But the leading business men of the village are of a different stamp—not Puritans, but Puritanical—the same rock with the corners knocked off—of less strength, but more polish. They reverence their fathers, keep the religious and political altar they have raised burning, but are not so regardless of temporal comforts; in a word, they are Yankees.
Major Simeon Giles is a specimen. It is difficult to draw his portrait. He has a hard, dry face, which looks as though it had been turned out from a seasoned white-oak knot. He wears a grievous expression, lying somewhere between sobriety and melancholy. His money, character, and family have made him a great man—he is a leading personage in church and state, and exercises a wonderful influence in every department of society. The deacon is full of dry expressions, and many of his cool, sly remarks have become proverbs; but the hardest thing he ever said was after his pious soul had been very much vexed, when he observed, "that if Providence should see fit to remove Mr. —— from this vale of tears, he would endeavor to resign himself to the stroke."
Major Simeon has many severe struggles within him, between the flesh and the spirit. His avarice and piety are both strong, and the former sometimes gains a temporary advantage. All his movements are governed by method. He remains so long at his store, so long at his house, "takes a journey" with his family once a year, "has a place for everything, and everything in its place,"—a peg for his hat, a corner for his boots—and he is almost as rigid in observing and enforcing his laws as Deacon Smith.
Major Simeon is supreme, of course, over his own family. He never trifles with his children. A cold shadow falls around him, which often silences their voice of mirth and ringing laugh—the effect of reverence, however, more than fear.
Major Giles lives in the Old Giles Mansion. I will not pretend to say how many Gileses have occupied it. Their portraits are hanging upon its walls, and their bodies lie in the burying-ground; a long row of them, all the way across it, and half back again—bud, blossom, and gathered fruit. There is the portrait of the celebrated Elnathan Giles, who died during the reign of Queen Anne. He looks very stern. He had passed through the scenes of the Salem witchcraft, and had been personally connected with the excitement—had attended several of the trials as a witness; was bewitched once himself—and, according to family tradition, saw one witch hung—an out-and-out witch—who had bridled many innocent people at midnight, sailed through chamber windows, and hurry-scurried off with them, astride a broomstick.
Next to him hangs the face of his son, Colonel Ethelbert, as he was called, who lived just long enough to fight at Bunker Hill. He had been a militia colonel before the Revolution, and militia colonels were something in those days. He made a ferocious-looking portrait, certainly. One can almost smell gunpowder in the room. He is dressed up in his military coat, standing collar, an epaulet on his shoulder; and there are strewn around him, in the background, armies, artillery, drums, and banners. No wonder the Americans were victorious. And then came the face of Major Simeon, whom I have described.
The wives of these men are also done up in oil, and hang meekly and submissively by the side of their lords, as all wives should, or rather as all wives did, in those days—and actually died without knowing how much they were oppressed.
There are other things besides portraits, to remind Major Simeon of his ancestry. There is a tree still standing (strange that a tree should outlive generations of men), that Elnathan planted with his own hand, on the day Ethelbert was born—a stately elm, whose branches, in their magnificent curve, almost sweep the ground. This tree shadowed the cold face of both Elnathan and Ethelbert, when their coffins were closed for the last time beneath it. There is the spring, more than half a century old, that bubbles from the hill, and goes trickling, leaping, and flashing down the green slope, singing away to itself as sweetly as ever. The old lilac-bush, too, has outlived thousands whose hands have plucked its blossoms, and yet it bursts out in the spring, and looks as fresh as the children who play beneath it.
It has been thought that Major Simeon and his family were aristocratic. There is a stately air about them, when they enter church, that smacks of blood. And the Major himself has often declared that, while "stock isn't everything, it is a great consolation to know, in his case, that the name of Giles has never been stained."
There are several other families in the village whose ancestry runs back as far as the Gileses'; and they have about them as many heirlooms to remind them of it.