We are so ancient that plenty of us remember the stone fireplace in the log-cabin, with its dusters for the hearth of buffalo tail and wild-turkey wing, with iron pot hung by a chain from the chimney hook, with pewter or wooden plates from which to eat with horn-handled knives and iron spoons. But yet are we so modern that we have fine new houses with bay windows, ornamental cupolas, and porches raving woodenly in that frettish fever which the infamous scroll-saw put upon fifty years of our land's domestic architecture. And these houses are furnished with splendid modern furniture, even with black walnut, gold touched and upholstered in blue plush and maroon, fresh from the best factories. Our fairly old people remember when they hunted deer and were hunted by the red Indian on our town site, while their grandchildren have only the memories of the town-born, of the cottage-organ, the novel railroad, and the two-story brick block with ornamental false front. In short, we round an epoch within ourselves, historically and socially.
The country, however, keeps its first purity of charm, a country of little hills and little valleys lined with little quick rivers. These beauties, indeed, have not gone unsung. Years ago a woman poet eased her heart of ecstasies about this Little Country.
"Here swells the river in its boldest course," she wrote, "interspersed by halcyon isles on which Nature has lavished all her prodigality in tree, vine, and flower, banked by noble bluffs three hundred feet high, their sharp ridges as exquisitely definite as the edge of a shell; their summits adorned with those same beautiful trees and with buttresses of rich rock, crested with old hemlocks that wear a touching and antique grace amid the softer and more luxuriant vegetation."
Not spectacular, this—not sensational—not even unusual. Common enough little hills, as the world goes, with the usual ragged-edged village between them and the river, peopled by human beings entirely usual both in their outer and inner lives. It seems to be, indeed, not a place in which events could occur with any romantic fitness.
Perhaps I have grown to love this Little Country because I am a usual man. Perhaps I would have felt as much for it even had I not been held to it by a memory that would bind me to any spot howsoever unlovely. But I rejoiced always in its beauty, and more than ever when it made easier for me the only life it once appeared that I should live. I quote again from our visiting poet: "The aspect of this country was to me enchanting beyond any I have ever seen, from its fulness of expression, its bold and impassioned sweetness. Here the flood has passed over and marked everywhere its course by a smile. The fragments of rock touch it with a mildness and liberality which give just the needed relief. I should never be tired here, though I have elsewhere seen country of more secret and alluring charms, better calculated to stimulate and suggest. Here the eye and heart are filled."
Here, too, my eye and heart were filled—emptied—and wondrously filled yet again, for which last I hold Potts to be curiously—but I wander.
Enough to say that I stored a harvest of memories in a secret place here years ago. And I went to this on days when I was downhearted. Your boy of fifteen, I think, is the only perfect lover—giving all, demanding nothing, save, indeed, the right to his secret cherishings.
Tremors, born within me that day when old gray, bristling Leggett, our Principal, opened the schoolroom door upon Lucy Tait, are as poignant, as sweetly terrible, now as in that far time when the light of her wondrous presence first fell upon me.
An instant she hesitated timidly in the sombre frame of the doorway, looking far over our heads. Then old Leggett came in front of her. There was a word of presentation to Miss Berham, our teacher, the vision was escorted to a seat at my left front, and I was bade to continue the reading lesson if I ever expected to learn anything. As a matter of truth I did not expect to learn anything more. I thought I must suddenly have learned all there is to know. The page of the ancient reader over which I then mumbled is now before me. "A Good Investment" was the title of the day's lesson, and I had been called upon to render the first paragraph. With lightness, unrecking the great moment so perilously at hand, I had begun: "'Will you lend me two thousand dollars to establish myself in a small retail business?' inquired a young man, not yet out of his teens of a middle-aged gentleman who was poring over his ledger in the counting room of one of the largest establishments in Boston."
The iron latch rattled, the door swung fatefully back, our heads were raised, our eyes bored her through and through.