Twice-told tales
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 heap of eel-grass
entangled in which is a dead skate so oddly accoutred with two legs and
a long tail that they mistake him for a drowned animal. A few steps
farther the ladies scream, and the gentlemen make ready to protect them
against a young shark of the dogfish 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;
there, too, is the sun, going down, but not in 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 belongs 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 the depths of the mirror
with a tender and melancholy smile.
Ah! One feels a chilliness—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.
THE AMBITIOUS GUEST
One September night a family had gathered round their hearth and piled
it high with the driftwood of mountain-streams, the dry cones of the
pine, and the splintered ruins of great trees that had come crashing
down the precipice. Up the chimney roared the fire, and brightened the
room with its broad blaze. The faces of the father and mother had a
sober gladness; the children laughed. The eldest daughter was the image
of Happiness at seventeen, and the aged grandmother, who sat knitting
in the warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old. They had
found the “herb heart’s-ease” in the bleakest spot of all New England.
This family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the
wind was sharp throughout the year and pitilessly cold in the winter,
giving their cottage all its fresh inclemency before it descended on
the valley of the Saco. They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one,
for a mountain towered above their heads so steep that the stones would
often rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight.
The daughter had just uttered some simple jest that filled them all
with mirth, when the wind came through the Notch and seemed to pause
before their cottage, rattling the door with a sound of wailing and
lamentation before it passed into the valley. For a moment it saddened
them, though there was nothing unusual in the tones. But the family
were glad again when they perceived that the latch was lifted by some
traveller whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast which
heralded his approach and wailed as he was entering and went moaning
away from the door.
Though they dwelt in such a solitude, these people held daily converse
with the world. The romantic pass of the Notch is a great artery
through which the life-blood of internal commerce is continually
throbbing between Maine on one side and the Green Mountains and the
shores of the St. Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew up
before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but his
staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness
might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of
the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the
teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night, and,
if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime and steal a
kiss from the mountain-maid at parting. It was one of those primitive
taverns where the traveller pays only for food and lodging, but meets
with a homely kindness beyond all price. When the footsteps were heard,
therefore, between the outer door and the inner one, the whole family
rose up, grandmother, children and all, as if about to welcome some one
who belonged to them, and whose fate was linked with theirs.
The door was opened by a young man. His face at first wore the
melancholy expression, almost despondency, of one who travels a wild
and bleak road at nightfall and alone, but soon brightened up when he
saw the kindly warmth of his reception. He felt his heart spring
forward to meet them all, from the old woman who wiped a chair with her
apron to the little child that held out its arms to him. One glance and
smile placed the stranger on a footing of innocent familiarity with the
eldest daughter.
“Ah! this fire is the right thing,” cried he, “especially when there is
such a pleasant circle round it. I am quite benumbed, for the Notch is
just like the pipe of a great pair of bellows; it has blown a terrible
blast in my face all the way from Bartlett.”
“Then you are going toward Vermont?” said the master of the house as he
helped to take a light knapsack off the young man’s shoulders.
“Yes, to Burlington, and far enough beyond,” replied he. “I meant to
have been at Ethan Crawford’s to-night, but a pedestrian lingers along
such a road as this. It is no matter; for when I saw this good fire and
all your cheerful faces, I felt as if you had kindled it on purpose for
me and were waiting my arrival. So I shall sit down among you and make
myself at home.”
The frank-hearted stranger had just drawn his chair to the fire when
something like a heavy footstep was heard without, rushing down the
steep side of the mountain as with long and rapid strides, and taking
such a leap in passing the cottage as to strike the opposite precipice.
The family held their breath, because they knew the sound, and their
guest held his by instinct.
“The old mountain has thrown a stone at us for fear we should forget
him,” said the landlord, recovering himself. “He sometimes nods his
head and threatens to come down, but we are old neighbors, and agree
together pretty well, upon the whole. Besides, we have a sure place of
refuge hard by if he should be coming in good earnest.”
Let us now suppose the stranger to have finished his supper of bear’s
meat, and by his natural felicity of manner to have placed himself on a
footing of kindness with the whole family; so that they talked as
freely together as if he belonged to their mountain-brood. He was of a
proud yet gentle spirit, haughty and reserved among the rich and great,
but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door and be like
a brother or a son at the poor man’s fireside. In the household of the
Notch he found warmth and simplicity of feeling, the pervading
intelligence of New England, and a poetry of native growth which they
had gathered when they little thought of it from the mountain-peaks and
chasms, and at the very threshold of their romantic and dangerous
abode. He had travelled far and alone; his whole life, indeed, had been
a solitary path, for, with the lofty caution of his nature, he had kept
himself apart from those who might otherwise have been his companions.
The family, too, though so kind and hospitable, had that consciousness
of unity among themselves and separation from the world at large which
in every domestic circle should still keep a holy place where no
stranger may intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled
the refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple
mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same free
confidence. And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred of a
common fate a closer tie than that of birth?
The secret of the young man’s character was a high and abstracted
ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not
to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to
hope, and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty that,
obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway,
though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. But when posterity
should gaze back into the gloom of what was now the present, they would
trace the brightness of his footsteps, brightening as meaner glories
faded, and confess that a gifted one had passed from his cradle to his
tomb with none to recognize him.
“As yet,” cried the stranger, his cheek glowing and his eye flashing
with enthusiasm—“as yet I have done nothing. Were I to vanish from the
earth to-morrow, none would know so much of me as you—that a nameless