University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.

Dana.

We leave the imagination of the reader to supply
an interval of several years. Before the thread
of the narrative shall be resumed, it will be necessary
to take another hasty view of the condition of
the country in which the scene of our legend had
place.

The exertions of the provincials were no longer
limited to the first efforts of a colonial existence.
The establishments of New-England had passed the
ordeal of experiment, and were become permanent.
Massachusetts was already populous; and Connecticut,

the colony with which we have more immediate
connexion, was sufficiently peopled to manifest
a portion of that enterprise which has since made
her active little community so remarkable. The
effects of these increased exertions were becoming
extensively visible; and we shall endeavor to set one
of these changes, as distinctly as our feeble powers
will allow, before the eyes of those who read these
pages.

When compared with the progress of society in
the other hemisphere, the condition of what is called,
in America, a new settlement, becomes anomalous.
There, the arts of life have been the fruits
of an intelligence that has progressively accumulated
with the advancement of civilization; while
here, improvement is, in a great degree, the consequence
of experience elsewhere acquired. Necessity,
prompted by an understanding of its wants,
incited by a commendable spirit of emulation, and
encouraged by liberty, early gave birth to those
improvements which have converted a wilderness
into the abodes of abundance and security, with a
rapidity that wears the appearance of magic. Industry
has wrought with the confidence of knowledge,
and the result has been peculiar.

It is scarcely necessary to say that, in a country
where the laws favor all commendable enterprise,
where unnecessary artificial restrictions are unknown,
and where the hand of man has not yet
exhausted its efforts, the adventurer is allowed the
greatest freedom of choice, in selecting the field of
his enterprise. The agriculturist passes the heath
and the barren, to seat himself on the river-bottom;
the trader looks for the site of demand and supply,
and the artisan quits his native village to seek employment
in situations where labor will meet its
fullest reward. It is a consequence of this extraordinary
freedom of election, that, while the great

picture of American society has been sketched with
so much boldness, a large portion of the filling-up
still remains to be done. The emigrant has consulted
his immediate interests; and, while no very extensive
and profitable territory, throughout the
whole of our immense possessions, has been wholly
neglected, neither has any particular district yet
attained the finish of improvement. The city is,
even now, seen in the wilderness, and the wilderness
often continues near the city, while the latter
is sending forth its swarms to distant scenes of industry.
After thirty years of fostering care on the
part of the government, the Capital, itself, presents
its disjointed and sickly villages, in the centre of
the deserted `old-fields' of Maryland, while numberless
youthful rivals are flourishing on the waters of
the West, in spots where the bear has ranged and
the wolf howled, long since the former has been
termed a city.

Thus it is that high civilization, a state of infant
existence, and positive barbarity, are often brought
so near each other, within the borders of this republic.
The traveller, who has passed the night
in an inn that would not disgrace the oldest country
in Europe, may be compelled to dine in the shantee[1]
of a hunter; the smooth and gravelled road sometimes
ends in an impassable swamp; the spires of
the town are often hid by the branches of a tangled
forest, and the canal leads to a seemingly barren
and unprofitable mountain. He that does not return
to see what another year may bring forth, commonly

bears away from these scenes, recollections that
conduce to error. To see America with the eyes of
truth, it is necessary to look often; and in order to
understand the actual condition of these states, it
should be remembered, that it is equally unjust to
believe that all the intermediate points partake of
the improvements of particular places, as to infer
the want of civilization at more remote establishments,
from a few unfavorable facts gleaned near
the centre. By an accidental concurrence of moral
and physical causes, much of that equality which
distinguishes the institutions of the country is extended
to the progress of society over its whole
surface.

Although the impetus of improvement was not
as great in the time of Mark Heathcote as in our
own days, the principle of its power was actively in
existence. Of this fact we shall furnish a sufficient
evidence, by pursuing our intention of describing
one of those changes to which allusion has already
been made.

The reader will remember that the age of which
we write had advanced into the last quarter of the
seventeenth century. The precise moment at which
the action of the tale must re-commence, was that
period of the day when the gray of twilight was
redeeming objects from the deep darkness with
which the night draws to its close. The month was
June, and the scene such as it may be necessary to
describe with some particularity.

Had there been light, and had one been favorably
placed to enjoy a bird's-eye view of the spot, he
would have seen a broad and undulating field of
leafy forest, in which the various deciduous trees
of New-England were relieved by the deeper verdure
of occasional masses of evergreens. In the
centre of this swelling and nearly interminable outline
of woods, was a valley that spread between

three low mountains. Over the bottom-land, for the
distance of several miles, all the signs of a settlement
in a state of rapid and prosperous improvement
were visible. The devious course of a deep
and swift brook, that in the other hemisphere would
have been termed a river, was to be traced through
the meadows by its borders of willow and sumach.
At a point near the centre of the valley, the waters
had been arrested by a small dam; and a mill, whose
wheel at that early hour was without motion, stood
on the artifical mound. Near it was the site of a
New-England hamlet.

The number of dwellings in the village might
have been forty. They were, as usual, constructed
of a firm frame-work, neatly covered with sidings
of boards. There was a surprising air of equality
in the general aspect of the houses; and, if there
were question of any country but our own, it might
be added there was an unusual appearance of comfort
and abundance in even the humblest of them
all. They were mostly of two low stories, the superior
overhanging the inferior, by a foot or two;
a mode of construction much in use in the earlier
days of the Eastern Colonies. As paint was but
little used at that time, none of the buildings exhibited
a color different from that the wood would
naturally assume, after the exposure of a few years
to the weather. Each had its single chimney in the
centre of the roof, and but two or three showed
more than a solitary window on each side of the
principal or outer door. In front of every dwelling
was a small neat court, in green sward, separated
from the public road by a light fence of deal. Double
rows of young and vigorous elms lined each side of
the wide street, while an enormous sycamore still
kept possession of the spot, in its centre, which it
had occupied when the white man entered the
forest. Beneath the shade of this tree the inhabitants

often collected, to gather tidings of each other's
welfare, or to listen to some matter of interest that
rumor had borne from the towns nearer the sea.
A narrow and little-used wheel-track ran, with a
graceful and sinuous route, through the centre of
the wide and grassy street. Reduced in appearance
to little more than a bridle-path, it was to be
traced, without the hamlet, between high fences
of wood, for a mile or two, to the points where it
entered the forest. Here and there, roses were
pressing through the openings of the fences before
the doors of the different habitations, and bushes
of fragrant lilacs stood in the angles of most of the
courts.

The dwellings were detached. Each occupied
its own insulated plot of ground, with a garden in
its rear. The out-buildings were thrown to that
distance which the cheapness of land, and security
from fire, rendered both easy and expedient.

The church stood in the centre of the highway,
and near one end of the hamlet. In the exterior
and ornaments of the important temple, the taste of
the times had been fastidiously consulted, its form
and simplicity furnishing no slight resemblance to
the self-denying doctrines and quaint humors of the
religionists who worshipped beneath its roof. The
building, like all the rest, was of wood, and externally
of two stories. It possessed a tower, without
a spire; the former alone serving to betray its
sacred character. In the construction of this edifice,
especial care had been taken to eschew all deviations
from direct lines and right angles. Those narrow-arched
passages for the admission of light, that
are elsewhere so common, were then thought, by
the stern moralists of New-England, to have some
mysterious connexion with her of the scarlet mantle.
The priest would as soon have thought of appearing
before his flock in the vanities of stole and

cassock, as the congregation of admitting the repudiated
ornaments into the outline of their severe
architecture. Had the Genii of the Lamp suddenly
exchanged the windows of the sacred edifice with
those of the inn that stood nearly opposite, the
closest critic of the settlement could never have
detected the liberty, since, in the form, dimensions,
and style of the two, there was no visible difference.

A little inclosure, at no great distance from the
church, and on one side of the street, had been set
apart for the final resting-place of those who had
finished their race on earth. It contained but a solitary
grave.

The inn was to be distinguished from the surrounding
buildings, by its superior size, an open
horse-shed, and a sort of protruding air, with which
it thrust itself on the line of the street, as if to invite
the traveller to enter. A sign swung on a gallows-looking
post, that, in consequence of frosty
nights and warm days, had already deviated from
the perpendicular. It bore a conceit that, at the
first glance, might have gladdened the heart of a
naturalist, with the belief that he had made the
discovery of some unknown bird. The artist, however,
had sufficiently provided against the consequences
of so embarrassing a blunder, by considerately
writing beneath the offspring of his pencil,
“This is the sign of the Whip-Poor-Will;” a name,
that the most unlettered traveller, in those regions,
would be likely to know was vulgarly given to the
Wish-Ton-Wish, or the American night-hawk.

But few relics of the forest remained immediately
around the hamlet. The trees had long been
felled, and sufficient time had elapsed to remove
most of the vestiges of their former existence. But
as the eye receded from the cluster of buildings,
the signs of more recent inroads on the wilderness
became apparent, until the view terminated with

openings, in which piled logs and mazes of felled
trees announced the recent use of the axe.

At that early day, the American husbandman,
like the agriculturists of most of Europe, dwelt in
his village. The dread of violence from the savages
had given rise to a custom similar to that
which, centuries before, had been produced in the
other hemisphere by the inroads of more pretending
barbarians, and which, with few and distant exceptions,
had deprived rural scenery of a charm that,
it would seem, time and a better condition of society
are slow to repair. Some remains of this ancient
practice are still to be traced in the portion of the
Union of which we write, where, even at this day,
the farmer often quits the village to seek his scattered
fields in its neighborhood. Still, as man has
never been the subject of a system here, and as
each individual has always had the liberty of consulting
his own temper, bolder spirits early began
to break through a practice, by which quite as
much was lost in convenience as was gained in security.
Even in the scene we have been describing,
ten or twelve humble habitations were distributed
among the recent clearings on the sides of the
mountains, and in situations too remote to promise
much security against any sudden inroad of the
common enemy.

For general protection, in cases of the last extremity,
however, a stockaded dwelling, not unlike
that which we have had occasion to describe in our
earlier pages, stood in a convenient spot near the
hamlet. Its defences were stronger and more elaborate
than usual, the pickets being furnished with
flanking block-houses; and, in other respects, the
building bore the aspect of a work equal to any resistance
that might be required in the warfare of
those regions. The ordinary habitation of the priest
was within its gates; and hither most of the sick

were timely conveyed, in order to anticipate the
necessity of removals at more inconvenient moments.

It is scarcely necessary to tell the American, that
heavy wooden fences subdivided the whole of this
little landscape into inclosures of some eight or ten
acres in extent; that, here and there, cattle and
flocks were grazing without herdsmen or shepherds,
and that, while the fields nearest to the dwellings
were beginning to assume the appearance of a careful
and improved husbandry, those more remote became
gradually wilder and less cultivated, until the
half-reclaimed openings, with their blackened stubs
and barked trees, were blended with the gloom of
the living forest. These are, more or less, the accompaniments
of every rural scene, in districts of
the country where time has not yet effected more
than the first two stages of improvement.

At the distance of a short half-mile from the fortified
house, or garrison, as by a singular corruption
of terms the stockaded building was called, stood a
dwelling of pretensions altogether superior to any
in the hamlet. The buildings in question, though
simple, were extensive; and though scarcely other
than such as might belong to an agriculturist in
easy circumstances, still they were remarkable, in
that settlement, by the comforts which time alone
could accumulate, and some of which denoted an
advanced condition for a frontier family. In short,
there was an air about the establishment, as in the
disposition of its out-buildings, in the superior workmanship,
in the materials, and in numberless other
well-known circumstances, which went to show that
the whole of the edifices were re-constructions. The
fields near this habitation exhibited smoother surfaces
than those in the distance; the fences were
lighter and less rude; the stumps had absolutely
disappeared, and the gardens and homestead were
well planted with flourishing fruit-trees. A conical

eminence arose, at a short distance, in the rear of
the principal dwelling. It was covered with that
beautiful and peculiar ornament of an American
farm, a regular, thrifty, and luxuriant apple-orchard.
Still, age had not given its full beauty to the plantation,
which might have had a growth of some
eight or ten years. A blackened tower of stone,
which sustained the charred ruins of a superstructure
of wood, though of no great height in itself,
rose above the tallest of the trees, and stood a sufficient
memorial of some scene of violence, in the
brief history of the valley. There was also a small
block-house near the habitation; but, by the air of
neglect that reigned around, it was quite apparent
the little work had been of a hurried construction,
and of but temporary use. A few young plantations
of fruit-trees were also to be seen in different parts
of the valley, which was beginning to exhibit many
other evidences of an improved agriculture.

So far as all these artificial changes went, they
were of an English character. But it was England
devoid alike of its luxury and its poverty, and with
a superfluity of space that gave to the meanest
habitation in the view, an air of abundance and
comfort that is so often wanting about the dwellings
of the comparatively rich, in countries where man
is found bearing a far greater numerical proportion
to the soil, than was then, or is even now the case,
in the regions of which we write.