“Don’t she look handsome? Don’t she look nice as anybody?” he would ask of the neighbors, and show the new wig he had bought her, as the poor hair was thin. His simple pride thought it as beautiful as any young girl’s curls, and indeed it was very youthful. One’s heart was wrung, yet uplifted, too, for here was love which had passed through the absolute wrecking of life, and was untouched.
The Captain was a tall hearty man, but it was he who died first, after all, and all in a minute. The paralyzed creature thus bereaved, moaned, day after day; her eyes seemed to be asking for something, there in the room, and no one could find the right thing, till someone thought of the Captain’s binoculars, which he always had by him. From that moment she became tranquil, and even grew happy again, if only she had the bright brass thing where her poor hand could touch it. If it was moved, she moaned for it to be set back. It was her precious token, from his hand to hers. With it beside her she could wait and be good, poor dear soul, until, in about two years, her release came, and she went to join “Captain.”
One word more about Mr. Peter Simons, of whom the town keeps pleasant memories. He lived handsomely, in a handsome house overlooking the river, and his housekeeper, Deborah Twycross, was as much of a magnate in her own way as himself. Mr. Peter was very high with her; but he stood in awe of her, too. Still, he never would let her engage his second servant, a privilege which she coveted.
In his young days a “hired girl” received $2.00 a week wages, if she could milk, $1.50 if she could not. By the time Mr. Peter was established in stately bachelor housekeeping no girl was any longer expected to milk, and few knew how. But when engaging a servant, if he did not like the applicant’s looks, Mr. Peter would say,
“Can you milk?”
Of course, she could not, and there the matter would end. He never asked a girl whose looks he liked, if she could milk!
He was a man of endless secret benevolence, and posed all the time as a hard-fisted person and a miser. He was at the most devious pains to conceal his constant kindnesses. The noble minister who at that time carried our Town on his young shoulders, received sums of money, in every time of need, for library, schools, or cases of poverty and suffering, directed in a variety of elaborately disguised handwritings. He was able in time to trace them all to Mr. Peter. Many a struggling young man was set on his feet and established in life by this secret benefactor; and after Mr. Peter’s death, his coal dealer told how for years he had had orders to deliver loads of coal to this and that family in distress, after dark, and as noiselessly as possible, under an agreement of secrecy, enforced by such threats that he never dared disobey.
The Town has changed since Mr. Peter’s day. Boys no longer brave the terrors of a visit to a White Witch to have their warts charmed, or a toothache healed. (“Mother Hatch,” who plied her arts some thirty years ago, was the last of these. Her appliances for fortune-telling were the correct ones of cards, an ink-well, and a glass to gaze in; but a small trembling sufferer in knickerbockers—a hero to the still more trembling group of friends and eggers-on outside—did not benefit by these higher mysteries. The enchantress, beside her traffic in the black arts, took in washing; she would withdraw her hands from the suds, and lay a reeking finger on the offending tooth, the patient gasping and shutting his terror-stricken eyes while she recited a sufficient incantation.)
Even the memory of the Whipping-post, which still stood in Mr. Peter’s childhood, has long since vanished. The town bell is no longer rung at seven in the morning and at noon, and a steam fire-whistle has replaced the tocsin of alarm that formerly was rung from all the church steeples; but the curfew still rings every night, at nine in the evening (the bell which rings it was made by Paul Revere); and, among the customary Scriptural-sounding offices of fence-viewers, field-drivers, measurers of wood and bark, etc., the town still has a town crier. A very few years ago it still had a pound-keeper and hog-reeve, but by now the outlines of the pound itself have disappeared.