 | CHAPTER I.
OLDTOWN AND THE MINISTER. Oldtown folks |  |
1. CHAPTER I.
OLDTOWN AND THE MINISTER.
IT has always been a favorite idea of mine, that there is so much
of the human in every man, that the life of any one individual,
however obscure, if really and vividly perceived in all its aspirations,
struggles, failures, and successes, would command the
interest of all others. This is my only apology for offering my
life as an open page to the reading of the public.
Besides this, however, every individual is part and parcel of a
great picture of the society in which he lives and acts, and his life
cannot be painted without reproducing the picture of the world
he lived in; and it has appeared to me that my life might recall
the image and body of a period in New England most peculiar
and most interesting, the impress of which is now rapidly fading
away. I mean the ante-railroad times, — the period when our
own hard, rocky, sterile New England was a sort of half Hebrew
theocracy, half ultra-democratic republic of little villages, separated
by a pathless ocean from all the civilization and refinement
of the Old World, forgotten and unnoticed, and yet burning like
live coals under this obscurity with all the fervid activity of an
intense, newly kindled, peculiar, and individual life.
My early life lies in one of these quiet little villages, — that of
Oldtown, in Massachusetts. It was as pretty a village as ever
laid itself down to rest on the banks of a tranquil river. The
stream was one of those limpid children of the mountains, whose
brown, clear waters ripple with a soft yellow light over many-colored
pebbles, now brawling and babbling on rocky bottoms,
over green mossed rocks, and then again sweeping silently, with
many a winding curve, through soft green meadows, nursing on
its bosom troops of water-lilies, and bordering its banks with
blue and white violets, snow-flaked meadow-sweet, and wild iris.
Hither and thither, in the fertile tracts of meadow or upland
through which this little stream wound, were some two dozen
farm-houses, hid in green hollows, or perched on breezy hill-tops;
while close alongside of the river, at its widest and deepest part,
ran one rustic street, thickly carpeted with short velvet green
grass, where stood the presiding buildings of the village.
First among these was the motherly meeting-house, with its
tall white spire, its ample court of sheds and stalls for the shelter
of the horses and the various farm-wagons which came in to Sunday
services. There was also the school-house, the Academy, and
Israel Scran's store, where everything was sold, from hoe-handles
up to cambric needles, where the post-office was kept, and
where was a general exchange of news, as the different farm-wagons
stood hitched around the door, and their owners spent a
leisure moment in discussing politics or theology from the top of
codfish or mackerel barrels, while their wives and daughters were
shopping among the dress goods and ribbons, on the other side
of the store. Next to the store was the tavern, — with a tall signpost
which used to creak and flap in the summer winds, with a
leisurely, rich, easy sort of note of invitation, — a broad veranda
in front, with benches, — an open tap-room, where great barrels
of beer were kept on draft, and a bar where the various articles
proscribed by the temperance society were in those days allowed
an open and respectable standing. This tavern veranda and tap-room
was another general exchange, not in those days held in the
ill repute of such resorts now. The minister himself, in all the
magnificence of his cocked hat and ample clerical wig, with his
gold-headed cane in his hand, would sometimes step into the tap-room
of a cold winter morning, and order a mug of flip from obsequious
Amaziah the host, and, while he sipped it, would lecture
with a severe gravity a few idle, ragged fellows who were spending
too much time in those seductive precincts. The clergy in
warm a fervor as between the comfortable sips of a beverage of
whose temperate use they intended to be shining examples. The
most vivid image of respectability and majesty which a little boy
born in a Massachusetts village in those early days could form
was the minister. In the little theocracy which the Pilgrims
established in the wilderness, the ministry was the only order of
nobility. They were the only privileged class, and their voice
it was that decided ex cathedra on all questions both in Church
and State, from the choice of a Governor to that of the district-school
teacher.
Our minister, as I remember him, was one of the cleanest,
most gentlemanly, most well bred of men, — never appearing
without all the decorums of silk stockings, shining knee and shoe
buckles, well-brushed shoes, immaculately powdered wig, out of
which shone his clear, calm, serious face, like the moon out of a
fleecy cloud.
Oldtown was originally an Indian town, and one of the most
numerous and powerful of the Indian tribes had possessed the
beautiful tracts of meadow and upland farms that bordered the
Sepaug River. Here the great apostle of the Indians had established
the first missionary enterprise among them, under the
patronage of a society in England for the propagation of the Gospel
in foreign parts; here he had labored and taught and prayed
with a fervor which bowed all hearts to his sway, and gathered
from the sons of the forest a church of devoted Christians. The
harsh guttural Indian language, in the fervent alembic of his loving
study, was melted into a written dialect; a Bible and hymnbook
and spelling-book seemed to open a path to an Indian literature.
He taught them agriculture, and many of the arts and
trades of civilized life. But he could not avert the doom which
seems to foreordain that those races shall dry up and pass away
with their native forests, as the brook dries up when the pines
and hemlocks which shaded its source are torn away.
In my boyhood, three generations had passed since the apostle
died. The elms which two grateful Indian catechumens had set
out as little saplings on either side of his gateway were now
boughs, and giving a grand air of scholarly retirement to the
plain, old-fashioned parsonage; but the powerful Indian tribe
had dwindled to a few scattered families, living an uncertain and
wandering life on the outskirts of the thrift and civilization of
the whites.
Our minister was one of those cold, clear-cut, polished crystals
that are formed in the cooling-down of society, after it has
been melted and purified by a great enthusiasm. Nobody can
read Dr. Cotton Mather's biography of the first ministers of
Massachusetts, without feeling that they were men whose whole
souls were in a state of fusion, by their conceptions of an endless
life; that the ruling forces which impelled them were the sublimities
of a world to come; and that, if there be such a thing possible
as perfect faith in the eternal and invisible, and perfect loyalty
to God and to conscience, these men were pervaded by it.
More than this, many of them were men of a softened and tender
spirit, bowed by past afflictions, who had passed through the
refining fires of martyrdom, and come to this country, counting
not home or kindred dear to them, that they might found a commonwealth
for the beloved name and honor of One who died for
them. Christo et Ecclesiæ, was the seal with which they consecrated
all their life-work, from the founding of Harvard College
down to the district school in every village. These men
lived in the full spirit of him who said, “I am crucified with
Christ, nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me”;
and the power of this invisible and mighty love shed a softening
charm over the austere grandeur of their lives. They formed a
commonwealth where vice was wellnigh impossible; where such
landmarks and boundaries and buttresses and breastworks hedged
in and defended the morality of a community, that to go very far
out of the way would require some considerable ingenuity and
enterprise.
The young men grew up grave and decorous through the nursing
of church, catechism, and college, all acting in one line; and
in due time many studious and quiet youths stepped, in regular
succession, from the college to the theological course, and thence
the articles of faith as taught in their catechism without
dispute, and took their places calmly and without opposition to
assist in carrying on a society where everything had been arranged
to go under their direction, and they were the recognized
and appointed leaders and governors.
The Rev. Mr. Lothrop had come of good ministerial blood
for generations back. His destination had always been for the
pulpit. He was possessed of one of those calm, quiet, sedate
natures, to whom the temptations of turbulent nerves or vehement
passions are things utterly incomprehensible.
Now, however stringent and pronounced may be the forms in
which one's traditional faith may have been expressed, it is certain
that temperament gradually, and with irresistible power,
modifies one's creed. Those features of a man's professed belief
which are unsympathetic with his nature become to his mind involved
in a perpetual haze and cloud of disuse; while certain
others, which are congenial, become vivid and pronounced; and
thus, practically, the whole faith of the man changes without his
ever being aware of the fact himself.
Parson Lothrop belonged to a numerous class in the third generation
of Massachusetts clergy, commonly called Arminian, —
men in whom this insensible change had been wrought from the
sharply defined and pronounced Calvinism of the early fathers.
They were mostly scholarly, quiet men, of calm and philosophic
temperament, who, having from infancy walked in all the
traditions of a virtuous and pious education, and passed from
grade to grade of their progress with irreproachable quiet and
decorum, came to regard the spiritual struggles and conflicts, the
wrestlings and tears, the fastings and temptations of their ancestors
with a secret scepticism, — to dwell on moralities, virtues,
and decorums, rather than on those soul-stirring spiritual mysteries
which still stood forth unquestioned and uncontradicted in
their confessions of faith.
Parson Lothrop fulfilled with immaculate precision all the
proprieties exacted in his station. Oldtown having been originally
an Indian missionary station, an annual stipend was paid
for the conversion of the Indians; and so Parson Lothrop had
the sounding-board of Eliot's pulpit put up over the great arm-chair
in his study, and used to call thither weekly the wandering
remnants of Indian tribes to be catechised. He did not, like his
great predecessor, lecture them on the original depravity of the
heart, the need of a radical and thorough regeneration by the
Holy Spirit of God, or the power of Jesus as a Saviour from
sin, but he talked to them of the evil of drunkenness and lying
and idleness, and exhorted them to be temperate and industrious;
and when they, notwithstanding his exhortations, continued
to lead an unthrifty, wandering life, he calmly expressed his
conviction that they were children of the forest, a race destined
to extinction with the progress of civilization, but continued his
labors for them with automatic precision.
His Sunday sermons were well-written specimens of the purest
and most elegant Addisonian English, and no mortal could find
fault with a word that was in them, as they were sensible, rational,
and religious, as far as they went. Indeed, Mr. Lothrop was
quite an elegant scholar and student in literature, and more than
once surprise had been expressed to him that he should be willing
to employ his abilities in so obscure a town and for so inconsiderable
a salary. His reply was characteristic. “My salary is
indeed small, but it is as certain as the Bank of England, and
retirement and quiet give me leisure for study.”
He, however, mended his worldly prospects by a matrimonial
union with a widow lady of large property, from one of the most
aristocratic families of Boston. Mrs. Dorothea Lucretia Dixwell
was the widow of a Tory merchant, who, by rare skill in
trimming his boat to suit the times, had come through the Revolutionary
war with a handsome property unimpaired, which,
dying shortly after, he left to his widow. Mrs. Dixwell was in
heart and soul an Englishwoman, an adorer of church and king,
a worshipper of aristocracy and all the powers that be. She
owned a pew in King's Chapel, and clung more punctiliously
than ever to her prayer-book, when all other memorials of our
connection with the mother country had departed.
Could it be thought that the elegant and rich widow would
smile on the suit of an obscure country Congregational clergyman?
Yet she did; and for it there were many good reasons.
Parson Lothrop was a stately, handsome, well-proportioned man,
and had the formal and ceremonious politeness of a gentleman
of the old school, and by family descent Mrs. Dorothea's remembrance
could trace back his blood to that of some very solid families
among the English gentry, and as there were no more
noblemen to be had in America, marrying a minister in those
days was the next best thing to it; and so Mrs. Dixwell became
Mrs. Parson Lothrop, and made a processional entrance into
Oldtown in her own coach, and came therein to church the
first Sunday after her marriage, in all the pomp of a white
brocade, with silver flowers on it of life-size, and white-satin
slippers with heels two inches high. This was a great grace to
show to a Congregational church, but Mrs. Lothrop knew the
duty of a wife, and conformed to it heroically. Nor was Parson
Lothrop unmindful of the courtesies of a husband in this matrimonial
treaty, for it was stipulated and agreed that Madam
Lothrop should have full liberty to observe in her own proper
person all the festivals and fasts of the Church of England,
should be excused from all company and allowed to keep the
seclusion of her own apartment on Good Friday, and should
proceed immediately thereafter in her own coach to Boston, to
be present at the Easter services in King's Chapel. The same
procession to Boston in her own coach took place also on Whitsunday
and Christmas. Moreover she decked her house with
green boughs and made mince-pies at Christmas time, and in
short conducted her housekeeping in all respects as a zealous
member of the Church of England ought.
In those days of New England, the minister and his wife were
considered the temporal and spiritual superiors of everybody in
the parish. The idea which has since gained ground, of regarding
the minister and his family as a sort of stipendiary attachment
and hired officials of the parish, to be overlooked, schooled,
advised, rebuked, and chastened by every deacon and deacon's
wife or rich and influential parishioner, had not then arisen.
position and authority, that it would have been a sight worth
seeing to witness any of his parish coming to him, as deacons
and influential parishioners now-a-days feel at liberty to come
to their minister, with suggestions and admonitions. His manner
was ever gracious and affable, as of a man who habitually
surveys every one from above, and is disposed to listen with indulgent
courtesy, and has advice in reserve for all seekers; but
there was not the slightest shadow of anything which encouraged
the most presuming to offer counsel in return. And so the marriage
with the rich Episcopal widow, her processional entry
into Oldtown, the coach and outriders, the brocade and satin slippers,
were all submitted to on the part of the Oldtown people
without a murmur.
The fact is, that the parson himself felt within his veins the
traditional promptings of a far-off church and king ancestry, and
relished with a calm delight a solemn trot to the meeting-house
behind a pair of fat, decorous old family horses, with a black
coachman in livery on the box. It struck him as sensible and
becoming. So also he liked a sideboard loaded with massive
family plate, warmed up with the ruby hues of old wines of fifty
years' ripening, gleaming through crystal decanters, and well-trained
man-servants and maid-servants, through whom his wig,
his shoes, and all his mortal belongings, received daily and suitable
care. He was to Mrs. Dorothea the most deferential of
husbands, always rising with stately courtesy to offer her a chair
when she entered an apartment, and hastening to open the door
for her if she wished to pass out, and passing every morning
and evening the formal gallantries and inquiries in regard to
her health and well-being which he felt that her state and condition
required.
Fancy if you can the magnificent distance at which this sublime
couple stood above a little ten-year-old boy, who wore a
blue checked apron, and every day pattered barefoot after the
cows, and who, at the time this story of myself begins, had just,
by reaching up on his little bare tiptoes, struck the great black
knocker on their front door.
The door was opened by a stately black servant, who had about
him an indistinct and yet perceptible atmosphere of ministerial
gravity and dignity, looking like a black doctor of divinity.
“Is Mr. Lothrop at home,” I said, blushing to the roots of my
hair.
“Yes, sonny,” said the black condescendingly.
“Won't you please tell him father 's dying, and mother wants
him to come quick?” and with that, what with awe, and what with
grief, I burst into tears.
The kind-hearted black relaxed from his majesty at once, and
said: “Lord bress yer soul! why, don't cry now, honey, and
I 'll jes' call missis”; — and in fact, before I knew it, he had
opened the parlor door, and ushered me into the august presence
of Lady Lothrop, as she used to be familiarly called in our
village.
She was a tall, thin, sallow woman, looking very much like
those portraits by Copley that still adorn some old houses in
Boston; but she had a gentle voice, and a compassionate, womanly
way with her. She comforted me with a cake, which she
drew from the closet in the sideboard; decanted some very
choice old wine into a bottle, which she said I was to carry to
my mother, and be sure and tell her to take a little of it herself.
She also desired me to give her a small book which she had
found of use in times of affliction, called “The Mourner's Companion,”
consisting mainly of choice selections from the English
Book of Common Prayer.
When the minister came into the room I saw that she gave a
conjugal touch to the snowy plaited frill of his ruffled shirt, and
a thoughtful inspection to the wide linen cambric frills which set
off his well-formed hand, and which were a little discomposed by
rubbing over his writing-table, — nay, even upon one of them a
small stain of ink was visible, as the minister, unknown to himself,
had drawn his ruffles over an undried portion of his next
Sunday's sermon.
“Dinah must attend to this,” she said; “here 's a spot requiring
salts of lemon; and, my dear,” she said, in an insinuating
tone, holding out a richly bound velvet prayer-book, “would you
so excellent.”
“I am well aware of that, my love,” said the minister, repelling
her prayer-book with a gentle stateliness, “but I assure you,
Dorothea, it would not do, — no, it would not do.”
I thought the good lady sighed as her husband left the house,
and looked longingly after him through the window as he walked
down the yard. She probably consoled herself with the reflection
that one could not have everything, and that her spouse, if
not in the Established Church of England, was every way fitted
to adorn it had he only been there.
| CHAPTER I.
OLDTOWN AND THE MINISTER. Oldtown folks | |