jail, when some good people had gone in, one winter night, and told him that they were very cold, and asked him to sell them some whiskey to keep them warm. At any rate, our people would never let us go near the door. I used to wonder what kind of things they had to eat in the tavern. It was the only place I ever heard of where they charged anything for dinner or supper, and I thought the meals must be wonderful indeed, and I always hoped that some day I might have a chance to go there and eat.
On another side of the common was Squire Allen’s place. This was a great white house, altogether the grandest in the town,—or in the world, for that matter, so we children believed. It was set back from the road, in the midst of a grove of trees, and there was a big gate where carriages could drive into the front yard along the curving roadway and up to the large front door. Beneath the overhanging porch were four or five great square white pillars, and the door had a large brass knocker, and there were big square stone steps that came down to the road. Back of the house were a barn and a carriage-house, the latter the only building of the kind in Farmington.
Squire Allen was a tall man with white hair and a clean-shaven face. He carried a gold-headed cane, and when you met him on the street he never looked to the right or left. Everyone knew he was the greatest man in the place,—in fact, the greatest man in all the world. He had a large carriage, with two seats and big wheels and a top, and two horses; and he was nearly always riding in the carriage. I do not remember much about his family; I know that he had a little boy, but I was not acquainted with him, although I knew all the rest of the little boys in town. I would often see the Squire and his whole family out driving in their great carriage. I remember standing on the little bridge and looking down at the fishes in the brook; and I hear the rumble of wheels coming down the hill. I glance up, and there comes Squire Allen; his little boy is sitting on the front seat with him, and on the back seat are some ladies that I do not know. They drive down the hill, the old Squire looking neither to the right nor left. I am afraid of being run over, and I go as near the edge of the bridge as I dare, to escape the great rolling wheels. The little boy peers out at me as the carriage passes by, as if he wondered who could dare stand in the road when his father drove that way; but neither the Squire nor the ladies ever knew that I was there.
A few months ago, this same little boy called on me at my office in the city. He, like myself, had wandered far and wide since he passed me on the bridge. He came to ask me to help him get a job. Somehow, as I saw him then, and recalled the arrogance and pride that old Squire Allen and his family always had, I am afraid I almost felt glad that he had been obliged to come, I am almost sure I felt that at last fortune was making things right and even. I cannot find in my philosophy any good reason why the scheme is any more just if he was rich and I was poor when we were young, and I am rich and he is poor when we are growing old,—but still I believe I felt this way.
Old Squire Allen has been dead for a quarter of a century and more. Last summer, when I visited the old Pennsylvania town, I went to the little burying-ground, and inside the yard I found an iron picket fence, and in this enclosure a monument taller than any other in the yard, and on this stone I read Squire Allen’s name. Poor old man! It is many years since the worms ate up the last morsel of the old man that even a worm could find fit to eat, but still even after death and decay he lies there solitary and exclusive, the most commanding and imposing of all the names that seek immortality in the carved letters of the granite stones. Well, I am not sure but sometime I shall go back to Farmington and put up a monument higher than Allen’s, and have “Smith” carved on the base; and then I suppose it will be easier to go down under it to rest.
But it is only when I am especially envious that I have such thoughts as these. I was yet a little boy in Farmington when they placed the old Squire inside the burying-ground. What a day was that! The store was closed; the tavern door was shut; the old water-wheel stood still; all Farmington turned out in sad procession to follow the great man to his grave. The hawks and crows flying high above the town must have looked down and thought we mourned a king. At least no such royal funeral was ever seen in all those parts before or since. The burial of old Squire Allen was as like to that of Julius Cæsar as Farmington was like to Rome. So, after all, it would be very mean for me to buy a monument higher than his, just because I can; so I will leave him the undisputed monarch of the place, and will get for myself one of the small black oval-cornered slabs that we boys passed by with such contempt when we rambled through the yard to pick out the finest stones.
CHAPTER IX
THE CHURCH
Farmington was a very godly place; so, at least, her people thought. Among the many well-known attractions of the town, its religious privileges stood easily at the head. A little way up the hill, on a level piece of ground, the early settlers long ago had built a great white church. The congregation professed the United Presbyterian faith; and this was the state religion, not only of Farmington but of all the country around. The church itself was a wonder to behold. It seemed to us children to have been built to accommodate all the people in the world and then have room to spare. No other building we had ever seen could be compared in size with this great white church. And when we read of vast cathedrals and other wonderful buildings, we always thought of the United Presbyterian church, and had no idea that they were half so grand.
The main part of the building was very long and wide, and the ceiling very high; but more marvellous still was the great square belfry in the front. None of us boys ever knew how high it was; we always insisted that it was really higher than it seemed, and we were in the habit of comparing it with all the tall objects we had ever seen or of which we had heard or read. It was surely higher than our flag-pole or our tallest tree, higher than Niagara Falls or Bunker Hill Monument; and we scarcely believed that anyone had ever climbed to its dizzy top, although there was a little platform with a wooden railing round it almost at its highest point. We had heard that inside the belfry was an endless series of stairs, and that the sexton sometimes went to the top, when a new rope was to be fastened to the bell; but none of us had so much as looked up through the closed trap-door which kept even the most venturesome from the tower.