University of Virginia Library

33. CHAPTER XXXIII.

The plantation had passed through a long convulsion; the
crisis had arrived and passed; a healthy calm succeeded.
No rumors of witchcraft filled the neighborhood with blasting
slanders and deadly suspicions.

After the General Court and the people of the colony
had become thoroughly aware that Mr. Pynchon had
virtually been banished from the country, they began to
realize that there had been a great wrong done. They
began to feel that the settlement of Springfield had good
cause for dissatisfaction; and a reaction took place which
delighted in an opportunity to show honor to the family of
the prescribed bookmaker. John Pynchon, Elizur Holyoke,
and Samuel Chapin, in the order in which their names are
here recited, were appointed a board of magistracy, with a
commission precisely like the one granted the previous year
to Henry Smith. This commission was held by renewal for
many years, and acting under it, these three men became
an important and most respectable legal tribunal—the first
in the western part of the colony which assumed the dignity
of a court.

Its inauguration was the opening of a new volume of
life and affairs to the plantation, and properly belongs to
another drama. John Pynchon, its head, became the
foremost man in the Connecticut valley. There is hardly a
deed of land from the Indians, in the Connecticut valley,
in which his name is not mentioned. He was the leader
in trade as well as in public and military affairs. His
excellent wife, who was the daughter of Gov. Willis of

Hartford, bore him a large family of children; and, full
of years and honors, and known everywhere as the “Worshipful
Major Pynchon,” he lived to see the dawn of the
eighteenth century, when he fell asleep. He lived to see
the banks of the Connecticut settled throughout the width
of the Massachusetts patent, to pass through the terrible
scenes of King Philip's War, and suffer more than any
other man by its reverses, and to become assured of the
expansion of the colonial germs, planted here and there, into
a mighty empire.

Holyoke was honored during a long life with the confidence
of the town and the colonial government. He
was blessed with brave and beautiful children, worthy alike
of him and the noble and beautiful mother who bore them.

Deacon Samuel Chapin lived a long and useful life. He
was a diligent, persevering, reliable man—a faithful public
servant, and an invaluable man in the church. He was
blessed with a large family of children, and they were all
boys; and they had large families of children who were all
boys, who, in turn, had large families of boys. The consequence
was that Springfield became filled with good
people bearing that name, and the name was spread all
over New England, so that, at this day, there are many
thousands who bear the blood and the name of Deacon
Samuel Chapin.

On the departure of Mr. Moxon, the town was deprived
of the ordinances of religion, but there was a general
determination that no minister should be called until one
could be fixed upon who would fill the place honorably for
God and himself, and profitably for the people. At length,
their many prayers for a man who should be after God's
own heart were answered, and their long and patient efforts
crowned with success. The Reverend Pelatiah Glover
of Dorchester came among them, a young man, crowned
with the graces of his blessed Master, and walking in the

light of God's countenance. He went in and out before
them, and broke to them the bread of life for thirty years,
and then, in the precious words of a record that dared to
speak in Christian language, the Reverend Pelatiah Glover
“fell asleep in Jesus.” He made his office honorable, and
rescued its fame from the terrible delusions with which his
superstitious predecessor had associated it.

The Bay Path became better marked, from year to year,
as settlements began to string themselves upon it, as upon a
thread. Every year the footsteps of those who trod it
hurried more and more, until, at last, wheels began to
be heard upon it—heavy carts, creaking with merchandise.
Spots of the forest which it divided were cleared, and
as the settlements upon the Connecticut were multiplied—
as the white men gathered in plantations at Woronoco,
Nonotuck, Pocomtuck, and Squakeag—they went more
rapidly and more frequently to the Bay.

A century passed away, and the wilderness had retired.
There was a constant roll along the Bay Path. It had
grown and was still growing into a great thoroughfare.
The finest of the wheat and the fattest of the flocks and
herds were transported to the Bay, whose young commerce
had already begun to whiten the coast, and to stretch off
upon broader enterprises in competition with the staunch
old bottoms of the mother land; and whose commodities
came rumbling back in prosperous exchange.

The dreamy years passed by, and then came the furious
stage coach, travelling night and day—splashing the mud,
brushing up the dust, dashing up to inns, and curving more
slowly up to post-offices. The journey was reduced to a
day. And then—miracle of miracles—came the railway
and the locomotive. The journey of a day is reduced
to three hours. Where the traveller toiled over swamps
and through thickets, and slept under the canopy of the
trees, disturbed all night by the howls of savage beasts, the

train flashes and thunders by, bearing a thousand happy
hearts, travelling for pastime, or bound upon errands of
business or friendship.

How fared Peter Trimble amid the changes of the succeeding
years? In the first place, his pimples disappeared.
Nobody knew where they went. It was only known that
they had been, and were not. As the sun of his married
life arose, they vanished and very probably exhaled. At
any rate, they went away never to return; and Peter
became a long, lank, feeble man, more or less given in his
later years to rheumatism, which he attributed to getting
up so much nights to look after the children. The Tomson
children he found of vast service to him, when he came to
have a family of his own, for he, like his deceased predecessor,
was abundantly blessed with offspring; and he did not
regret on the whole, that he had not been able to get rid
of them. Labor upon the farm became at last too severe
for him, and he took to cooperating, doing the most of his work
in the house, and thus assisting Esther in taking care of the
family, occasionally drowning their noise with his adze, and
always furnishing them with shavings to play with. He
preserved until his dying day his superiority as a cutter of
hair and a sharpener of razors, and in the latter part of his
life, consented to receive a small fee for his services in those
fields of effort.

And the widow Tomson made him an excellent wife, and
was quite equal in every respect to his deserts. She might
have been more elegant and refined, keener of intellect and
more profound and thorough in culture, but she would have
been but little more highly appreciated by him in consequence,
and could not have changed her relations to him,
in the matter of sensitiveness and intelligence, without a
great loss of personal comfort, and the necessity of obtaining
and losing a modicum of self-respect. That the pair were
very poor need not be written; but if, after their frugal

supper at night, the reader could have seen Peter making
rabbits on the wall in a kind of animated fresco for the
amusement of the children, or giving the youngest one an
imaginary ride to Boston on his foot, cantering feebly away
in the stimulus of Esther's voice, he would not have thought
them unhappy. But Peter spent a good deal of his time
away from home, and he enjoyed it, and made it profitable
in snaring partridges, and catching beaver, and hooking
various fish, and gathering sundry medicinal herbs. Esther
did not complain.

Hugh Parsons carried with him a lifelong sorrow and a
lifelong humiliation. Mild and inoffensive, he was beloved
and treated by the majority of those who knew him with
such attentions as only the unfortunate receive—some of
them so kind that they started the tears in his eyes, and all
of them so marked that they could not but remind him that
others remembered as well as he.

But there is one character—the most lovely that has
found its place in the narrative—which still remains to give
the reader a parting smile, and yet she parted from the
others early. The stone, if the reader have patience, shall
tell her beautiful story.

On the banks of the Connecticut, close down where the
bending turf hangs its ear over the rippling wavelets that
kiss the beach, and murmur and whisper to it night and
day, the first grave in the plantation of Agawam was made.
There swelled the first mound over a white man's breast,
and there, one by one, as the years rolled away, rose other
mounds. The rank grass waved over them, the night-straying
cow stumbled among them, and unseemly shrubs
sprouted between them, and, at long intervals, were cut
away. There, one after another, those whose life has informed
these pages were gathered, and there the brown
sandstone, roughly finished, and quaintly carved, and clumsily
inscribed, was placed above their heads. Years and

scores of years flew by, the heaps multiplying on every
hand, from period to period, till the yard seemed full, yet
it ever took in more. There they lay when the wintry
blast was driving, and when the summer sun was shining;
when the trees were shedding the purple of autumn, and
assuming the green of spring; when the ice, a lid of crystal,
lay over the waters of the river, and when those waters
laughed in the breeze and the sunlight, or swayed and
staggered with the weight of the stars upon their bosom.
There they lay—the silent settlement of Agawam. Some
fell by the red man's arm, and were borne thither in fear,
and buried in the presence of faithful muskets and threats
of vengeance. Some were borne there in old age—an old
age that died in fear after a life of fear. Among these slept
the maiden with the bloom upon her cheek and life's discipline
all untried, and the sweet infant of days, and the
mother parted prematurely from the children of her love,
and the man just risen to manhood.

Year after year the frost came down and heaved the
ground—now this way, now that—till the mounds settled
down to the level around them, and the stones sank down
into the mould, or leaned in indiscriminate and inharmonious
angles, or fell prone along the graves, face to face with
the skeletons whose name they bore. It was a rude spot—
sacred, oh, very sacred—but dressed in few of the charms that
the sensitive Christian mind loves to gather around the
place where its silent friends lie, and where it expects to lay
down its own frail tenement. So, in the later times, when
the steamboat came thundering up against the bank where
the sleepers reposed, and the Bay Path had been mounted
with tracks of iron, and the long trains flew over it, another
field was chosen—a field laid out by God's own hand as a
sleeping-place for his children. A tinkling brook dragged
its silver chain over the pebbles through the midst of it,
and old gnarled oaks with scanty foliage spread their arms

and nodded upon its hill-sides, and maples rose on every
hand, so darkly and freshly green in summer, and so richly
draped in gold and purple in autumn, that they betrayed the
crystal springs which gushed at their roots, and laughed
and played like children among the alders.

Into this new field came a swarm of living forms, and
ratified by Christian rites Nature's recognised act of consecration.
And then commenced the work of reformation
and culture. The brook was led down from the spring
where it was born, like a pet lamb, with a bell upon its
neck—made to leap precipices and practise dainty antics at
their feet, to steal silently along under the grass for a score
of rods, and then dash into the sunshine, then to stumble
down graduated steps, to find its feet at the last, and bound
merrily away out of sight and hearing. From the foot of
the oak was thrown out a terrace, and on the terrace rose
a shaft of marble. And the springs which gushed from
among the roots of the maples, and had spent their lives
playing among the alder bushes, were taught a new path to
the valley, and there sprang like living trees, swaying and
dissolving, sighing and whispering, in the midst of their
crystal basins. The rough face of the earth was smoothed,
picturesque little nooks that had caught the leaves for centuries
were cleaned out, the hills were rounded off, and
paths were made to wind into every sinuosity of the renewed
landscape.

To this beautiful spot were then borne the dead. On
every hill, in every silent nook, on every jutting promontory,
rose the sandstone and the marble. There was laid the
pastor, among the fathers and mothers and lambs of his
flock. It became the resting-place of the people—so beautiful
that the living never tired of wandering through it
and lingering in it, and so sweet with its music of brooks
and trees and fountains, and the sight and smell of flowers,
that death became more amiable in the association. In the

long Sabbath afternoons of summer, many a lonely wanderer
sat under the trees, and dreamed away the peaceful hours;
and groups with chastened hearts and springing tears assembled
around their cherished inclosures, to think and talk
of the departed ones at eventide.

At last, there arose the need of another iron path to the
settlement. Like the original Bay Path, that which at first
connected Agawam with the Connecticut settlements was a
bridle path. Then, as on the Bay Path, descended the era
of enlargement and improvement. The baggage wagon,
the stage coach, and all the old conveniences for travel
and transportation came in their time, and, by their side,
the sail boat and the steamer. But the age demanded
something more, and the engineer, as he adjusted his levels,
struck gravestones in his glance, and the surveyor's chain
was dragged across the old inclosure where the fathers
were sleeping, and where they had lain down without a
dream of rising until the resurrection. The decree of commerce
was issued, and it was arranged that the accumulated
dead of two centuries should be removed to the new
cemetery. The spade was dipped deeply down through the
mould and sand at one side of the field, and every pound
of earth, spadeful by spadeful, was scrutinized for such
frail memorials of those who had been buried there as remained
undissolved. Each bit of plank, each ghastly skull,
each remnant of a bone was treasured in coffers prepared
for it, and wherever a stone marked a deposit, both were
removed together, and preserved from dissociation. At
last, the work was completed, and the sacred old spot surrendered
to the engineer.

There, on the summit of the hill, overlooking the valley
and the western range of mountains, rests the fallen generation.
The old stones, with inscriptions very imperfectly
traceable, invite the attention of the curious passer-by, and
there he will read, if he can make out the half obliterated

letters, the names of many who have become familiar to
him in these pages. Among the old stones, he will find one
which seems to have bidden defiance to time, and to have
escaped the mossy and crumbling decadence of its fellows.
It has marked a precious resting-place for nearly two hundred
years, and these are the words which it bears, as
clearly cut and as fairly engraven as if they were traced by
the chisel within a twelvemonth.