THE VILLAGE UNCLE.
AN IMAGINARY RETROSPECT.
Come! another log upon the hearth. True, our little parlor iscomfortable, especially here where the old man sits in his oldarm-chair; but on Thanksgiving-night the blaze should dance higher upthe chimney and send a shower of sparks into the outer darkness. Tosson an armful of those dry oak chips, the last relicts of the Mermaid'sknee-timbers--the bones of your namesake, Susan. Higher yet, andclearer, be the blaze, till our cottage windows glow the ruddiest inthe village and the light of our household mirth flash far across thebay to Nahant.
And now come, Susan; come, my children. Draw your chairs round me, allof you. There is a dimness over your figures. You sit quiveringindistinctly with each motion of the blaze, which eddies about youlike a flood; so that you all have the look of visions or people thatdwell only in the firelight, and will vanish from existence ascompletely as your own shadows when the flame shall sink among theembers.
Hark! let me listen for the swell of the surf; it should be audible amile inland on a night like this. Yes; there I catch the sound, butonly an uncertain murmur, as if a good way down over the beach, thoughby the almanac it is high tide at eight o'clock, and the billows mustnow be dashing within thirty yards of our door. Ah! the old man's earsare failing him, and so is his eyesight, and perhaps his mind, elseyou would not all be so shadowy in the blaze of his Thanksgiving fire.
How strangely the past is peeping over the shoulders of the present!To judge by my recollections, it is but a few moments since I sat inanother room. Yonder model of a vessel was not there, nor the oldchest of drawers, nor Susan's profile and mine in that giltframe--nothing, in short, except this same fire, which glimmered onbooks, papers and a picture, and half discovered my solitary figure ina looking-glass. But it was paler than my rugged old self, andyounger, too, by almost half a century.
Speak to me, Susan; speak, my beloved ones; for the scene isglimmering on my sight again, and as it brightens you fade away. Oh, Ishould be loth to lose my treasure of past happiness and become oncemore what I was then--a hermit in the depths of my own mind,sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes and anon a scribbler of weariertrash than what I read; a man who had wandered out of the real worldand got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys and vicissitudeswere of such slight stuff that he hardly knew whether he lived or onlydreamed of living. Thank Heaven I am an old man now and have done withall such vanities!
Still this dimness of mine eyes!--Come nearer, Susan, and stand beforethe fullest blaze of the hearth. Now I behold you illuminated fromhead to foot, in your clean cap and decent gown, with the dear lock ofgray hair across your forehead and a quiet smile about your mouth,while the eyes alone are concealed by the red gleam of the fire uponyour spectacles. There! you made me tremble again. When the flamequivered, my sweet Susan, you quivered with it and grew indistinct, asif melting into the warm light, that my last glimpse of you might beas visionary as the first was, full many a year since. Do you rememberit? You stood on the little bridge over the brook that runs acrossKing's Beach into the sea. It was twilight, the waves rolling in, thewind sweeping by, the crimson clouds fading in the west and the silvermoon brightening above the hill; and on the bridge were you,fluttering in the breeze like a sea-bird that might skim away at yourpleasure. You seemed a daughter of the viewless wind, a creature ofthe ocean-foam and the crimson light, whose merry life was spent indancing on the crests of the billows that threw up their spray tosupport your footsteps. As I drew nearer I fancied you akin to therace of mermaids, and thought how pleasant it would be to dwell withyou among the quiet coves in the shadow of the cliffs, and to roamalong secluded beaches of the purest sand, and, when our Northernshores grew bleak, to haunt the islands, green and lonely, far amidsummer seas. And yet it gladdened me, after all this nonsense, to findyou nothing but a pretty young girl sadly perplexed with the rudebehavior of the wind about your petticoats. Thus I did with Susan aswith most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into mymind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues before I could seeher as she really was.
Now, Susan, for a sober picture of our village. It was a smallcollection of dwellings that seemed to have been cast up by the seawith the rock-weed and marine plants that it vomits after a storm, orto have come ashore among the pipe-staves and other lumber which hadbeen washed from the deck of an Eastern schooner. There was just spacefor the narrow and sandy street between the beach in front and aprecipitous hill that lifted its rocky forehead in the rear among awaste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture. Thevillage was picturesque in the variety of its edifices, though allwere rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, ofdriftwood, there a row of boat-houses, and beyond them a two-storydwelling of dark and weatherbeaten aspect, the whole intermixed withone or two snug cottages painted white, a sufficiency of pig-styes anda shoemaker's shop. Two grocery stores stood opposite each other inthe centre of the village. These were the places of resort at theiridle hours of a hardy throng of fishermen in red baize shirts,oilcloth trousers and boots of brown leather covering the wholeleg--true seven-league boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than walkthe earth. The wearers seemed amphibious, as if they did but creep outof salt water to sun themselves; nor would it have been wonderful tosee their lower limbs covered with clusters of little shellfish suchas cling to rocks and old ship-timber over which the tide ebbs andflows. When their fleet of boats was weather-bound, the butchersraised their price, and the spit was busier than the frying-pan; forthis was a place of fish, and known as such to all the country roundabout. The very air was fishy, being perfumed with dead sculpins,hard-heads and dogfish strewn plentifully on the beach.--You see,children, the village is but little changed since your mother and Iwere young.
How like a dream it was when I bent over a pool of water one pleasantmorning and saw that the ocean had dashed its spray over me and mademe a fisherman! There was the tarpaulin, the baize shirt, the oilclothtrousers and seven-league boots, and there my own features, but soreddened with sunburn and sea-breezes that methought I had anotherface, and on other shoulders too. The seagulls and the loons and I hadnow all one trade: we skimmed the crested waves and sought our preybeneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds. Always whenthe east grew purple I launched my dory, my little flat-bottomedskiff, and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge, the Middle Ledge, orperhaps beyond Egg Rock; often, too, did I anchor off Dread Ledge--aspot of peril to ships unpiloted--and sometimes spread an adventuroussail and tracked across the bay to South Shore, casting my lines insight of Scituate. Ere nightfall I hauled my skiff high and dry on thebeach, laden with red rock-cod or the white-bellied ones of deepwater, haddock bearing the black marks of St. Peter's fingers near thegills, the long-bearded hake whose liver holds oil enough for amidnight lamp, and now and then a mighty halibut with a back broad asmy boat. In the autumn I toled and caught those lovely fish themackerel. When the wind was high, when the whale-boats anchored offthe Point nodded their slender masts at each other and the doriespitched and tossed in the surf, when Nahant Beach was thundering threemiles off and the spray broke a hundred feet in the air round thedistant base of Egg Rock, when the brimful and boisterous seathreatened to tumble over the street of our village,--then I made aholiday on shore.
Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett's store, attentive tothe yarns of Uncle Parker--uncle to the whole village by right ofseniority, but of Southern blood, with no kindred in New England. Hisfigure is before me now enthroned upon a mackerel-barrel--a lean oldman of great height, but bent with years and twisted into an uncouthshape by seven broken limbs; furrowed, also, and weatherworn, as ifevery gale for the better part of a century had caught him somewhereon the sea. He looked like a harbinger of tempest--a shipmate of theFlying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war andmerchantmen, fishing-schooners and chebacco-boats, the old salt hadbecome master of a hand-cart, which he daily trundled about thevicinity, and sometimes blew his fish-horn through
the streets ofSalem. One of Uncle Parker's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder,and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as hespoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French andbattles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to beseated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nailthrough his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes heexpatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy andgoose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on theGrand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at theIsle of Sables, where he had gladdened himself amid polar snows withthe rum and sugar saved from the wreck of a West India schooner. Andwrathfully did he shake his fist as he related how a party of Cape Codmen had robbed him and his companions of their lawful spoils andsailed away with every keg of old Jamaica, leaving him not a drop todrown his sorrow. Villains they were, and of that wicked brotherhoodwho are said to tie lanterns to horses' tails to mislead the marineralong the dangerous shores of the Cape.
Even now I seem to see the group of fishermen with that old salt inthe midst. One fellow sits on the counter, a second bestrides anoil-barrel, a third lolls at his length on a parcel of new cod-lines,and another has planted the tarry seat of his trousers on a heap ofsalt which will shortly be sprinkled over a lot of fish. They are alikely set of men. Some have voyaged to the East Indies or thePacific, and most of them have sailed in Marblehead schooners toNewfoundland; a few have been no farther than the Middle Banks, andone or two have always fished along the shore; but, as Uncle Parkerused to say, they have all been christened in salt water and know morethan men ever learn in the bushes. A curious figure, by way ofcontrast, is a fish-dealer from far up-country listening with eyeswide open to narratives that might startle Sinbad the Sailor.--Be itwell with you, my brethren! Ye are all gone--some to your gravesashore and others to the depths of ocean--but my faith is strong thatye are happy; for whenever I behold your forms, whether in dream orvision, each departed friend is puffing his long nine, and a mug ofthe right blackstrap goes round from lip to lip.
But where was the mermaid in those delightful times? At a certainwindow near the centre of the village appeared a pretty display ofgingerbread men and horses, picture-books and ballads, smallfish-hooks, pins, needles, sugarplums and brass thimbles--articles onwhich the young fishermen used to expend their money from puregallantry. What a picture was Susan behind the counter! A slendermaiden, though the child of rugged parents, she had the slimmest ofall waists, brown hair curling on her neck, and a complexion ratherpale except when the sea-breeze flushed it. A few freckles becamebeauty-spots beneath her eyelids.--How was it, Susan, that you talkedand acted so carelessly, yet always for the best, doing whatever wasright in your own eyes, and never once doing wrong in mine, norshocked a taste that had been morbidly sensitive till now? And whencehad you that happiest gift of brightening every topic with an unsoughtgayety, quiet but irresistible, so that even gloomy spirits felt yoursunshine and did not shrink from it? Nature wrought the charm. Shemade you a frank, simple, kind-hearted, sensible and mirthful girl.Obeying Nature, you did free things without indelicacy, displayed amaiden's thoughts to every eye, and proved yourself as innocent asnaked Eve.--It was beautiful to observe how her simple and happynature mingled itself with mine. She kindled a domestic fire within myheart and took up her dwelling there, even in that chill and lonesomecavern hung round with glittering icicles of fancy. She gave me warmthof feeling, while the influence of my mind made her contemplative. Itaught her to love the moonlight hour, when the expanse of theencircled bay was smooth as a great mirror and slept in a transparentshadow, while beyond Nahant the wind rippled the dim ocean into adreamy brightness which grew faint afar off without becoming gloomier.I held her hand and pointed to the long surf-wave as it rolled calmlyon the beach in an unbroken line of silver; we were silent togethertill its deep and peaceful murmur had swept by us. When the Sabbathsun shone down into the recesses of the cliffs, I led the mermaidthither and told her that those huge gray, shattered rocks, and hernative sea that raged for ever like a storm against them, and her ownslender beauty in so stern a scene, were all combined into a strain ofpoetry. But on the Sabbath-eve, when her mother had gone early to bedand her gentle sister had smiled and left us, as we sat alone by thequiet hearth with household things around, it was her turn to make mefeel that here was a deeper poetry, and that this was the dearest hourof all. Thus went on our wooing, till I had shot wild-fowl enough tofeather our bridal-bed, and the daughter of the sea was mine.
I built a cottage for Susan and myself, and made a gateway in the formof a Gothic arch by setting up a whale's jaw-bones. We bought a heiferwith her first calf, and had a little garden on the hillside to supplyus with potatoes and green sauce for our fish. Our parlor, small andneat, was ornamented with our two profiles in one gilt frame, and withshells and pretty pebbles on the mantelpiece, selected from the sea'streasury of such things on Nahant Beach. On the desk, beneath thelooking-glass, lay the Bible, which I had begun to read aloud at thebook of Genesis, and the singing-book that Susan used for her eveningpsalm. Except the almanac, we had no other literature. All that Iheard of books was when an Indian history or tale of shipwreck wassold by a pedler or wandering subscription-man to some one in thevillage, and read through its owner's nose to a slumbrous auditory.
Like my brother-fishermen, I grew into the belief that all humanerudition was collected in our pedagogue, whose green spectacles andsolemn phiz as he passed to his little schoolhouse amid a waste ofsand might have gained him a diploma from any college in New England.In truth, I dreaded him.--When our children were old enough to claimhis care, you remember, Susan, how I frowned, though you were pleasedat this learned man's encomiums on their proficiency. I feared totrust them even with the alphabet: it was the key to a fatal treasure.But I loved to lead them by their little hands along the beach andpoint to nature in the vast and the minute--the sky, the sea, thegreen earth, the pebbles and the shells. Then did I discourse of themighty works and coextensive goodness of the Deity with the simplewisdom of a man whose mind had profited by lonely days upon the deepand his heart by the strong and pure affections of his evening home.Sometimes my voice lost itself in a tremulous depth, for I felt hiseye upon me as I spoke. Once, while my wife and all of us were gazingat ourselves in the mirror left by the tide in a hollow of the sand, Ipointed to the pictured heaven below and bade her observe how religionwas strewn everywhere in our path, since even a casual pool of waterrecalled the idea of that home whither we were travelling to rest forever with our children. Suddenly your image, Susan, and all the littlefaces made up of yours and mine, seemed to fade away and vanish aroundme, leaving a pale visage like my own of former days within the frameof a large looking-glass. Strange illusion!
My life glided on, the past appearing to mingle with the present andabsorb the future, till the whole lies before me at a glance. Mymanhood has long been waning with a stanch decay; my earliercontemporaries, after lives of unbroken health, are all at restwithout having known the weariness of later age; and now with awrinkled forehead and thin white hair as badges of my dignity I havebecome the patriarch--the uncle--of the village. I love that name: itwidens the circle of my sympathies; it joins all the youthful to myhousehold in the kindred of affection.
Like Uncle Parker, whose rheumatic bones were dashed against Egg Rockfull forty years ago, I am a spinner of long yarns. Seated on thegunnel of a dory or on the sunny side of a boat-house, where thewarmth is grateful to my limbs, or by my own hearth when a friend ortwo are there, I overflow with talk, and yet am never tedious. With abroken voice I give utterance to much wisdom. Such, Heaven be praised!is the vigor of my faculties that many a forgotten usage, andtraditions ancient in my youth, and early adventures of myself orothers hitherto effaced by things more recent, acquire newdistinctness in my memory. I remember the happy days when the haddockwere more numerous on all the fishing-grounds than sculpins in thesurf--when the deep-water cod swam close in-shore, and the dogfis
h,with his poisonous horn, had not learnt to take the hook. I can numberevery equinoctial storm in which the sea has overwhelmed the street,flooded the cellars of the village and hissed upon our kitchen hearth.I give the history of the great whale that was landed on Whale Beach,and whose jaws, being now my gateway, will last for ages after mycoffin shall have passed beneath them. Thence it is an easy digressionto the halibut--scarcely smaller than the whale--which ran out sixcodlines and hauled my dory to the mouth of Boston harbor before Icould touch him with the gaff.
If melancholy accidents be the theme of conversation, I tell how afriend of mine was taken out of his boat by an enormous shark, and thesad, true tale of a young man on the eve of marriage who had been ninedays missing, when his drowned body floated into the very pathway onMarble-head Neck that had often led him to the dwelling of his bride,as if the dripping corpse would have come where the mourner was. Withsuch awful fidelity did that lover return to fulfil his vows! Anotherfavorite story is of a crazy maiden who conversed with angels and hadthe gift of prophecy, and whom all the village loved and pitied,though she went from door to door accusing us of sin, exhorting torepentance and foretelling our destruction by flood or earthquake. Ifthe young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, Ispeak of pilots who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by itstaste, and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston andMount Desert guided only by the rote of the shore--the peculiar soundof the surf on each island, beach and line of rocks along the coast.Thus do I talk, and all my auditors grow wise while they deem itpastime.
I recollect no happier portion of my life than this my calm old age.It is like the sunny and sheltered slope of a valley where late in theautumn the grass is greener than in August, and intermixed with goldendandelions that had not been seen till now since the first warmth ofthe year. But with me the verdure and the flowers are not frost-bittenin the midst of winter. A playfulness has revisited my mind--asympathy with the young and gay, an unpainful interest in the businessof others, a light and wandering curiosity--arising, perhaps, from thesense that my toil on earth is ended and the brief hour till bedtimemay be spent in play. Still, I have fancied that there is a depth offeeling and reflection under this superficial levity peculiar to onewho has lived long and is soon to die.
Show me anything that would make an infant smile, and you shall beholda gleam of mirth over the hoary ruin of my visage. I can spend apleasant hour in the sun watching the sports of the village childrenon the edge of the surf. Now they chase the retreating wave far downover the wet sand; now it steals softly up to kiss their naked feet;now it comes onward with threatening front, and roars after thelaughing crew as they scamper beyond its reach. Why should not an oldman be merry too, when the great sea is at play with those littlechildren? I delight, also, to follow in the wake of a pleasure-partyof young men and girls strolling along the beach after an early supperat the Point. Here, with handkerchiefs at nose, they bend over a heapof eel-grass entangled in which is a dead skate so oddly accoutredwith two legs and a long tail that they mistake him for a drownedanimal. A few steps farther the ladies scream, and the gentlemen makeready to protect them against a young shark of the dogfish kindrolling 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 oflive lobsters packed in rock-weed for the country-market. And whenthey reach the fleet of dories just hauled ashore after the day'sfishing, how do I laugh in my sleeve, and sometimes roar outright, atthe simplicity of these young folks and the sly humor of thefishermen! In winter, when our village is thrown into a bustle by thearrival of perhaps a score of country dealers bargaining for frozenfish to be transported hundreds of miles and eaten fresh in Vermont orCanada, I am a pleased but idle spectator in the throng. For I launchmy boat no more.
When the shore was solitary, I have found a pleasure that seemed evento exalt my mind in observing the sports or contentions of two gullsas they wheeled and hovered about each other with hoarse screams, onemoment flapping on the foam of the wave, and then soaring aloft tilltheir white bosoms melted into the upper sunshine. In the calm of thesummer sunset I drag my aged limbs with a little ostentation ofactivity, because I am so old, up to the rocky brow of the hill. ThereI see the white sails of many a vessel outward bound or homeward fromafar, and the black trail of a vapor behind the Eastern steamboat;there, too, is the sun, going down, but not in gloom, and there theillimitable ocean mingling with the sky, to remind me of eternity.
But sweetest of all is the hour of cheerful musing and pleasant talkthat comes between the dusk and the lighted candle by my glowingfireside. And never, even on the first Thanksgiving-night, when Susanand I sat alone with our hopes, nor the second, when a stranger hadbeen sent to gladden us and be the visible image of our affection, didI feel such joy as now. All that belongs to me are here: Death hastaken none, nor Disease kept them away, nor Strife divided them fromtheir parents or each other; with neither poverty nor riches todisturb them, nor the misery of desires beyond their lot, they havekept New England's festival round the patriarch's board. For I am apatriarch. Here I sit among my descendants, in my old arm-chair andimmemorial corner, while the firelight throws an appropriate gloryround my venerable frame.--Susan! My children! Something whispers methat this happiest hour must be the final one, and that nothingremains but to bless you all and depart with a treasure of recollectedjoys to heaven. Will you meet me there? Alas! your figures growindistinct, fading into pictures on the air, and now to fainteroutlines, while the fire is glimmering on the walls of a familiarroom, and shows the book that I flung down and the sheet that I lefthalf written some fifty years ago. I lift my eyes to thelooking-glass, and perceive myself alone, unless those be themermaid's features retiring into the depths of the mirror with atender 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 andterror after dismissing the shadows that had personated dead ordistant people and stripping his cavern of the unreal splendor whichhad changed it to a palace.
And now for a moral to my reverie. Shall it be that, since fancy cancreate so bright a dream of happiness, it were better to dream on fromyouth to age than to awake and strive doubtfully for something real?Oh, the slight tissue of a dream can no more preserve us from thestern reality of misfortune than a robe of cobweb could repel thewintry blast. Be this the moral, then: In chaste and warm affections,humble wishes and honest toil for some useful end there is health forthe mind and quiet for the heart, the prospect of a happy life and thefairest hope of heaven.