Hillsboro People

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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• Publié par: thowyang
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 29
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hillsboro People,
by Dorothy Canfield
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Title: Hillsboro People
Author: Dorothy Canfield
Release Date: August 2, 2004 [EBook #13091]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK HILLSBORO PEOPLE ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Valerine Blas and
PG Distributed ProofreadersHILLSBORO PEOPLE
BY DOROTHY CANFIELD
AUTHOR OF THE BENT TWIG, THE SQUIRREL
CAGE, ETC.
WITH OCCASIONAL VERMONT VERSES BY
SARAH N. CLEGHORN
1915
CONTENTS
VERMONT (Poem)
HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN (Poem)
AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN
PETUNIAS—THAT'S FOR REMEMBRANCE
THE HEYDAY OF THE BLOOD
AS A BIRD OUT OF THE SNARE
THE BEDQUILT
PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER
FLINT AND FIRE
A SAINT'S HOURS (Poem)
IN MEMORY OF L.H.W.
IN NEW NEW ENGLAND
THE DELIVERERNOCTES AMBROSIANAE (Poem)
HILLSBORO'S GOOD LUCK
SALEM HILLS TO ELLIS ISLAND (Poem)
AVUNCULUS
BY ABANA AND PHARPAR (Poem)
FINIS
A VILLAGE MUNCHAUSEN
THE ARTIST
WHO ELSE HEARD IT? (Poem)
A DROP IN THE BUCKET
THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND (Poem)
PIPER TIM
ADESTE FIDELES!
VERMONT
Wide and shallow in the cowslip marshes
Floods the freshet of the April snow.
Late drifts linger in the hemlock gorges,
Through the brakes and mosses trickling slow
Where the Mayflower,
Where the painted trillium, leaf and blow.
Foliaged deep, the cool midsummer maples
Shade the porches of the long white street;
Trailing wide, Olympian elms lean over
Tiny churches where the highroads meet.
Fields of fireflies
Wheel all night like stars among the wheat.
Blaze the mountains in the windless autumn
Frost-clear, blue-nooned, apple-ripening days;
Faintly fragrant in the farther valleys
Smoke of many bonfires swells the haze;
Fair-bound cattle Plod with lowing up the meadowy ways.
Roaring snows down-sweeping from the
uplands
Bury the still valleys, drift them deep.
Low along the mountain, lake-blue shadows,
Sea-blue shadows in the hollows sleep.
High above them
Blinding crystal is the sunlit steep.HEMLOCK MOUNTAIN
By orange grove and palm-tree, we walked the
southern shore,
Each day more still and golden than was the day
before.
That calm and languid sunshine! How faint it
made us grow
To look on Hemlock Mountain when the storm
hangs low!
To see its rocky pastures, its sparse but hardy
corn,
The mist roll off its forehead before a harvest
morn;
To hear the pine-trees crashing across its gulfs of
snow
Upon a roaring midnight when the whirlwinds
blow.
Tell not of lost Atlantis, or fabled Avalon;
The olive, or the vineyard, no winter breathes
upon;
Away from Hemlock Mountain we could not well
forego,
For all the summer islands where the gulf tides
flow.AT THE FOOT OF HEMLOCK
MOUNTAIN
"In connection with this phase of the problem of
transportation it must be remembered that the rush
of population to the great cities was no temporary
movement. It is caused by a final revolt against
that malignant relic of the dark ages, the country
village and by a healthy craving for the deep, full
life of the metropolis, for contact with the vitalizing
stream of humanity."—Pritchell's "Handbook of
Economics," page 247.
Sometimes people from Hillsboro leave our
forgotten valley, high among the Green Mountains,
and "go down to the city," as the phrase runs, They
always come back exclaiming that they should
think New Yorkers would just die of lonesomeness,
and crying out in an ecstasy of relief that it does
seem so good to get back where there are some
folks. After the desolate isolation of city streets,
empty of humanity, filled only with hurrying ghosts,
the vestibule of our church after morning service
fills one with an exalted realization of the great
numbers of the human race. It is like coming into a
warmed and lighted room, full of friendly faces,
after wandering long by night in a forest peopled
only with flitting shadows. In the phantasmagoric
pantomime of the city, we forget that there are so
many real people in all the world, so diverse, so
unfathomably human as those who meet us in thelittle post-office on the night of our return to
Hillsboro.
Like any other of those gifts of life which gratify
insatiable cravings of humanity, living in a country
village conveys a satisfaction which is
incommunicable. A great many authors have
written about it, just as a great many authors have
written about the satisfaction of being in love, but in
the one, as in the other case, the essence of the
thing escapes. People rejoice in sweethearts
because all humanity craves love, and they thrive
in country villages because they crave human life.
Now the living spirit of neither of these things can
be caught in a net of words. All the foolish, fond
doings of lovers may be set down on paper by
whatever eavesdropper cares to take the trouble,
but no one can realize from that record anything of
the glory in the hearts of the unconscious two. All
the queer grammar and insignificant surface
eccentricities of village character may be ruthlessly
reproduced in every variety of dialect, but no one
can guess from that record the abounding flood of
richly human life which pours along the village
street.
This tormenting inequality between the thing felt
and the impression conveyed had vexed us
unceasingly until one day Simple Martin, the town
fool, who always says our wise things, said one of
his wisest. He was lounging by the watering-trough
one sunny day in June, when a carriage-load of
"summer folk" from Windfield over the mountain
stopped to water their horses. They asked him, asthey always, always ask all of us, "For mercy's
sake, what do you people do all the time, away off
here, so far from everything."
Simple Martin was not irritated, or perplexed, or
rendered helplessly inarticulate by this question, as
the rest of us had always been. He looked around
him at the lovely, sloping lines of Hemlock
Mountain, at the Necronett River singing in the
sunlight, at the familiar, friendly faces of the people
in the street, and he answered in astonishment at
the ignorance of his questioners, "Do? Why, we
jes' live!"
We felt that he had explained us once and for all.
We had known that, of course, but we hadn't
before, in our own phrase, "sensed it." We just live.
And sometimes it seems to us that we are the only
people in America engaged in that most wonderful
occupation. We know, of course, that we must be
wrong in thinking this, and that there must be
countless other Hillsboros scattered everywhere,
rejoicing as we do in an existence which does not
necessarily make us care-free or happy, which
does not in the least absolve us from the necessity
of working hard (for Hillsboro is unbelievably poor
in money), but which does keep us alive in every
fiber of our sympathy and thrilling with the
consciousness of the life of others.
A common and picturesque expression for a
common experience runs, "It's so noisy I can't hear
myself think." After a visit to New York we feel that
its inhabitants are so deafened by the constant