University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.
AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER.

It was a comfort to get to a place with something
like society, with residences which had pretensions
to elegance, with people of some breeding,
with a newspaper, and “stores” to advertise in it,
and with two or three churches to keep each
other alive by wholesome agitation. Rockland
was such a place.

Some of the natural features of the town have
been described already. The Mountain, of course,
was what gave it its character, and redeemed it
from wearing the commonplace expression which
belongs to ordinary country-villages. Beautiful,
wild, invested with the mystery which belongs to
untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to
give it dignity, it had yet closer relations with
the town over which it brooded than the passing
stranger knew of. Thus, it made a local climate
by cutting off the northern winds and holding the
sun's heat like a garden-wall. Peach-trees, which,
on the northern side of the mountain, hardly ever
came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in Rockland.

But there was still another relation between
the mountain and the town at its foot, which
strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and
which was oftener thought of than spoken of by
its inhabitants. Those high-impending forests, —
“hangers,” as White of Selborne would have
called them, — sloping far upward and backward
into the distance, had always an air of menace
blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as if
some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy
robe over the bare, precipitous flanks of the
rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide
like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest
chance-support, and, so sliding, crush the village
out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled
over on the valley of Goldau.

Persons have been known to remove from the
place, after a short residence in it, because they
were haunted day and night by the thought of
this awful green wall piled up into the air over
their heads. They would lie awake of nights,
thinking they heard the muffled snapping of
roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side
were tugging to break away, like the snow
from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees
were clinging with all their fibres to hold back
the soil just ready to peel away and crash down
with all its rocks and forest-growths. And yet,
by one of those strange contradictions we are
constantly finding in human nature, there were
natives of the town who would come back thirty

or forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under
this same threatening mountain-side, as old men
sun themselves against southward-facing walls.
The old dreams and legends of danger added to
the attraction. If the mountain should ever slide,
they had a kind of feeling as if they ought to be
there. It was a fascination like that which the
rattlesnake is said to exert.

This comparison naturally suggests the recollection
of that other source of danger which was
an element in the every-day life of the Rockland
people. The folks in some of the neighboring
towns had a joke against them, that a Rocklander
couldn't hear a bean-pod rattle without
saying, “The Lord have mercy on us!” It is
very true, that many a nervous old lady has had
a terrible start, caused by some mischievous
young rogue's giving a sudden shake to one of
these noisy vegetable products in her immediate
vicinity. Yet, strangely enough, many persons
missed the excitement of the possibility of a fatal
bite in other regions, where there were nothing
but black and green and striped snakes, mean
ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent
without his venom, — poor crawling creatures,
whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag.
Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably
experience a certain gratification in this infinitesimal
sense of danger. It was noted that the old
people retained their hearing longer than in other
places. Some said it was the softened climate,

but others believed it was owing to the habit of
keeping their ears open whenever they were walking
through the grass or in the woods. At any
rate, a slight sense of danger is often an agreeable
stimulus. People sip their crême de noyau
with a peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there
is a bare possibility that it may contain prussic
acid enough to knock them over; in which case
they will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had
emptied itself into the earth through their brain
and marrow.

But Rockland had other features which helped
to give it a special character. First of all, there
was one grand street which was its chief glory.
Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its
elms made a long, pointed-arched gallery of it
through most of its extent. No natural Gothic
arch compares, for a moment, with that formed
by two American elms, where their lofty jets
of foliage shoot across each other's ascending
curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of
green. When one looks through a long double
row of these, as in that lovely avenue which the
poets of Yale remember so well, —

he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer
than any minster, with all its clustered stems and
flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.

Nobody knows New England who is not on
terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The

elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other
vegetable creature among us. It loves man as
man loves it. It is modest and patient. It has
a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere
and makes arrangements for coming up
by-and-by. So, in spring, one finds a crop of
baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very
weak and small compared to those succulent
vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them,
slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe,
as meekly as Herod's innocents. One of them
gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has established
a kind of right to stay. Three generations of
carrot and parsnip-consumers have passed away,
yourself among them, and now let your great-grandson
look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two
feet of clean girth, three hundred and sixty feet
in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it covers
the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leafed
oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted
into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not
only on account of its Gothic-arched vista. In
this street were most of the great houses, or
“mansion-houses,” as it was usual to call them.
Along this street, also, the more nicely kept and
neatly painted dwellings were chiefly congregated.
It was the correct thing for a Rockland
dignitary to have a house in Elm Street.

A New England “mansion-house” is naturally
square, with dormer windows projecting from the

roof, which has a balustrade with turned posts
round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard
before its door, as its owner shows a respectable
expanse of clean shirt-front. It has a lateral
margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master
wears his white wrist-bands showing beyond
his coat-cuffs. It may not have what can properly
be called grounds, but it must have elbowroom,
at any rate. Without it, it is like a man
who is always tight-buttoned for want of any
linen to show. The mansion-house which has
had to button itself up tight in fences, for want
of green or gravel margin, will be advertising for
boarders presently. The old English pattern of
the New England mansion-house, only on a
somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas Abney's
place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers
for the family, and wrote those blessed hymns of
his that sing us into consciousness in our cradles,
and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between
the moments of wandering and of stupor,
when we lie dying, and sound over us when we
can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears
to the hot, aching eyes beneath the thick, black
veils, and carrying the holy calm with them
which filled the good man's heart, as he prayed
and sung under the shelter of the old English
mansion-house.

Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-story,
trim, white-painted, “genteel” houses, which, being
more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded

close up to the street, instead of standing back
from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses.
Their little front-yards were very commonly
full of lilac and syringa and other bushes,
which were allowed to smother the lower story
almost to the exclusion of light and air, so that,
what with small windows and small window-panes,
and the darkness made by these choking
growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some
of these houses were the most tomb-like, melancholy
places that could be found anywhere
among the abodes of the living. Their garnishing
was apt to assist this impression. Largepatterned
carpets, which always look discontented
in little rooms, hair-cloth furniture, black and
shiny as beetles' wing-cases, and centre-tables,
with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called astral
by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre, —
these things were inevitable. In set piles round
the lamp was ranged the current literature of the
day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound
numbers of one of the Unknown Public's
Magazines with worn-out steel engravings and
high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a distinguished
British author whom it is unnecessary
to mention, a volume of sermons, or a novel or
two, or both, according to the tastes of the family,
and the Good Book, which is always Itself in the
cheapest and commonest company. The father
of the family with his hand in the breast of his
coat, the mother of the same in a wide-bordered
cap, sometimes a print of the Last Supper, by no
means Morghen's, or the Father of his Country,
or the old General, or the Defender of the Constitution,
or an unknown clergyman with an open book
before him, — these were the usual ornaments
of the walls, the first two a matter of rigor, the
others according to politics and other tendencies.

This intermediate class of houses, wherever
one finds them in New England towns, are very
apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory. They
have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor
the comfort of the farm-house. They are rarely
kept at an agreeable temperature. The mansion-house
has large fireplaces and generous chimneys,
and is open to the sunshine. The farm-house
makes no pretensions, but it has a good warm
kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable
there with the rest of the family, without fear
and without reproach. These lesser country-houses
of genteel aspirations are much given to
patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get
heat without combustion. The chilly parlor and
the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the
warmest welcome. If one would make these
places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first
precept would be, — The dearest fuel, plenty of
it, and let half the heat go up the chimney. If
you can't afford this, don't try to live in a “genteel”
fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest
farm-house.

There were a good many comfortable farmhouses

scattered about Rockland. The best of
them were something of the following pattern,
which is too often superseded of late by a more
pretentious, but infinitely less pleasing kind of
rustic architecture. A little back from the road,
seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain
wooden building, two stories in front, with a long
roof sloping backwards to within a few feet of
the ground. This, like the “mansion-house,” is
copied from an old English pattern. Cottages
of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for instance,
always with the same honest, homely
look, as if their roofs acknowledged their relationship
to the soil out of which they sprung.
The walls were unpainted, but turned by the
slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet
dove- or slate-color. An old broken mill-stone at
the door, — a well-sweep pointing like a finger
to the heavens, which the shining round of water
beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping eye,
— a single large elm a little at one side, — a barn
twice as big as the house, — a cattle-yard, with
some fields, in pasture or in crops, with low stone
walls round them, — a row of beehives, — a garden-patch,
with roots, and currant-bushes, and
many-hued hollyhocks, and swollen-stemmed,
globe-headed, seedling onions, and marigolds,
and flower-de-luces, and lady's-delights, and peonies,
crowding in together, with southernwood
in the borders, and woodbine and hops and
morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,
— these were the features by which the Rockland-born
children remembered the farm-house,
when they had grown to be men. Such are the
recollections that come over poor sailor-boys
crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as
their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and
such are the flitting images that make the eyes
of old country-born merchants look dim and
dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm
with the after-dinner flush of the red wave out
of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from
the green waves of the ocean.

Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences,
facing each other, and looking like a couple of
fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the
air, — as if they would flap their roofs, the next
thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples,
and peck at each other's glass eyes with their
sharp-pointed weathercocks.

The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned
New England meeting-house. It was
a large barn with windows, fronted by a square
tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted
and raised on legs, out of which rose a
slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at
its summit. Inside, tall, square pews with flapping
seats, and a gallery running round three
sides of the building. On the fourth side the
pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board hanging

over it. Here preached the Reverend Pierrepont
Honeywood, D. D., successor, after a number
of generations, to the office and the parsonage
of the Reverend Didymus Beau, before mentioned,
but not suspected of any of his alleged
heresies. He held to the old faith of the Puritans,
and occasionally delivered a discourse which
was considered by the hard-headed theologians
of his parish to have settled the whole matter
fully and finally, so that now there was a good
logical basis laid down for the Millennium, which
might begin at once upon the platform of his
demonstrations. Yet the Reverend Dr. Honeywood
was fonder of preaching plain, practical
sermons about the duties of life, and showing his
Christianity in abundant good works among his
people. It was noticed by some few of his flock,
not without comment, that the great majority of
his texts came from the Gospels, and this more
and more as he became interested in various benevolent
enterprises which brought him into relations
with ministers and kind-hearted laymen
of other denominations. He was in fact a man
of a very warm, open, and exceedingly human
disposition, and, although bred by a clerical
father, whose motto was “Sit anima mea cum
Puritanis,” he exercised his human faculties in
the harness of his ancient faith with such freedom
that the straps of it got so loose they did
not interfere greatly with the circulation of the
warm blood through his system. Once in a
while he seemed to think it necessary to come
out with a grand doctrinal sermon, and then he
would lapse away for a while into preaching on
men's duties to each other and to society, and hit
hard, perhaps, at some of the actual vices of the
time and place, and insist with such tenderness
and eloquence on the great depth and breadth
of true Christian love and charity, that his oldest
deacon shook his head, and wished he had shown
as much interest when he was preaching, three
Sabbaths back, on Predestination, or in his discourse
against the Sabellians. But he was sound
in the faith; no doubt of that. Did he not preside
at the council held in the town of Tamarack,
on the other side of the mountain, which
expelled its clergyman for maintaining heretical
doctrines? As presiding officer, he did not vote,
of course, but there was no doubt that he was all
right; he had some of the Edwards blood in him,
and that couldn't very well let him go wrong.

The meeting-house on the other and opposite
summit was of a more modern style, considered
by many a great improvement on the old New
England model, so that it is not uncommon for a
country parish to pull down its old meeting-house,
which has been preached in for a hundred years
or so, and put up one of these more elegant edifices.
The new building was in what may be
called the florid shingle-Gothic manner. Its pinnacles
and crockets and other ornaments were,
like the body of the building, all of pine wood,

— an admirable material, as it is very soft and
easily worked, and can be painted of any color
desired. Inside, the walls were stuccoed in imitation
of stone, — first a dark-brown square, then
two light-brown squares, then another dark-brown
square, and so on, to represent the accidental differences
of shade always noticeable in the real
stones of which walls are built. To be sure, the
architect could not help getting his party-colored
squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as
those of a chess-board; but nobody can avoid
doing things in a systematic and serial way; indeed,
people who wish to plant trees in natural
clumps know very well that they cannot keep
from making regular lines and symmetrical figures,
unless by some trick or other, as that one of
throwing a peck of potatoes up into the air and
sticking in a tree wherever a potato happens to
fall. The pews of this meeting-house were the
usual oblong ones, where people sit close together
with a ledge before them to support their hymnbooks,
liable only to occasional contact with the
back of the next pew's heads or bonnets, and a
place running under the seat of that pew where
hats could be deposited, — always at the risk
of the owner, in case of injury by boots or
crickets.

In this meeting-house preached the Reverend
Chauncy Fairweather, a divine of the “Liberal”
school, as it is commonly called, bred at that famous
college which used to be thought, twenty

or thirty years ago, to have the monopoly of training
young men in the milder forms of heresy.
His ministrations were attended with decency,
but not followed with enthusiasm. “The beauty
of virtue” got to be an old story at last. “The
moral dignity of human nature” ceased to excite
a thrill of satisfaction, after some hundred repetitions.
It grew to be a dull business, this preaching
against stealing and intemperance, while he
knew very well that the thieves were prowling
round orchards and empty houses, instead of being
there to hear the sermon, and that the drunkards,
being rarely church-goers, get little good by
the statistics and eloquent appeals of the preacher.
Every now and then, however, the Reverend Mr.
Fairweather let off a polemic discourse against
his neighbor opposite, which waked his people up
a little; but it was a languid congregation, at
best, — very apt to stay away from meeting in
the afternoon, and not at all given to extra evening
services. The minister, unlike his rival of
the other side of the way, was a down-hearted
and timid kind of man. He went on preaching
as he had been taught to preach, but he had misgivings
at times. There was a little Roman
Catholic church at the foot of the hill where his
own was placed, which he always had to pass on
Sundays. He could never look on the thronging
multitudes that crowded its pews and aisles or
knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing
to get in among them and go down on his knees
and enjoy that luxury of devotional contact which
makes a worshipping throng as different from the
same numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is
from a trail of scattered cinders.

“Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor
laborers and working-women!” he would say to
himself. “If I could but breathe that atmosphere,
stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient
litanies, and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed
incense, for one hour, instead of droning over
these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!”
The intellectual isolation of his sect
preyed upon him; for, of all terrible things to
natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to
a minority. No person that looked at his thin
and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye, his
tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who
heard his querulous, though not unmusical voice,
could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one,
that he was engaged in some inward conflict.
His dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his
seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more
striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing
a belief which made him a passenger on
board a shipwrecked planet, was yet a most good-humored
and companionable gentleman, whose
laugh on week-days did one as much good to
listen to as the best sermon he ever delivered on
a Sunday.

A mile or two from the centre of Rockland was
a pretty little Episcopal church, with a roof like a

wedge of cheese, a square tower, a stained window,
and a trained rector, who read the service
with such ventral depth of utterance and rrreduplication
of the rrresonant letter, that his own
mother would not have known him for her son,
if the good woman had not ironed his surplice
and put it on with her own hands.

There were two public-houses in the place:
one dignified with the name of the Mountain
House, somewhat frequented by city-people in
the summer months, large-fronted, three-storied,
balconied, boasting a distinct ladies'-drawing-room,
and spreading a table d'hôte of some pretensions;
the other, “Pollard's Tahvern,” in the
common speech, — a two-story building, with a
bar-room, once famous, where there was a great
smell of hay and boots and pipes and all other
bucolic-flavored elements, — where games of
checkers were played on the back of the bellows
with red and white kernels of corn, or with
beans and coffee, — where a man slept in a box-settle
at night, to wake up early passengers, —
where teamsters came in, with wooden-handled
whips and coarse frocks, reinforcing the bucolic
flavor of the atmosphere, and middle-aged male
gossips, sometimes including the squire of the
neighboring law-office, gathered to exchange a
question or two about the news, and then fall
into that solemn state of suspended animation
which the temperance bar-rooms of modern days
produce in human beings, as the Grotta del Cane

does in dogs in the well-known experiments related
by travellers. This bar-room used to be
famous for drinking and story-telling, and sometimes
fighting, in old times. That was when
there were rows of decanters on the shelf behind
the bar, and a hissing vessel of hot water ready,
to make punch, and three or four loggerheads
(long irons clubbed at the end) were always lying
in the fire in the cold season, waiting to be
plunged into sputtering and foaming mugs of
flip, — a goodly compound, speaking according
to the flesh, made with beer and sugar, and a
certain suspicion of strong waters, over which a
little nutmeg being grated, and in it the hot iron
being then allowed to sizzle, there results a peculiar
singed aroma, which the wise regard as a
warning to remove themselves at once out of the
reach of temptation.

But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer
presented its old attractions, and the loggerheads
had long disappeared from the fire. In place of
the decanters, were boxes containing “lozengers,”
as they were commonly called, sticks of candy in
jars, cigars in tumblers, a few lemons, grown
hard-skinned and marvellously shrunken by long
exposure, but still feebly suggestive of possible
lemonade, — the whole ornamented by festoons
of yellow and blue cut fly-paper. On the front
shelf of the bar stood a large German-silver
pitcher of water, and scattered about were ill-conditioned
lamps, with wicks that always wanted

picking, which burned red and smoked a good
deal, and were apt to go out without any obvious
cause, leaving strong reminiscences of the whale-fishery
in the circumambient air.

The common school-houses of Rockland were
dwarfed by the grandeur of the Apollinean Institute.
The master passed one of them, in a walk
he was taking, soon after his arrival at Rockland.
He looked in at the rows of desks, and recalled
his late experiences. He could not help laughing,
as he thought how neatly he had knocked the
young butcher off his pins.

as well as a little `learning,'” he said to himself;
“only it 's dangerous to the fellow you try it on.”
And he cut him a good stick, and began climbing
the side of The Mountain to get a look at that
famous Rattlesnake Ledge.