Main Street Read online

edifices arebuilt, as you see, in one generally accordant style, though with suchsubordinate variety as keeps the beholder's curiosity excited, and causeseach structure, like its owner's character, to produce its own peculiarimpression. Most of them have a huge chimney in the centre, with fluesso vast that it must have been easy for the witches to fly out of them asthey were wont to do, when bound on an aerial visit to the Black Man inthe forest. Around this great chimney the wooden house clusters itself,in a whole community of gable-ends, each ascending into its own karatepeak; the second story, with its lattice-windows, projecting over thefirst; and the door, which is perhaps arched, provided on the outsidewith an iron hammer, wherewith the visitor's hand may give a thunderingrat-a-tat.

  The timber framework of these houses, as compared with those of recentdate, is like the skeleton of an old giant, beside the frail bones of amodern man of fashion. Many of them, by the vast strength and soundnessof their oaken substance, have been preserved through a length of timewhich would have tried the stability of brick and stone; so that, in allthe progressive decay and continual reconstruction of the street, downour own days, we shall still behold these old edifices occupying theirlong-accustomed sites. For instance, on the upper corner of that greenlane which shall hereafter be North Street, we see the Curwen House,newly built, with the carpenters still at work on the roof nailing downthe last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner stands anotherdwelling,--destined, at some period of its existence, to be the abode ofan unsuccessful alchemist,--which shall likewise survive to our owngeneration, and perhaps long outlive it. Thus, through the medium ofthese patriarchal edifices, we have now established a sort of kindred andhereditary acquaintance with the Main Street.

  Great as is the transformation produced by a short term of years, eachsingle day creeps through the Puritan settlement sluggishly enough. Itshall pass before your eyes, condensed into the space of a few moments.The gray light of early morning is slowly diffusing itself over thescene; and the bellman, whose office it is to cry the hour at thestreet-corners, rings the last peal upon his hand bell, and goes wearilyhomewards, with the owls, the bats, and other creatures of the night.Lattices are thrust back on their hinges, as if the town were opening itseyes, in the summer morning. Forth stumbles the still drowsy cowherd,with his horn; putting which to his lips, it emits a bellowing bray,impossible to be represented in the picture, but which reaches thepricked-up ears of every cow in the settlement, and tells her that thedewy pasture-hour is come. House after house awakes, and sends the smokeup curling from its chimney, like frosty breath from living nostrils; andas those white wreaths of smoke, though impregnated with earthyadmixtures, climb skyward, so, from each dwelling, does the morningworship--its spiritual essence, bearing up its human imperfection--findits way to the heavenly Father's throne.

  The breakfast-hour being passed, the inhabitants do not, as usual, go totheir fields or workshops, but remain within doors; or perhaps walk thestreet, with a grave sobriety, yet a disengaged and unburdened aspect,that belongs neither to a holiday nor a Sabbath. And, indeed, thispassing day is neither, nor is it a common week-day, although partakingof all the three. It is the Thursday Lecture; an institution which NewEngland has long ago relinquished, and almost forgotten, yet which itwould have been better to retain, as bearing relations to both thespiritual and ordinary life, and bringing each acquainted with the other.The tokens of its observance, however, which here meet our eyes, are ofrather a questionable cast. It is, in one sense, a day of public shame;the day on which transgressors, who have made themselves liable to theminor severities of the Puritan law receive their reward of ignominy. Atthis very moment, this constable has bound an idle fellow to thewhipping-post, and is giving him his deserts with a cat-o'-nine tails.Ever since sunrise, Daniel Fairfield has been standing on the steps ofthe meeting-house, with a halter about his neck, which he is condemned towear visibly throughout his lifetime; Dorothy Talby is chained to a postat the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronlyface, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against herhusband; while, through the bars of that great wooden cage, in the centreof the scene, we discern either a human being or a wild beast, or both inone, whom this public infamy causes to roar, and gnash his teeth, andshake the strong oaken bars, as if he would breakforth, and tear inpieces the little children who have been peeping at him. Such are theprofitable sights that serve the good people to while away the earlierpart of lecture-day. Betimes in the forenoon, a traveller--the firsttraveller that has come hitherward this morning-rides slowly into thestreet on his patient steed. He seems a clergyman; and, as he drawsnear, we recognize the minister of Lynn, who was pre-engaged to lecturehere, and has been revolving his discourse, as he rode through the hoarywilderness. Behold, now, the whole town thronging into the meeting-house,mostly with such sombre visages that the sunshine becomes littlebetter than a shadow when it falls upon them. There go the Thirteen Men,grim rulers of a grim community! There goes John Massey, the firsttown-born child, now a youth of twenty, whose eye wanders with peculiarinterest towards that buxom damsel who comes up the steps at the sameinstant. There hobbles Goody Foster, a sour and bitter old beldam,looking as if she went to curse, and not to pray, and whom many of herneighbors suspect of taking an occasional airing on a broomstick. There,too, slinking shamefacedly in, you observe that same poor do-nothing andgood-for-nothing whom we saw castigated just now at the whipping-post.Last of all, there goes the tithing-man, lugging in a couple of smallboys, whom he has caught at play beneath God's blessed sunshine, in aback lane. What native of Naumkeag, whose recollections go back morethan thirty years, does not still shudder at that dark ogre of hisinfancy, who perhaps had long ceased to have an actual existence, butstill lived in his childish belief, in a horrible idea, and in thenurse's threat, as the Tidy Man!

  It will be hardly worth our while to wait two, or it may be three,turnings of the hour-glass, for the conclusion of the lecture.Therefore, by my control over light and darkness, I cause the dusk, andthen the starless night, to brood over the street; and summon forth againthe bellman, with his lantern casting a gleam about his footsteps, topace wearily from corner to corner, and shout drowsily the hour to drowsyor dreaming ears. Happy are we, if for nothing else, yet because we didnot live in those days. In truth, when the first novelty and stir ofspirit had subsided,--when the new settlement, between the forest-borderand the sea, had become actually a little town,--its daily life must havetrudged onward with hardly anything to diversify and enliven it, whilealso its rigidity could not fail to cause miserable distortions of themoral nature. Such a life was sinister to the intellect, and sinister tothe heart; especially when one generation had bequeathed its religiousgloom, and the counterfeit of its religious ardor, to the next; for thesecharacteristics, as was inevitable, assumed the form both of hypocrisyand exaggeration, by being inherited from the example and precept ofother human beings, and not from an original and spiritual source. Thesons and grandchildren of the first settlers were a race of lower andnarrower souls than their progenitors had been. The latter were stern,severe, intolerant, but not superstitious, not even fanatical; andendowed, if any men of that age were, with a far-seeing worldly sagacity.But it was impossible for the succeeding race to grow up, in heaven'sfreedom, beneath the discipline which their gloomy energy of characterhad established; nor, it may be, have we even yet thrown off all theunfavorable influences which, among many good ones, were bequeathed to usby our Puritan forefathers. Let us thank God for having given us suchancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not lessfervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.

  "What is all this?" cries the critic. "A sermon? If so, it is not inthe bill."

  "Very true," replies the showman; "and I ask pardon of the audience."

  Look now at the street, and observe a strange people entering it. Theirgarments are torn and disordered, their faces haggard, their figuresemaciated; for they have made their way hithe
r through pathless deserts,suffering hunger and hardship, with no other shelter thin a hollow tree,the lair of a wild beast, or an Indian wigwam. Nor, in the mostinhospitable and dangerous of such lodging-places, was there half theperil that awaits them in this thoroughfare of Christian men, with thosesecure dwellings and warm hearths on either side of it, and yondermeeting-house as the central object of the scene. These wanderers havereceived from Heaven a gift that, in all epochs of the world, has broughtwith it the penalties of mortal suffering and persecution, scorn, enmity,and death itself;--a gift that, thus terrible to its possessors, has everbeen most hateful to all other men, since its very existence seems tothreaten the overthrow of whatever else the toilsome ages have builtup;--the gift of a new idea. You can discern it in them, illuminatingtheir faces--their whole persons, indeed, however earthly andcloddish--with a light that