It would have been ungracious on my part to have objected to this proposal, though I had a good many doubts about its wisdom. So it happened that my little excursion to L——, which I had innocently designed to be a season of simple lotus-eating such as Mr. Tennyson ascribes to his Olympian deities, “reclined upon the hills together, careless of mankind,” was complicated by a subordinate interest in a comedy from real life which had that quiet village for a stage.
The next day I started, taking Boston en route. That staid, quiet, cleanly city seems always to be, compared with New York, like a good school-boy by the side of a big, blustering brother fonder of a street row than his books. Then to Fitchburg, where I stopped over night, as some stage travelling was to be done from our “jumping-off” place, and riding over the country roads in the morning was more promising than on a dark and cloudy night. In the morning the Fitchburg Railroad again, and one of its branches to L——. The unwonted coolness of the morning breeze, as the train entered the New Hampshire hills, already began to refresh mind and body alike. The pines and hemlocks extending back into deep, dim recesses carpeted with moss and ferns; the cattle moving slowly over the pastures in the distance; the pastures themselves stretching up the sides of the highest hills, still of the freshest green, without a hint of the yellow undertone that I watched gradually overspread them as the summer ripened into autumn; a lake in the foreground, silent, unvisited, its clear waters unpolluted by the dregs of commerce or the drainage of a vast metropolis; even the caw! caw! of the ravens flying off from the tops of the pine stumps, send a novel and delicious feeling of freedom through the breast of the city traveller who has put care and work behind him for a season. Nor is this feeling altogether evanescent. Even now, as winter approaches and the north winds from the same hills come sweeping down over the great city, sending us chattering and freezing to our cosey firesides, the glory of the July foliage moves our memory like a far-off dream of youth. Yet, after all, it may be doubted whether the charm of country scenes is not due in great part to their novelty and the feeling that we are not bound to them longer than we please. Of all that has been written in praise of country life, how much is the work of the city resident; how little, comparatively speaking, springs from the country itself! There drudgery too often takes the place of sentiment. It is the Epicurean poet, Horace, satiated with the noise of the Forum and the gossip of the baths, who sings sweetest of rural contentment, of the “lowing herds,” the “mellow fruits of autumn,” and the “brooks murmuring over stony beds.” But when he gives play to his satiric vein, none pictures more truthfully than the Venusian the grumbling of the husbandman, who “turns the heavy clay with the hard plough.” Embowered in some shady arbor on the windings of the Digentia through his Sabine farm, or doing a little amateur farming, to the amusement, as he confesses, of his blunt country neighbors, who laughed at the dandy poet with a hoe in his hand, it was easy for Horace to chant the smooth and sunny side of country life. But the eight laborers on his estate, chained literally to the soil, as many a New England farmer morally is by the burden of debt or family, no doubt saw things differently. And the bailiff of his woodlands we know to have despised those “desert and inhospitable wilds,” and to have longed for the streets and shows of Rome. It is amazing upon what inattentive ears the music of our wild birds falls in a secluded farm-house. Often it seems absolutely unheard; while the clatter of the long street of the country town that the farmer visits once a month is for ever in his mind.
But we delay too long at the way station at L——. Let us onwards.
The carrier of the United States mail, who is at the same time the Jehu of the passenger stage, slings our impedimenta up behind with an energy to be envied by a veteran “baggage-smasher” at some of our big depots, straps it down, and jumps upon the box. We mount more slowly beside him, disdaining to be shut up in the close interior, and intent upon looking at the country we pass through this lovely morning. The two stout grays breast the hill leading to L—— Centre, eight miles distant.
The surface of the country is hilly and broken; as we approach L——, mountainous. Mounting the crest of the first steep hill, a beautiful natural panorama spreads out before us: long, narrow, intersecting lines of timber, like giant hedges, dividing the hill farms from each other. A rolling country spreads toward the east, bounded on the horizon by a low range of mountains wooded to the summit, and with a white steeple flashing out here and there among the trees at their base. The effects of light and shade, caused by the clouds on a brilliant day, on one of those white steeples, standing out solitarily against the side of a mountain eight or ten miles distant, are peculiar. Sometimes it becomes invisible, as the circle of the shadow is projected upon that area of the mountain which includes it. Then, as the dark veil moves slowly, with a sliding motion, up the side and over the crest of the mountain, the white spire flashes out from the obscure background of the forest with a sudden brilliancy. On this side patches of blue water among the trees in the hollows revealed the presence of numerous ponds, as the small lakes, and some of the large ones, are universally called in New England.
To the northwest what seemed to be a level plain from the height over which we rode, but which was in reality broken and undulating ground, stretched beneath us for ten or twelve miles to the base of Mt. Monadnock. The mountain, grand, massive, and still veiled by a thin mist, rose boldly from the low country at its foot to a height of nearly four thousand feet.
A ride of an hour and a half brought us to the top of the hill on the side of which stands L——. A dozen scattered houses flank the broad village green, and a Congregational meeting-house, with white belfry tower and green blinds, stands half-way down the incline.
The post-office and country store combined is at the cross-roads as you drive down the hill, and some ancient elms on the green seem to nod at the stranger with a friendly air as he enters the village. “Here,” said I to myself, “is rural quiet and simplicity. Farewell for many slumberous weeks the busy haunts of men.” L—— is quite out of the beaten track of summer travel, and had been recommended me by a friend who had spent some seasons there, on the ground of economy, charming scenery, good fishing, and repose. Nor did I find any reason to regret having listened to him. A country tavern offers entertainment to man and beast, and is resorted to by the drummers and sample men who invade L——, as elsewhere, with their goods. But I was not forced to be dependent on it, as a letter from my friend opened to me the hospitable doors of the comfortable farm-house where he had boarded two years before.
Here let it be said at the outset that whatever the other drawbacks of village life in New Hampshire, there is among the farming class a natural courtesy, and, among the women, even an inherited refinement of manner, especially in their treatment of strangers, which speaks well for the native stock. Prejudices there are among both men and women—deep-rooted, as we shall see—and narrow-minded opinions in plenty; but even these are concealed where to manifest them might give offence. The family in which I was domiciled consisted of Mr. Allen and his wife, their married daughter—who, together with her husband, resided with them—an unmarried daughter, and a pretty little girl, the grandchild. Mr. Allen kept a country store—for L—— boasted of two—and traded also in cattle with Canada, making a journey sometimes as far as Montreal in the spring to buy stock, which he fattened on his pastures through the summer and autumn, and sold in the early part of the winter. These various ventures, which were on the whole successful—as the command of a little ready money enabled him to take his time and buy and sell to advantage—had made him more “forehanded” than most of his neighbors. He was one of the selectmen of L——. His dwelling-house, a large, white, well-kept two-story edifice, with a garden-plot facing the village street, a piazza on the sunny side, and two beautiful maples dividing the carriage yard from the road, was one of the handsomest in L——. Mrs. Allen was one of those energetic housewives whose sound sense and domestic capacity had evidently contributed not a little to her husband’s present prosperity.
They were a sturdy couple, intelligent, honest, and knowing what was due to themselves and others; now going down the hill together with mutual dependence and confidence in each other. I consider them a good example of the best type of the New Hampshire farming class.