Read Ebook: A Northern Countryside by Richards Rosalind

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Ebook has 493 lines and 41320 words, and 10 pages

His clothes were quite wonderful. He was shining with soap and with fashion, and so full of warmth and of pleasure. He brought out colored photographs of his two fat little children, told of his staff and his patrons, beamed upon everyone, and showed his pretty wife all about our plain High School, admiring and reverent. I think that if it had been Oxford he could not have been prouder, and indeed Oxford could never be to the average student a place of higher achievement than High School to a Lamont!

He was so simple and kindly that I believe he would have taken his wife to the Lamont shanty as happily. The Lamont barn is still standing, grown up with tall nettles and dandelions. A farmer uses it for his extra hay, mowed in the low rich patches of river meadow. Tramps sleep in the hay, and quantities of barn-swallows flash in and out of the empty windows.

Not even the flight of the birds from the south, unbelievable in wonder as this is, is more miraculous than the run of the fish, from the vast spaces of ocean up all our fresh-water streams for hundreds of miles. Their bright thousands find their way unerringly, up into the heart of the country. No one knows whence they come, and save for an occasional straggler, no one has ever taken salmon or shad or ale-wife in deep water. We know their passage up-stream, but no one knows when they take their way down again.

The smelts run up, when winter is still at its height. They are caught through holes in the ice. The men build huts of boards or of boughs, each round his own smelt hole. They build a fire on the ice, or have a kerosene lantern or lamp, and fish thus all day in fair comfort. They catch smelts by thousands, so that our town's people, who can eat them not two hours out of the water, are spoiled for the smelts which are called fresh in cities. Tom-cod come up a little ahead of the smelts.

Soon after the ice goes out, while the water is still very rapid and turgid, the alewives run up, and they are as good eating as smelts, though too full of bones. They are smoked slightly, but not salted. About this time, too, the smaller boys begin catching yellow-perch at the mouths of the brooks. These, and tom-cod, are not thought worth putting on the market, but they are crisp little fish, and a string of them, thirteen for twelve cents, makes a good supper.

Suckers also come with the opening of the brooks. The discovery has been made lately, that these fish, which New Englanders despise , are prized by the Jewish population of some of the bigger cities, and bring a good price. A ton and a half of suckers were shipped from our river this season.

Our royal fish are the shad, which arrive in the middle of May, when the woods are all blossoming. The May river is full of their great silvery squadrons. They are caught at night, in drift nets, by hundreds. Most of them are shipped away, but our Town must and does eat as many as possible. One family, who know what they like, practically abjure all other solid food for the shad season!

The taking of the Acushticook eels is now a regular industry, and this came about rather sadly. Stephen Mitchell, the millwright of the Acushticook paper mill, was a fine man, with a turn for inventing. His ideas were sound and a good many of his mechanical devices turned out excellently. He became interested in explosives, and worked for a long time at a new method for capping torpedoes. He had been warned time and again, and such an intelligent man must have realized perfectly the danger of work with explosive materials, but one day an accident happened. There was an explosion which took not only both hands, but his eyes.

I think everyone in the town felt sickened by the accident, and by the prospect of helpless invalidism ahead of a fine active man. But Stephen, as soon as his wounds healed, began looking for something to do.

The Acushticook eels had always been fished for in a desultory fashion, and Stephen cast about for a way to make the fishing amount to more. The mill owners did all in their power to help him. They gladly gave him the sole right of the use of the stream, and helped him in building his dam. He had also a grant from the Legislature. He hired good workers, and for many years he and his wife, who was a master hand, lived happily and successfully on their fishery. Sometimes two tons of eels were shipped in the course of the autumn.

Stephen always was cheerful. He could see enough difference between light and darkness to find his way about town, and he was so quick to recognize voices that you forgot his blindness. He kept among people a great deal, and was an animated talker at town gatherings. He was an opinionated man, but a fine and upright one. After his death his widow kept on with the fishery, and she still runs it with profit.

You would never think now that tall Indiamen were once built here in our town, but they were, and sailed hence round the world away, and we too boasted our wharves, with the once-familiar notice:

"All ships required to cock-a-bill their yards before lying at this dock."

Mr. Peter Simons, one of our early magnates, and "ship's husband," of many vessels , took a treasure voyage to the Spanish Main once, and brought home a moderate sized treasure, some of the doubloons of which are preserved in his family to this day.

Ship-building was the chief industry of the place. There were four principal ship-yards. The skippers as well as the lumber came from close at hand. It seems a wonderful thing, in these stay-at-home times, that keen young lads from the farms could have been, at twenty-one, in command of full-rigged ships, fearlessly making their way, in prosperous trade, to places that might as well be in Mars, for all most of us know of them to-day: but Java and the Spice Islands, Shanghai, Tasmania, and the Moluccas were household words in those days, and you still hear a sentence now and then which shows the one-time familiarity of ways which have passed from our knowledge.

Captain Annable has crossed the Atlantic sixty-three times, sailing clipper mail-ships.

The Captains are nearly all gone now. Little trace of the ship-yards remains, and even the wharves from which the Indiamen sailed have rotted, and been replaced by the lumber and coal wharves of to-day; but all through the countryside you come on touches of the shipping days, and of the East, as startling as a sudden fragrance of sandalwood in some old cabinet. At one house I know there is a collection of butterflies and moths of the Far East, with two cream-colored Atlas moths eight inches from tip to tip. At another there is a set of rice-paper paintings of the orders of the Japanese nobility and gentry, with full insignia of state robes, which ought to be in a museum; and the parlor of a third neighbor, the gracious widow of a sea-captain, has, besides carved teak furniture and Chinese embroideries, a set of carved ivory chessmen fit for a palace. The king and queen stand over eight inches high. The castles are true elephant-and-castles, and the pawns are tiny mounted and turbaned warriors, brandishing scimitars. The figures stand on carved open-work balls-within-balls, four deep--"Laborious Orient ivory, sphere in sphere"--as delicate as frost-work. This set was bought in Shanghai, when the foreign compound still had its guard of soldiers, and the Chinese thronged the doorways to stare at the "white devils."

The great gold-figured lacquer cabinet, the pride of one of our statelier houses, was brought from China a hundred years ago, by a young Captain Jameson, who was coming home for his wedding. He sailed again with his bride immediately after the marriage, and their ship never was heard of. The cabinet was sold, and then sold again, till it finally reached the setting which fits it so well.

You find lacquered Indian teapoys, Eastern porcelains, shells and corals from all round the world far out in scattered farmhouses; and farm-hands are still summoned to meals by a blast on a conch-shell, a queer note, not unlike the belling of an elk.

Beside the actual china and embroideries and carvings, something of the character bred in the seafaring days has spread, like nourishing silt, through our countryside. The Captains were grave, quiet men. They had power of command, and keenness in emergency. Contact with many people of many nations quickened their perceptions and gave them charming manners; but more than this, there was something large-minded and tranquil about them. All their lives they had to deal with an element stronger than themselves. The next day's work could never be planned or calculated on, and something of the detached quality which comes from dealing with the sea, a long and simple perspective towards human affairs, became part of them.

An expression of married life, so beautiful that I can never forget it, came from the lips of the widow of one of our sea-captains, a little old lady, now over eighty, who lives alone in a tiny brick cottage . She wears a wonderful cap, and fills her house with quilts and cushions of silk patch-work which would make a kaleidoscope blink. I had an errand to her about a poorer neighbor, one Thanksgiving time. Her house is an outlying one, and I remember how the farm lights, scattered all about our river hills, shone in the soft autumn evening.

Her bright warm kitchen was coziness itself, with a shiny stove, full to the brim with red coals, and a big lamp. She sat with her cat on her knee, sewing on an orange and green cushion, made in queer little puffs, and she jumped up, dropping thimble, and spectacles, in her warm-hearted welcome. After my errand, we fell into talk, about "Cap'n," and their long voyaging together. That was when the Captains as a matter of course took their wives, and often their children, with them, keeping a cow on board for the family's use, and sometimes chickens and pigs. Many babies who grew to be sturdy citizens were born on the high seas in those days.

She told about long peaceful days, slipping through the Trades, and about gales, but mostly about china and pottery, for this was their hobby, almost their passion. They took inconvenient journeys of great length to see new potteries, and hoped at last to see all the sea-board china factories, in East and West. She showed me her treasures, pretty bits of Sevres, majolica, Doulton, and Wedgewood, all standing together, and among them an alabaster model of the leaning tower of Pisa . At last, with a lowered voice, she spoke of the worst danger they had ever been through, a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal. The ship lay dismasted, and the waves broke over her helplessness. She was lifted up and dashed down like a log, and every soul on board expected only to perish.

"Cap'n come downstairs to our cabin:

"Oh, Mary," he says, "if only you was to home! I could die easy if only you was to home!"

"I be to home!" I says. "If I had the wings of a dove, I wouldn't be anywheres but where I be!"

This ranks with the epitaph at Nantucket:

"Think what a wife should be, and she was that!"

Another seafaring friend was, as so often happens, the last person whom you would ever connect with adventures, a little lady so tiny, so dainty, that a trip across the lawn with garden gloves and hat, to tie up her roses, might have been her longest excursion; but instead she has sailed round and round the world with her courtly sea-captain father, has lifted her quiet gray eyes to see coral islands and spice islands, and the strange mountain ranges of the East Indies.

"She wore white mostly when we were in the Trades or the Tropics," her father has told me, "and she sat on deck all day, with her white fancy-work. She always seemed to like whatever was happening."

One day, in a fog with a heavy sea running, the ship ran on a reef. The life-saving crew got the men off with great difficulty, but the Captain refused to leave his post, and little Miss Jessie refused too.

"No, thank you," she said, in her soft voice, "No, thanks very much, I think I will stay with the Captain."

"And you couldn't move her," he said, "any more than the rock of Gibraltar."

With the night the storm lessened, and almost by a miracle the ship was got off safely next morning.

I must tell of one more seafaring couple, who lived down the river in a low white cottage where "Captain," retired from service, could watch vessels passing, even without his handsome brass-bound binoculars, a much-prized tribute for life-saving.

The wife was long paralyzed, and the Captain, with the simple-minded nephew they had adopted, tended her as he might have tended an adored child. He bought her silk waists, fine aprons, little frills of one sort or another, fastened them on her with clumsy, loving fingers, and then would sit back, laughing with pride, while the paralyzed woman, with her wrecked face, managed to make uncouth sounds of pleasure.

"Don't she look handsome? Don't she look nice as anybody?" he would ask of the neighbors, and show the new wig he had bought her, as the poor hair was thin. His simple pride thought it as beautiful as any young girl's curls, and indeed it was very youthful. One's heart was wrung, yet uplifted, too, for here was love which had passed through the absolute wrecking of life, and was untouched.

The Captain was a tall hearty man, but it was he who died first, after all, and all in a minute. The paralyzed creature thus bereaved, moaned, day after day; her eyes seemed to be asking for something, there in the room, and no one could find the right thing, till someone thought of the Captain's binoculars, which he always had by him. From that moment she became tranquil, and even grew happy again, if only she had the bright brass thing where her poor hand could touch it. If it was moved, she moaned for it to be set back. It was her precious token, from his hand to hers. With it beside her she could wait and be good, poor dear soul, until, in about two years, her release came, and she went to join "Captain."

One word more about Mr. Peter Simons, of whom the town keeps pleasant memories. He lived handsomely, in a handsome house overlooking the river, and his housekeeper, Deborah Twycross, was as much of a magnate in her own way as himself. Mr. Peter was very high with her; but he stood in awe of her, too. Still, he never would let her engage his second servant, a privilege which she coveted.

"Can you milk?"

Of course, she could not, and there the matter would end. He never asked a girl whose looks he liked, if she could milk!

He was a man of endless secret benevolence, and posed all the time as a hard-fisted person and a miser. He was at the most devious pains to conceal his constant kindnesses. The noble minister who at that time carried our Town on his young shoulders, received sums of money, in every time of need, for library, schools, or cases of poverty and suffering, directed in a variety of elaborately disguised handwritings. He was able in time to trace them all to Mr. Peter. Many a struggling young man was set on his feet and established in life by this secret benefactor; and after Mr. Peter's death, his coal dealer told how for years he had had orders to deliver loads of coal to this and that family in distress, after dark, and as noiselessly as possible, under an agreement of secrecy, enforced by such threats that he never dared disobey.

The Town has changed since Mr. Peter's day. Boys no longer brave the terrors of a visit to a White Witch to have their warts charmed, or a toothache healed.

Even the memory of the Whipping-post, which still stood in Mr. Peter's childhood, has long since vanished. The town bell is no longer rung at seven in the morning and at noon, and a steam fire-whistle has replaced the tocsin of alarm that formerly was rung from all the church steeples; but the curfew still rings every night, at nine in the evening ; and, among the customary Scriptural-sounding offices of fence-viewers, field-drivers, measurers of wood and bark, etc., the town still has a town crier. A very few years ago it still had a pound-keeper and hog-reeve, but by now the outlines of the pound itself have disappeared.

A smaller river, the Acushticook, tumbles and foams down through the midst of our town, and brings us the wonderfully soft pure water of a chain of over twenty lakes and ponds. It flung the hills apart to join the larger stream which it meets at right angles at the Town Bridge, and the last mile of its course is through a beautiful small gorge, in a succession of falls, now compacted into the eight dams which turn our mills.

Above the falls, though it breaks into occasional rapids, its course is quieter, and as you travel towards the setting sun, your canoe follows a peaceful stream, running for the most part through woods.

The country along the Acushticook is broken and hilly, woods or open pastures full of boulders and junipers. The farms depend on their stock and apple orchards for their prosperity. You see big chicken yards, and the more enterprising farmers send their eggs and broilers to city markets. Pigs do well among the apple trees, and most of the farms have ducks and geese as well as chickens. A well-trodden road follows the crest of the ridge, parallel to the river.

The Baxters, good, silent people, live well out on this road, and handsome Ambrose Baxter has a thriving milk route. Sefami Baxter, his uncle, worked in the paper mill his whole life, and now his son, young Sefami, has built up a good market garden business on the Acushticook road. He started it years ago with a tiny greenhouse, which he built on to his farm kitchen. He raised tomatoes and other seedlings, and early lettuce. It was an innovation in our part of the world, and neighbors shook their heads; but one bit of greenhouse was added to another, and now Sefami has three long stacks of them and is a prosperous man. He has a whole field of rhubarb and a large orchard, where he keeps twenty hives of bees. He had no capital beyond the savings of a plain working family, and he had to find his market for himself.

Acushticook has changed her course from time to time through the centuries, and about five miles from town a stretch of flat land which must once have been either intervale along the river's course or one of its many small lakes, lies pocketed among the hills. This stretch, which is very fertile, belongs, or belonged, to the Dunnacks, and they were surely a family which will be remembered. They never pretended to be anything more than plain farming people, but they were marked by a personal dignity and refinement, even fastidiousness, by their intelligence, and alas, by their many sorrows. Old Warren Dunnack was a farmer of substance. His son, the Warren Dunnack of our time, was nearly all his life in charge of the "Homestead" , during the long absence abroad of its owners. He married a beautiful woman, Sarah Brant. She was a magnificent creature, in a hard, almost animal sort of way, but was a shallow person, with a vain nature, coveting show, fine food and clothes, and she broke Warren's heart. He took her back again and again after her many flights, for he had an unconquerable chivalry and gentleness for all women, and he let her have everything that he could earn.

Lucretia was the beauty of the family, a slip of a girl with eyes like black diamonds. She married a showy business man, who turned out badly. She came home, a handsome and embittered older woman, and made life uncomfortable for herself and everyone else on the farm. Afterwards she became companion to a widow of some means, a fantastic person, and they lived together all their days.

Delia, who was so pretty, though not striking like Lucretia, married silly Ephraim Simmons; but her affection for her brother Warren was the abiding thing of her life. When Warren's wife left him, and Delia was offered the position of housekeeper at the Homestead, she took it, and there she and Warren kept house for fifteen years. Two good-natured slack daughters helped Ephraim with his farm, and he certainly needed the money that their mother earned. He was a poor enough farmer; but his foolish face used to look wistful when he drove the six miles, every other Saturday, to see Delia.

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