The school-teachers were taken to board in turn, two weeks at a time, by different families; and a friend, now an elderly woman, has told me that when teaching, as a young girl, she had as a rule to share her bed with three or four children of the family. In several places the hens slept in the room too. The schools of course were ungraded. After her teaching hours she helped in the housework, but she liked it, and made warm friends. She found the life vigorous and hardy—“It was life that was every bit of it alive,” she has told me.
It is sometimes said that marriage and divorce are taken lightly in the country districts, and certainly the Jingroes and their like, of whom more later, make their gipsy marriages, which bind only at will; but even among some of our outlying communities of far higher standing than the forest settlements, it is true that a curious, primitive view of wedlock often obtains. Marriages in the country are deep as the rock, enduring as the hills, once the real mate is found. The fine, toil-worn faces of man and wife, in Golden-Wedding and Four-generations groups in local newspapers, show a thing before which one puts off the shoes from off one’s feet. But, when husband and wife find only misery in their marriage, find themselves fundamentally at variance, they quietly “get a bill,” (i. e. of divorce,) and each is considered free to marry again. The adjustment, according to their lights, is made decently and in order; and all cases come quickly before the final court of public opinion, which in these clear-eyed country districts metes out an inexorable judgment to lightness, to cowardice or selfishness.
It is difficult not to mis-state, about so subtle a matter; but the attitude of these neighborhoods is not a lax one. It is rather as if, in places so small, where the margin of everything is so narrow, the tremendous exigencies of life enforce a tolerance which is no conscious action of men’s minds, but a thing larger than themselves, before which they must bow. Life is so simple and vital, so cleared by necessity of a million extraneous complexities, that people are able, as one of the Saints says, to judge the action by the person, not the person by the action.
Long ago there was plenty of shipping direct from Weir’s Mills to Boston, and even to-day scows, and a few small schooners, come up between the hills for hay and wood, up all the windings of the Winding River, slipping through the draws at the peaceful, pretty hamlets of Upper, Middle, and Lower Bridge.
The country about Weir’s Mills shows in indefinable ways that you are approaching the sea. You get the taste of salt, with a south wind, more often than with us. The roads show sandy, and you see an occasional clump of sweet bay in the pastures. The pines grow more and more dwarfed, and so maritime in look that you expect to see blue water and the masts of ships ten miles before you come to them. We came on another indication one day, in asking our way of a young girl at a farm door.
“The second turn to the west,” she told us. In our part of the county we do not often think of the points of the compass. “The second turn on your left,” it would have been.
This is one of our older districts, and a certain amount of old-fashioned speech remains. Many persons still speak of ninepence (twelve and a half cents) and a shilling (sixteen and two-thirds cents). A High School pupil (one of the many boys who walk three or four miles in to our Town, in all weathers, to get their schooling) brought in some Mountain Ash berries to the botanical class. Round-Tree berries, he called them, and the master was puzzled, until he realized that this meant Rowan Tree, and that the name had come down straight from the boy’s English forefathers, who picked the rowan berries by their home streams.
THE PEACEFUL, PRETTY HAMLET OF UPPER BRIDGE