Extravagance was more than a fault, it was an actual sin, in the eyes of these prudent, simple-living folk, and you may have heard before the story of the ingenious housewife, who, tired of the blank bareness of her yellow-painted floors, conceived the bold idea of manufacturing a carpet for it herself:
A large square of sail-cloth served her for a canvas, and upon this she painted, with the few colors that she could procure, a pattern of flowers of every kind that she was familiar with,—blue roses and green lilies having the preference, as making more show than their humbler sisters. This, when finished, she covered with a thick coat of varnish, thus making a very good substitute for the more modern oil-cloth.
Of course everybody, from far and near, came to look, and wonder, and admire; and among them a good old deacon, who, after critically surveying the wonderful work, turned to the proud artist, and, with a look half of amazement, half of pitying reproach, upon his honest, weather-beaten face, asked solemnly:—
“Sister ——, do you expect to have all this and heaven too?”
To-day, Boston is sometimes jestingly styled the “Hub of the Universe,” but at the beginning of the present century it was, soberly speaking, the Hub of New England, for from it spokes projected into every part, however distant, of that region.
As in past ages all roads led to Rome, so seventy-five or eighty years ago all roads led to or from Boston. In an old Farmer’s Almanac, printed in 1817, I find, among other things quaint and curious, four closely-printed pages devoted to “Roads to the Principal Towns of the Continent from Boston, with the distances and names of Innkeepers.” Beginning with: “From Boston to Newport, over Seekonk, through Rehoboth, 69 miles,” and ending with “Down the Ohio, to the mouth of the Muskinqum, 524 miles,”—a tolerably long ride in those days of the old-fashioned stage coach.
Naturally, this Umbilicus of the Western World set the fashions in theology, literature, dress, and manners for all New England, and any one who had made a trip to Boston was venerated as a kind of travelled wonder, and forever after regarded as an authority upon all mooted points of general interest.
It has been said, on what authority I am unable to state, that “all good Americans go to Paris when they die.” But in those days of Boston’s supremacy an aspiring dame in one of our Maine villages, finding herself upon her death bed, expressed as her one last wish, that she “might be permitted to go to heaven by the way o’ Boston.”
Evidently the poor soul had pined in vain all her life for a sight of its splendors, and could think of nothing so near akin to heaven as a peep at this earthly Paradise on her way there.
I might go on indefinitely to call up pictures, heroic, quaint, or pathetic, of these earnest-hearted men and women, who toiled, suffered, and planned, for the future, that we, their children, have entered into the fulness of. But time forbids, and I can only say, in closing this paper, that it will be well for us, if, in these days of national prosperity and power, when Liberty, proudly triumphant, stands like