 | Twice-told tales |  |
THE VILLAGE UNCLE.
AN IMAGINARY RETROSPECT.
Come! another log upon the hearth. True, our little
parlor is comfortable, especially here, where the old
man sits in his old arm chair; but on Thanksgiving
night, the blaze should dance higher up the chimney,
and send a shower of sparks into the outer darkness.
Toss on an armful of those dry oak chips, the last
relicts of the Mermaid's knee timbers, the bones of
your namesake, Susan. Higher yet, and clearer be
the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest
in the village, and the light of our household mirth
flash far across the bay to Nahant. And now, come,
Susan, come, my children, draw your chairs round
me, all of you. There is a dimness over your figures!
You sit quivering indistinctly with each motion
of the blaze, which eddies about you like a flood,
so that you all have the look of visions, or people
that dwell only in the firelight, and will vanish from
existence, as completely as your own shadows, when
me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible
a mile inland, on a night like this. Yes; there
I catch the sound, but only an uncertain murmur, as
if a good way down over the beach; though, by the
almanac, it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the billows
must now be dashing within thirty yards of our
door. Ah! the old man's ears are failing him; and
so is his eye-sight, and perhaps his mind; else you
would not all be so shadowy, in the blaze of his
Thanksgiving fire.
How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders
of the present! To judge by my recollections,
it is but a few moments since I sat in another room;
yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the old
chest of drawers, nor Susan's profile and mine, in
that gilt frame; nothing, in short, except this same
fire, which glimmered on books, papers, and a picture,
and half discovered my solitary figure in a
looking-glass. But it was paler than my rugged old
self, and younger, too, by almost half a century.
Speak to me, Susan; speak, my beloved ones; for the
scene is glimmering on my sight again, and as it
brightens you fade away. Oh! I should be loth to
lose my treasure of past happiness, and become once
more what I was then; a hermit in the depths of
my own mind; sometimes yawning over drowsy
volumes, and anon a scribbler of wearier trash than
what I read; a man who had wandered out of the
real world and got into its shadow, where his troubles,
joys and vicissitudes were of such slight stuff, that
of living. Thank heaven, I am an old man now, and
have done with all such vanities.
Still this dimness of mine eyes! Come nearer,
Susan, and stand before the fullest blaze of the hearth.
Now I behold you illuminated from head to foot, in
your clean cap and decent gown, with the dear lock
of gray hair across your forehead, and a quiet smile
about your mouth, while the eyes alone are concealed,
by the red gleam of the fire upon your spectacles.
There, you made me tremble again! When the
flame quivered, my sweet Susan, you quivered with
it, and grew indistinct, as if melting into the warm
light, that my last glimpse of you might be as visionary
as the first was, full many a year since. Do
you remember it? You stood on the little bridge,
over the brook that runs across King's Beach into the
sea. It was twilight; the waves rolling in, the wind
sweeping by, the crimson clouds fading in the west,
and the silver moon brightening above the hill; and
on the bridge were you, fluttering in the breeze like
a sea bird that might skim away at your pleasure.
You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a creature
of the ocean foam and the crimson light, whose
merry life was spent in dancing on the crests of the
billows, that threw up their spray to support your
footsteps. As I drew nearer, I fancied you akin to
the race of mermaids, and thought how pleasant
it would be to dwell with you among the quiet coves,
in the shadow of the cliffs, and to roam along secluded
beaches of the purest sand, and when our northern
lonely, far amid summer seas. And yet it gladdened
me, after all this nonsense, to find you nothing but a
pretty young girl, sadly perplexed with the rude behavior
of the wind about your petticoats.
Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in
my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and
coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could
see her as she really was. Now, Susan, for a sober
picture of our village! It was a small collection of
dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the
sea, with the rock weed and marine plants that it
vomits after a storm, or to have come ashore among
the pipe staves and other lumber, which had been
washed from the deck of an eastern schooner. There
was just space for the narrow and sandy street between
the beach in front, and a precipitous hill that
lifted its rocky forehead in the rear, among a waste
of juniper bushes and the wild growth of a broken
pasture. The village was picturesque, in the variety
of its edifices, though all were rude. Here stood a
little old hovel, built, perhaps, of drift wood, there a
row of boat houses, and beyond them a two story
dwelling, of dark and weather-beaten aspect, the
whole intermixed with one or two snug cottages,
painted white, a sufficiency of pig-styes, and a shoemaker's
shop. Two grocery stores stood opposite
each other, in the centre of the village. These were
the places of resort, at their idle hours, of a hardy
throng of fishermen, in red baize shirts, oil cloth
trousers, and boots of brown leather covering the
the ocean than walk the earth. The wearers seemed
amphibious, as if they did but creep out of salt water
to sun themselves; nor would it have been wonderful
to see their lower limbs covered with clusters of little
shell fish, such as cling to rocks and old ship timber
over which the tide ebbs and flows. When their
fleet of boats was weather bound, the butchers raised
their price, and the spit was busier than the frying
pan; for this was a place of fish, and known as such,
to all the country round about; the very air was fishy,
being perfumed with dead sculpins, hard heads and
dog fish, strewn plentifully on the beach. You see,
children, the village is but little changed, since your
mother and I were young.
How like a dream it was, when I bent over a pool
of water, one pleasant morning, and saw that the
ocean had dashed its spray over me and made me a
fisherman! There was the tarpaulin, the baize shirt,
the oil cloth trousers and seven league boots, and
there my own features, but so reddened with sunburn
and sea breezes, that methought I had another
face, and on other shoulders too. The sea gulls and
the loons, and I, had now all one trade; we skimmed
the crested waves and sought our prey beneath them,
the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds. Always
when the east grew purple, I launched my dory,
my little flat-bottomed skiff, and rowed cross-handed to
Point Ledge, the Middle Ledge, or, perhaps, beyond
Egg Rock; often, too, did I anchor off Dread Ledge, a
spot of peril to ships unpiloted; and sometimes spread
South Shore, casting my lines in sight of Scituate.
Ere night fall, I hauled my skiff high and dry on the
beach, laden with red rock cod, or the white bellied
ones of deep water; haddock, bearing the black
marks of Saint Peter's fingers near the gills; the
long-bearded hake, whose liver holds oil enough for
a midnight lamp; and now and then a mighty halibut,
with a back broad as my boat. In the autumn,
I toled and caught those lovely fish, the mackerel.
When the wind was high; when the whale boats, anchored
off the Point, nodded their slender masts at
each other, and the dories pitched and tossed in the
surf; when Nahant Beach was thundering three
miles off, and the spray broke a hundred feet in air,
round the distant base of Egg Rock; when the brimful
and boisterous sea threatened to tumble over the
street of our village; then I made a holiday on shore.
Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett's
store, attentive to the yarns of uncle Parker; uncle
to the whole village, by right of seniority, but of
southern blood, with no kindred in New England.
His figure is before me now, enthroned upon a mackerel
barrel; a lean old man, of great height, but bent
with years, and twisted into an uncouth shape by
seven broken limbs; furrowed also, and weather-worn,
as if every gale, for the better part of a century,
had caught him some where on the sea. He
looked like a harbinger of tempest; a shipmate of
the Flying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages
aboard men-of-war and merchantmen, fishing schooners
master of a hand-cart, which he daily trundled about
the vicinity, and sometimes blew his fish horn through
the streets of Salem. One of uncle Parker's eyes
had been blown out with gunpowder, and the other
did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as
he spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against
the French, and battles with his own shipmates, when
he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a
sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike nail
through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes
he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden,
a greasy and goose-like fowl, which the sailors
catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks. He dwelt
with rapture on an interminable winter at the Isle of
Sables, where he had gladdened himself, amid polar
snows, with the rum and sugar saved from the wreck
of a West India schooner. And wrathfully did he
shake his fist, as he related how a party of Cape Cod
men had robbed him and his companions of their lawful
spoil, and sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica,
leaving him not a drop to drown his sorrow.
Villains they were, and of that wicked brotherhood
who are said to tie lanterns to horses' tails, to mislead
the mariner along the dangerous shores of the Cape.
Even now, I seem to see the group of fishermen,
with that old salt in the midst. One fellow sits on the
counter, a second bestrides an oil barrel, a third lolls
at his length on a parcel of new cod lines, and another
has planted the tarry seat of his trousers on a
heap of salt, which will shortly be sprinkled over a
have voyaged to the East Indies or the Pacific, and
most of them have sailed in Marblehead schooners to
Newfoundland; a few have been no farther than the
Middle Banks, and one or two have always fished along
the shore; but as uncle Parker used to say, they have
all been christened in salt water, and know more than
men ever learn in the bushes. A curious figure, by
way of contrast, is a fish-dealer from far up-country,
listening with eyes wide open, to narratives that might
startle Sinbad the sailor. Be it well with you, my
brethren! Ye are all gone, some to your graves
ashore, and others to the depths of ocean; but my
faith is strong that ye are happy; for whenever I behold
your forms, whether in dream or vision, each
departed friend is puffing his long nine, and a mug of
the right black strap goes round from lip to lip!
But where was the mermaid in those delightful
times? At a certain window near the centre of the
village, appeared a pretty display of gingerbread
men and horses, picture books and ballads, small fishhooks,
pins, needles, sugar-plums and brass thimbles,
articles on which the young fishermen used to expend
their money from pure gallantry. What a picture
was Susan behind the counter! A slender maiden,
though the child of rugged parents, she had the slimmest
of all waists, brown hair curling on her neck,
and a complexion rather pale, except when the sea
breeze flushed it. A few freckles became beauty spots
beneath her eyelids. How was it, Susan, that you
talked and acted so carelessly, yet always for the
never once doing wrong in mine, nor shocked a taste
that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And
whence had you that happiest gift, of brightening
every topic with an unsought gayety, quiet but irresistible,
so that even gloomy spirits felt your sunshine,
and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the
charm. She made you a frank, simple, kind-hearted,
sensible and mirthful girl. Obeying nature, you did
free things without indelicacy, displayed a maiden's
thoughts to every eye, and proved yourself as innocent
as naked Eve.
It was beautiful to observe, how her simple and
happy nature mingled itself with mine. She kindled
a domestic fire within my heart, and took up her
dwelling there, even in that chill and lonesome cavern,
hung round with glittering icicles of fancy. She
gave me warmth of feeling, while the influence of
my mind made her contemplative. I taught her to
love the moonlight hour, when the expanse of the encircled
bay was smooth as a great mirror and slept in
a transparent shadow; while beyond Nahant, the
wind rippled the dim ocean into a dreamy brightness,
which grew faint afar off, without becoming gloomier.
I held her hand and pointed to the long surf-wave, as
it rolled calmly on the beach, in an unbroken line of
silver; we were silent together, till its deep and
peaceful murmur had swept by us. When the Sabbath
sun shone down into the recesses of the cliffs, I
led the mermaid thither, and told her that those huge,
gray, shattered rocks, and her native sea, that raged
beauty, in so stern a scene, were all combined
into a strain of poetry. But on the Sabbath eve,
when her mother had gone early to bed, and her
gentle sister had smiled and left us, as we sat alone
by the quiet hearth, with household things around, it
was her turn to make me feel, that here was a
deeper poetry, and that this was the dearest hour of
all. Thus went on our wooing, till I had shot wild
fowl enough to feather our bridal bed, and the Daughter
of the Sea was mine.
I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made
a gateway in the form of a Gothic arch, by setting up
a whale's jaw bones. We bought a heifer with her
first calf, and had a little garden on the hill side, to
supply us with potatoes and green sauce for our fish.
Our parlor, small and neat, was ornamented with our
two profiles in one gilt frame, and with shells and
pretty pebbles on the mantelpiece, selected from the
sea's treasury of such things, on Nahant Beach. On
the desk, beneath the looking-glass, lay the Bible,
which I had begun to read aloud at the book of Genesis,
and the singing book that Susan used for her
evening psalm. Except the almanac, we had no
other literature. All that I heard of books, was
when an Indian history, or tale of shipwreck, was
sold by a pedler or wandering subscription man, to
some one in the village, and read through its owner's
nose to a slumbrous auditory. Like my brother fishermen,
I grew into the belief that all human erudition
was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles
house, amid a waste of sand, might have gained him
a diploma from any college in New England. In
truth I dreaded him. When our children were old
enough to claim his care, you remember, Susan, how
I frowned, though you were pleased, at this learned
man's encomiums on their proficiency. I feared to
trust them even with the alphabet; it was the key to
a fatal treasure.
But I loved to lead them by their little hands along
the beach, and point to nature in the vast and the
minute, the sky, the sea, the green earth, the pebbles
and the shells. Then did I discourse of the mighty
works and coextensive goodness of the Deity, with
the simple wisdom of a man whose mind had profited
by lonely days upon the deep, and his heart by the
strong and pure affections of his evening home.
Sometimes my voice lost itself in a tremulous depth;
for I felt His eye upon me as I spoke. Once, while
my wife and all of us were gazing at ourselves, in
the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand, I
pointed to the pictured Heaven below, and bade her
observe how religion was strewn every where in our
path; since even a casual pool of water recalled the
idea of that home whither we were travelling, to rest
for ever with our children. Suddenly, your image,
Susan, and all the little faces made up of yours and
mine, seemed to fade away and vanish around me,
leaving a pale visage like my own of former days
within the frame of a large looking-glass. Strange
illusion!
My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle
with the present and absorb the future, till the whole
lies before me at a glance. My manhood has long
been waning with a stanch decay; my earlier contemporaries,
after lives of unbroken health, are all at
rest, without having known the weariness of later age;
and now with a wrinkled forehead and thin white hair
as badges of my dignity, I have become the patriarch,
the Uncle of the village. I love that name; it widens
the circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful
to my household, in the kindred of affection.
Like uncle Parker, whose rheumatic bones were
dashed against Egg Rock, full forty years ago, I am
a spinner of long yarns. Seated on the gunnel of a
dory, or on the sunny side of a boat house, where
the warmth is grateful to my limbs, or by my own
hearth, when a friend or two are there, I overflow
with talk, and yet am never tedious. With a
broken voice I give utterance to much wisdom.
Such, heaven be praised! is the vigor of my faculties,
that many a forgotten usage, and traditions ancient
in my youth, and early adventures of myself
or others, hitherto effaced by things more recent,
acquire new distinctness in my memory. I remember
the happy days when the haddock were more
numerous on all the fishing grounds than sculpins in
the surf; when the deep water cod swam close in
shore, and the dog-fish, with his poisonous horn, had
not learnt to take the hook. I can number every
equinoctial storm, in which the sea has overwhelmed
the street, flooded the cellars of the village, and
of the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach,
and whose jaws, being now my gate way, will last
for ages after my coffin shall have passed beneath
them. Thence it is an easy digression to the halibut,
scarcely smaller than the whale, which ran out six
codlines, and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston
harbor, before I could touch him with the gaff.
If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation,
I tell how a friend of mine was taken out of his
boat by an enormous shark; and the sad, true tale
of a young man on the eve of marriage, who had
been nine days missing, when his drowned body
floated into the very pathway, on Marblehead neck,
that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride;
as if the dripping corpse would have come where the
mourner was. With such awful fidelity did that
lover return to fulfil his vows! Another favorite
story is of a crazy maiden, who conversed with angels
and had the gift of prophecy, and whom all the
village loved and pitied, though she went from door
to door accusing us of sin, exhorting to repentance,
and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake.
If the young men boast their knowledge of
the ledges and sunken rocks, I speak of pilots who
knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its taste,
and could have steered blindfold to any port between
Boston and Mount Desert, guided only by the rote of
the shore; the peculiar sound of the surf on each
island, beach, and line of rocks, along the coast.
Thus do I talk, and all my auditors grow wise, while
they deem it pastime.
I recollect no happier portion of my life, than this,
my calm old age. It is like the sunny and sheltered
slope of a valley, where, lute in the autumn, the grass
is greener than in August, and intermixed with golden
dandelions, that had not been seen till now, since the
first warmth of the year. But with me, the verdure
and the flowers are not frost-bitten in the midst of
winter. A playfulness has revisited my mind; a
sympathy with the young and gay; an unpainful
interest in the business of others; a light and wandering
curiosity; arising, perhaps, from the sense
that my toil on earth is ended, and the brief hour till
bedtime may be spent in play. Still, I have fancied
that there is a depth of feeling and reflection, under
this superficial levity, peculiar to one who has lived
long, and is soon to die.
Show me any thing that would make an infant
smile, and you shall behold a gleam of mirth over
the hoary ruin of my visage. I can spend a pleasant
hour in the sun, watching the sports of the village
children, on the edge of the surf; now they chase
the retreating wave far down over the wet sand;
now it steals softly up to kiss their naked feet; now
it comes onward with threatening front, and roars
after the laughing crew, as they scamper beyond its
reach. Why should not an old man be merry too,
when the great sea is at play with those little children?
I delight, also, to follow in the wake of a
pleasure party of young men and girls, strolling
along the beach after an early supper at the Point.
Here, with handkerchiefs at nose, they bend over a
so oddly accoutred with two legs and a long tail, that
they mistake him for a drowned animal. A few
steps further, the ladies scream, and the gentlemen
make ready to protect them against a young shark of
the dog-fish kind, rolling with a lifelike motion in the
tide that has thrown him up. Next, they are smit
with wonder at the black shells of a wagon load of
live lobsters, packed in rock weed for the country
market. And when they reach the fleet of dories,
just hauled ashore after the day's fishing, how do I
laugh in my sleeve, and sometimes roar outright, at
the simplicity of these young folks and the sly humor
of the fishermen! In winter, when our village is
thrown into a bustle by the arrival of perhaps a score
of country dealers, bargaining for frozen fish, to be
transported hundreds of miles, and eaten fresh in
Vermont or Canada, I am a pleased but idle spectator
in the throng. For I launch my boat no more.
When the shore was solitary, I have found a pleasure
that seemed even to exalt my mind, in observing
the sports or contentions of two gulls, as they wheeled
and hovered about each other, with hoarse screams,
one moment flapping on the foam of the wave, and
then soaring aloft, till their white bosoms melted into
the upper sunshine. In the calm of the summer sunset,
I drag my aged limbs, with a little ostentation of
activity, because I am so old, up to the rocky brow
of the hill. There I see the white sails of many a
vessel, outward bound or homeward from afar, and
the black trail of a vapor behind the eastern steamboat;
gloom, and there the illimitable ocean mingling with
the sky, to remind me of Eternity.
But sweetest of all is the hour of cheerful musing
and pleasant talk, that comes between the dusk and
the lighted candle, by my glowing fireside. And
never, even on the first Thanksgiving night, when
Susan and I sat alone with our hopes, nor the second,
when a stranger had been sent to gladden us, and be
the visible image of our affection, did I feel such joy
as now. All that belong to me are here; Death has
taken none, nor Disease kept them away, nor Strife
divided them from their parents or each other; with
neither poverty nor riches to disturb them, nor the
misery of desires beyond their lot, they have kept
New England's festival round the patriarch's board.
For I am a patriarch! Here I sit among my descendants,
in my old arm chair and immemorial corner,
while the firelight throws an appropriate glory
round my venerable frame. Susan! My children!
Something whispers me, that this happiest hour must
be the final one, and that nothing remains but to
bless you all, and depart with a treasure of recollected
joys to Heaven. Will you meet me there? Alas!
your figures grow indistinct, fading into pictures on
the air, and now to fainter outlines, while the fire is
glimmering on the walls of a familiar room, and
shows the book that I flung down, and the sheet that
I left half written, some fifty years ago. I lift my
eyes to the looking-glass, and perceive myself alone,
unless those be the mermaid's features, retiring into
smile.
Ah! One feels a chillness, not bodily, but about
the heart, and, moreover a foolish dread of looking
behind him, after these pastimes. I can imagine precisely
how a magician would sit down in gloom and
terror, after dismissing the shadows that had personated
dead or distant people, and stripping his cavern
of the unreal splendor which had changed it to a
palace. And now for a moral to my reverie. Shall
it be, that, since fancy can create so bright a dream
of happiness, it were better to dream on from youth
to age, than to awake and strive doubtfully for something
real! Oh! the slight tissue of a dream can no
more preserve us from the stern reality of misfortune,
than a robe of cobweb could repel the wintry blast.
Be this the moral, then. In chaste and warm affections,
humble wishes, and honest toil for some useful
end, there is health for the mind, and quiet for the
heart, the prospect of a happy life, and the fairest
hope of Heaven.
| Twice-told tales | |