A favorite story of his, “The Old Auctioneer,” or “The Last Song of the Robin,” is a specimen of his peculiar stories, and a picture of that department of folk-lore called the “Folk-Lore Story.” We give it here:—
THE LAST SONG OF THE ROBIN.
“Susan, I can see that old farm now in my mind’s eye,—the country road, the guide-post on which was printed ‘20 Miles to Boston.’ I can see the painted tavern, and the dark pond where the mysterious travellers were killed. I can fancy hubbly oak-trees; the way-side orchard; the corner under the trees where the white avens bloomed; the balm bed, the red-pepper patch, the lilac-bushes, and the bouncing-bet. I can hear conquiddles, as we called the bobolinks, as they used to fly and sing in the windward meadows; red-winged blackbirds in the woodland pastures; martin birds under the eaves; and the first song of the robin as he came out of the woods, like the dove from Noah’s Ark, to see if the dry land had appeared. And, Susan, I can hear the last song of the robin.”
The old man’s eye looked over the great prairie, which spread out before him like a sea.
“It didn’t look like that, Susan, where the sun rises and sets in the same corn-field, and the rain-plover cries, and all is so wide, wide, wide.
“Susan, I’ve been thinking. I never told you much about my twin sister, who lives on the old farm now on the North River, in Massachusetts. She’s seventy-five years old, come yesterday. I’ve had a letter from her. She’s in trouble, Susan. I feel that I ought to go to her, old as I am. I do, Susan.”
“You are too old, grandpa.”
“The old place is about to be sold at auction. She says so in the letter, written in the same hand that we used to write together when we sat side by side on the wooden bench at school. She says that the poorhouse will soon be her home, but that there is One coming round soon who will settle all things. She means, Susan—Well, you know who it is that soon comes round and settles all things when a person passes the shadow of seventy years. I am able to go, Susan, and I must go. Somehow I can feel invisible hands pushing me like, as of the old folk, and I have dreamed twice of the last song of the robin.
“What was that? Well, well, the robins used to sing their last songs in the Indian-summer weather, before they went to their covers in the deep woods for the long winter. It was peculiarsome like. It was when the apples and leaves were falling, leaving bare the nests in the trees; after the wild-geese had flown over, and the partridges had begun to fly. I’ve heard ’em many a time. I would like to hear them once more, as I used to hear, them among the red trees by the old cranberry meadows. You may think me queer, Susan, and haunted like; but I long to see that old slanting roof just once more, and my twin sister, who was rocked in the same cradle with me, and is now in sorrow, and to hear that last song of the robin. It seems as though at times I could hear that now.”
He listened. There was a murmur of the wind in the cottonwood-trees.
“It is comin’ Thanksgiving, Susan. It makes me think of the folks and times that are gone; of the succotash, pandowdy, and puddings, and pumpkin pies. There never was no such days anywhere like those, and my hungry heart aches to spend one more Thanksgiving with my sister Susan. The last one I spent there was sort of queer. The old minister he ate of all the dishes in the kitchen before the table was set, and then there were so many of them that it made him heavy like, and he fell asleep saying grace, and we sat there feeling awkward like, and the victuals all got cold. Oh, how I would like to talk over those old times with Susan, my old sister Susan!
“And, Susan, my little granddaughter, I hid some letters behind a board in the haunted garret under the candle-poles, and there’s going to be a vendue, and I want to see them once again. That was more than fifty years ago.
THE POST OFFICE.
“Haunted garret? Such a place seems queer to you, does it, Susan? We have no haunted garrets here out West. All the old houses and farms in the Cape towns had their ghost-stories, and a family couldn’t have amounted to much who hadn’t been followed by a ghost sometime.”
It was near sunset. Like a high arch of glory rose the red light in the western air,—liquid rubies and gold. Against the sunset stood the black outlines of some Lombardy poplars and cottonwood-trees, and under the trees were three graves.
The old man’s face turned towards the graves. He sat musing for a time in deep thought. The wind rippled through the faded leaves, and scattered them about the graves.
“Susan!”
“Well, grandpa?”
“Susan!”
“Yes, I hear. What is it? Grandpa, I was thinking of the haunted garret.”
“Your grandmother and I brought those trees here. They were twigs then, and she was a bride. I brought her here some years after I took my claim. Now her grave is there, and the graves of two of our own little ones. I shall come back again. You and my sister Susan are all that is left me now,—just old Susan and young Susan. She needs me. He will take care of you. If I live a week, I am going to rocky old New England once more. I hear voices calling me sometimes, and then there drifts into the air that last song of the robin, peculiarsome like.”
“What were the letters you hid behind the board, grandpa?”
“In the haunted garret?”
“Yes.”
“I may tell you sometime. It is a long story. It was in the garret where I once saw the ghost of old Rachel, who ground red peppers with a calash over her head. They used to hear her wandering about at night in the herb-room, pounding, pounding, pounding with a pestle. What times those were!”
“I, too, would like to see the old house, and my great-aunt, and eat a Thanksgiving dinner with some of the good old families. What do you say, grandpa?”
“You would? Well, you may go too. You’ll hear them, all those ghost-stories and wonder-tales, right where they happened.”
The girl’s face brightened up with pleasure, followed by a doubtful shadow, as of ghostly thoughts. She was still thinking of the haunted garret.
The old man sat dreaming again. He at last said, “Susan!”
“Yes.”
“Susan!”
“Yes, I am listening.”
“I have a secret for you.”
“Yes? Let me hear.”
“We will not let the folks know that we are coming. We will meet ’em as strangers like. Old Susan will not know me—likely not. Not know me? and we were born on the same day and rocked in the same cradle. It takes two to be happy always, and I used to be happy with her.”
The girl sat thinking.
“Grandpa!”
But the old man’s mind was in New England now. He was listening in dreams to his sister’s voice, and perhaps the last song of the robin.
“Grandpa!”
“Yes, Susan.”
“Why could we not bring her back with us?”
“The old well is there, and the walls and the rooms where the folks all were married and died. We could not bring her back. There are some things that money cannot do. We might bring her body back; only that, Susan.”
“But those things are to be sold?”
“Yes; but they are there.”
“And we will be there too, on Thanksgiving Day.”
“Yes; under the old roof on which I used to hear the rain fall in the warm summer eves.”
The old man’s face contracted and turned away. He was crying.
“I have not cried before for years, Susan. Sing me that old song that your mother used to sing when you was a baby. They called it ‘Ben Bolt.’”
A piano stood in one corner of the room, and over it soon floated the words of the haunting song:
“Oh, don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,
Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown?”
At the words,
“In the old church-yard by the orchard, Ben Bolt,
In the valley so sweet and so low,”
the old man bent over his cane, and great tears again ran down his cheeks.
“I used to sing, Susan, and play the violin in the old house at home. Father made me promise not to take that with me. He said it would hinder me. He meant well.”
Susan sang:
“But of all the boys that were schoolmates then,
There is left but you and me.”
Then there fell a silence, and the western twilight deepened, and the walls of the sun seemed melting down.
“Thank you, my girl. That reminds me of the old times and the last song of the robin.”
They sat in silence, save that the west winds rustled amid the withering leaves of the old cottonwoods.
One cool day in September Susan alighted from her horse after a long ride over the prairie. She was met at the door by her grandfather.
“I’ve brought you another letter from the old home,” she said. “It is in aunt’s hand, and I think that she is in very great trouble. See! it is blotted.”
The old man put on his spectacles, and held the letter close to his eyes. “Yes, she is in trouble, you may depend. I knew how it would be. Her hand shook when she wrote that. Let me open it.”
He sat down on the rude piazza and read the letter, rocking at times nervously.
“Yes, she is in deep trouble, sure enough, Susan. We must go. I haven’t done just right, Susan, by your aunt; I haven’t, now. When I was young, I used to climb trees, and so hide from her and leave her, and she used to cry. I can see her now. I do feel as though I had been climbing a tree all of my life and hiding and leaving her. It didn’t add to the stature of Zaccheus to climb a tree, but it did add to his reputation. So it is with me, Susan. I’ve gained some property by immigrating here to the prairies, but I am Zaccheus still, and I hear a voice calling me to come down. That’s the way we used to talk in the old New England times, in figures like, when I thought the tree-tops reached clear up to the sky.”
“What does aunt write, grandpa?”
“The old place is going to be sold by vendue, and the debts will take all—all.”
“What is a vendue?”
“Oh, it’s like this. When property people lose almost all they have, and can’t pay their mortgages, then comes the sheriff, and after him a man whom we call an auctioneer, and the auctioneer cries ‘Going, going, gone,’ and when he gets through there’s not so much as a birch broom left.”
The old man rocked uneasily.
“It’s my fault, Susan. I want to tell you, though I do it to my shame, what a woman your old aunt is. She always put a person’s feeling above money. You see, it was this way: I had a fever to go West, and to marry, and Susan she wanted to marry a young farmer who owned an old Cape farm. But one of us had to stay with the folks. She was tender-hearted, Susan was, and she used to love me more than her own life,—she always loved others more than herself,—and one day, under the apple-trees, she said to me, ‘Martin,’ said she, ‘you may go West, and I’ll live with father and mother.’ When I came to be propounded for the Church, my conscience troubled me so that I made a covenant with myself that I would always be true to my twin sister Susan. And I nailed that covenant behind a board in the garret. And now I am going back to find it, and to keep it. Just hear this letter. She says:—
“‘Mother’s long sickness caused the mortgage, and the interest on it grew. Now they are going to sell the old place at vendue, and I’ll have to go to the poorhouse, or else live on the church, which is poor. Even my Thanksgiving turkeys will be sold.’
“Did you hear that, Susan? I remember how we used to go together hunting turkeys’ nests when, we were young. A turkey is a sly bird, and hides her nest, and always goes an opposite way when she starts for her nest. How we used to follow the turkeys slyly amid the dews, wild roses, and laurels, so as to find their nests! And now even her turkeys are to be sold! Susan, I feel as though I hadn’t done as I ought to. I must go back East, and I will do the right thing in the end. I will keep the covenant. It was Susan that gave me a chance in life. I can hear the old folks that are dead callin’, ‘Come home, come home;’ seems as though I could.”
“Grandfather, have you any spare money?”
“What makes you ask that, child?”
“Couldn’t you buy the old place and give it to her?”
“To Susan? To Susan? Why, bless your heart, that’s just what I’ve just been thinking! If I ought to—and a man ought to do what he ought, or he’ll feel just as he hadn’t ought to, and I feel that way now. No, Susan, none of those auction-attending folks shall eat my sister Susan’s turkeys this year. We’ll get ready and go. You never saw the sea, did you?”
“No; nor old houses with ghost-rooms. It all seems like a story.”
“Nor rocks, nor walls, nor great apple-orchards, nor woods of old oak-trees?”
“No, nor a Thanksgiving—a real true one, grandpa.”
“Well, child, you shall see a real old New England Thanksgiving this year, and I think it will be one well worth seeing. We’ll roast those turkeys ourselves. They’re saying ‘quit, quit’ to the mortgage now. I’m going to keep my covenant. It makes me happy to think of it. But, as I said, we will not let them know that we are coming. And, Susan, Susan, you maybe will hear that last song of the robin.”
MANUFACTURES BUILDING AND ELECTRIC FOUNTAIN.
The old man paced the piazza, and hummed, in a broken voice,—
“How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood,
When fond recollection presents them to view;
The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood,
And every loved spot which my infancy knew!
“I used to know the man that made that song,” he said. “He was a son of a Revolutionary soldier who lived at Scituate. He went to live in New York. Strange that people will go to live so far away! I used to hear the boys sing it during the war,” he added, absently, “when they would get Thanksgiving boxes from home. Seems as though I could hear it now in the air: there are some songs that haunt one’s heart, Susan: it seems as though I could hear it far away. Listen!”
He listened. The prairie air was still. He heard the song, but Susan—she did not hear. The wind rippled through the dry leaves of the cottonwoods over the three graves.
There are probably no roads in our country that are so legend-haunted as those between Boston and Plymouth. The making of those roads by the Massachusetts and Plymouth Bay colonies was the first map of the nation. The men who built them, and guarded them by heavy stone walls, were the descendants of some of the best families of England, whose soul-training had led them to place principle above wealth, pleasure, or fame. On their simple rural farms they lived, attended the church and the folkmote, as the town meeting may be called, and they made the latter the pattern of all future republics.
Their farms, with the gray stone walls, cool wells, and great elms, retaining their names, still remain. The purple swallows come to them as of old in the spring-time, and the ospreys, or fishing-hawks, drift over at noon, wheeling in the sun. The partridge and quail may still be found in the woodlands and woodland pastures, and a few woodpeckers may still be heard tapping the trees.
The byways in their seclusion are even more poetic than the main highways. The wild grape and clematis there cover the sinking walls. The ancient graveyards are there, and their slate stones, with their curious death’s-heads and virtuous poetry, still may be seen zigzagging as it were among the bright sumachs. The slanting roofs are covered with moss, and the great barn doors open to the sea.
It was down this way that the old man Martin Marlowe and his granddaughter rode in one of the last stage-coaches that ever passed down the winding roads by the sea,—past the homes of the two Presidents Adams, past the church of the eloquent Henry Ware, past the old Scituate farm, where Woodworth lived, who wrote “The Old Oaken Bucket,” to a once famous but now forgotten neighborhood on the North River, where a thousand ships had been built, and among them the one which first entered the Columbia River of Oregon, and that gave the river its name. The old Winslow place was near, as were the green farms on the Marshfield meadows, where Daniel Webster came to live, and the Winslow reservation, where live the last of the Wampanoags.
The old man seemed dwelling in the past as the stage rattled along.
“There are not many of them left now,” he said to Susan. “How I shall miss seeing my old friends! All that a man can have in this world is his friends, and when they go his world is gone.”
He looked out on the great elms, which were flaming with color, and dropping their leaves in golden showers. The weather was warm and the air had a swampy smell.
The old man began to tell the legends of the old houses and places as they passed along.
“Susan, there’s where old Parson White used to live in the Indian days. His house stood in the meadow; there’s the chimney there yet—see?—down by the alder-bushes. He preached nigh on to seventy year, and he lived to be ninety. He preached to the Indians in Eliot’s time, when old Waban was living. One day a good Indian came to him, as I’ve hearn the old folks tell, and said to him, ‘Matthew—Mark—Luke—John—Jonah.’ And the tall parson talked to him about his soul and redemption and heaven, and then gave him a mug of cider to encourage him in his inquiries. It did. He came again, and the minister was busy writing one of his long sermons that turned the hour-glass twice. ‘Matthew—Mark—Luke—John—Jonah,’ said the Indian. But the parson’s mind was in the skies now. So the poor Indian repeated over the Scripture names again; but the parson’s mind was absent, thinking,—Parson White was great on thinking. Then the Indian pounded with his walking-stick, making a great noise after each name, and especially after ‘Jonah.’ That brought the old parson down from his Jacob’s ladder. ‘What do you mean?’ he shouted, rising up like a steeple. ‘Cider!’ said the Indian, and the poor parson dropped his face. He was discouraged, Susan.”
The stage stopped here and there at the country stores, about whose doors hung woollens for winter wear, and on the wooden steps of which were barrels of apples, onions, and potatoes.
One of the saddest sights on a New England byway is a dead church, with its broken tower and silent bell, in some neighborhood where the “boys” have nearly all gone to the cities and the West. The coach rolled by such a one, with its briery graveyard and broken wall. The old man saw it, and his memory of boyhood legends revived again.
“Susan—Susan—Parson White preached his last sermon there. It is boarded up now. See the old bell that used to make the hills echo! Parson White had gone eighty then; almost ninety he must have been.
“It was a Sunday morning in balm-breathing June, with the wild roses blooming, and the orioles singing, and the bobolinks toppling in the clover. The windows were open, and the shadows of the elms fell across them. The communion-table was spread in front of the tall pulpit, which was hung with silk curtains under the sounding-board. Parson White, he went up the pulpit stairs and began to pray. The old folks used to say that they never heard such a prayer as that. He seemed to be looking into heaven. Suddenly he stopped. There was a long silence. The church was so still you might have heard the chippering of the wrens in the old trees. He said then: ‘The horsemen of Israel, and the chariots thereof,’ Then he was silent again, and then he seemed talking to himself, and said, in a low voice:—
“‘My willing soul would stay
In such a frame as this,
And sit and sing herself away
To everlasting bliss.’
He did not move again. Never. He lay there on the pulpit, his face encircled in the arms of his long black robe, and resting on the Bible. The deacons went up to him softly. He was dead.”
The old man dropped his head in silence for a time. The coach rolled on its dusty way over the red and russet leaves that were falling in the sun.
Little Susan was dreaming too,—of old Susan and haunted rooms and the fairy-like day of Thanksgiving.
“Susan—Susan—we are near the old farm,” said the old man, starting. “There’s the gable just over the savin-trees,—there, with the woodbine on it, where the martin-boxes used to be. Many’s the time I’ve looked out of that window. I was young then, Susan; we do not live twice in this world.”
A strange sound fell on the Western girl’s ears.
“Going! going! How much am I offered for the old family cradle? Fifty cents? Fifty cents am I offered for the old family cradle? Fifty cents for this old oak cradle? One generation has slept in it, and it is good for another. Fifty cents am I offered?”
The old man listened a moment, then thrust his head out of the coach-door, and said to the driver: “Hurry up! I want to bid on that cradle.”
The driver cracked his whip. The coach rolled by a thin grove of trees that partly hid the yard from the way, and a strange scene was brought to view. A crowd of people, young and old, were gathered around an old gray farmhouse with an open door. There were vehicles of almost all kinds about the place, with the horses hitched to the trees. In the yard in front of the door was the furniture of the house, and on a high chair stood the tall form of a country auctioneer, crying the articles for sale in the singsong tone of the old travelling preachers,—a tone that must be first heard to be imitated.
In the doorway, close by a great stone step, sat an old woman in a white cap and calico dress, and a handkerchief crossed over her breast. She was watching the sale. Her face was beautiful in its serenity, hope, and trust. Faith was written in it. She seemed to have a soul that had a life above all changes.
“Is that aunt?” said Susan.
“My girl, I do not know. It looks like her. Does she look like me?”
The stage stopped. The driver called to the auctioneer: “Hold on! Here’s a man that wants to bid on that cradle.”
The auctioneer ceased his singsong, and all eyes were turned on the old man and the girl alighting from the stage. No one knew them.
“Now we are all ready,” began the auctioneer again. “The old oak cradle. How much am I offered for the old oak cradle? Fifty cents am I offered for the oak cradle? Some good people have been rocked in this old cradle, and it is good enough yet. Fifty cents. Seventy-five? Yes, the old gentleman who has just arrived bids seventy-five. Eighty—do I hear it? Eighty now for the old oak cradle? There were many prayers made over that old oak cradle. S-e-v-e-n-t-ee-five! Eighty—do I hear it? Are you all done? S-e-v-e-n-t-ee-five! Going, going, going! Once, do I hear the eighty? Twice, do I hear the eighty? Three times—third and last call—do I hear the eighty? Gone—to—What is your name, stranger?”
“Cash,” said the old man, with a quivering lip, as he passed through the crowd, followed by the wondering girl.
“Sold to Cash,” said the auctioneer. “What have we here? The little oak chair for the child at the table. Are you all ready to bid for the little oak chair for the child at the table? It is as old as the family, and as good as new. Look at it,—the little oak chair for the child at the table,—how much am I offered? Here is another—two of them. How much am I offered for them both?”
