[C] Father Hennepin and others.
CHAPTER XIX.
The Old New England Home.—The Sheltered Village.—The Ancient Buildings.—Dormer Windows.—An Old Puritanical Home.—The Old Puritan Church.—The Burying-Ground.—Deacon Smith, his Habits and his Helpers.—Major Simeon Giles, his Mansion and his Ancestry.—Old Doctor Styles.—Crapo Jackson, the Sexton.—"Training Days."—Militia Dignitaries.—Major Boles.—Major General Peabody.—Preparations and Achievements.—Demolition of an Apple Cart.—"Shoulder Arms!"—Colonel Asher Peabody.—The Boys, and their World.—My Last Look at my Native Village.
Reader, there are mental pictures in the wilderness, as vivid as any in nature. They are the pictures of the past. They haunt the pioneer by day and by night. They go with him over the fields—sit down with him by the streams—linger around his evening hearth, and rise up in his dreams.
I was born in New England. The village was very old, and had received and discharged generations of men. Some two centuries ago, a troop of iron-sided old pilgrims, full of theology and man's rights, an offshoot of a larger body, with their pastor at their head, founded the place, and gave it tone and direction.
This village is very beautiful now. It stands sheltered between two mountains that cast their morning and evening shadows over it. A long stretch of meadow land lies between, through which a river, fringed with willows, lazily lingers and twists in elbows and half circles. The mountains sometimes look down very grim at the valley, and in places have advanced almost across it. There are a great many profiles detected by the imagination in their outline. Cotton Mather's face has been discovered in one huge rock—and the old fellow's head seems to withstand the storms of nature about as successfully as it did the storms of life. The "Devil's Pulpit"—a group of splintered shafts of Gothic appearance—is near by, and superstitious persons used to think that during every thunder-storm his majesty entered it, arrayed in garments of fire, and gave the Puritan a sound lecture.
There are all kinds of buildings in this village. These buildings mark the age in which they were erected, and are the real monuments of their founders. They are as they were. They have not been marred or profaned by modern notions. Some are very eccentric piles, hoary with age, full of angles and sharp corners; and some are painfully plain and severe. They all have a face, a cast of countenance, an expression—they almost talk the English of a hundred and fifty years ago. The row of dormer windows on the roof are to me great eyes that frown down upon the frivolity and thoughtlessness of the present—and those eyes are full of theology and civil rights. They look as though they were watching a Quaker, or reading the Stamp Act. The very souls of their architects are transferred to them. I never enter one, even in these fearless times, without feeling nervous and sober, half expecting to run afoul of its original proprietor, with some interrogatory about my business, and the wickedness of his descendants.
There used to stand—there is still standing—one of these queer piles upon a bluff overlooking the river. It was built of stone, and is very much moss-grown. It fairly looks daggers at the ambitious little structures that have sprouted up by its side. It is a heap of Puritanical thoughts—visible thoughts—all hardened into wood and rock. There it has stood, frowning and frowning, for a century and a half. It is full of great massive timbers and stones, and is as stout as the heart of its founder. A weather-cock is attached to one of the chimneys—a sheet-iron angel, lying on his breast, and blowing a trumpet, and the wind shifts him round and round over different parts of the village. This angel has blown away thousands of men; but there he lies, his cheeks puffed, blowing yet, as fresh and healthy as ever.