Annie Kilburn | Page 4

away from the new houses, in the taste
of some of the Boston suburbs; they generally remained before the old
ones, whose inmates resented the ragged effect that their absence gave
the street. The irregularity had hitherto been of an orderly and
harmonious kind, such as naturally follows the growth of a country
road into a village thoroughfare. The dwellings were placed nearer or
further from the sidewalk as their builders fancied, and the elms that
met in a low arch above the street had an illusive symmetry in the
perspective; they were really set at uneven intervals, and in a line that
wavered capriciously in and out. The street itself lounged and curved
along, widening and contracting like a river, and then suddenly lost
itself over the brow of an upland which formed a natural boundary of
the village. Beyond this was South Hatboro', a group of cottages built
by city people who had lately come in--idlers and invalids, the former
for the cool summer, and the latter for the dry winter. At chance
intervals in the old village new side streets branched from the
thoroughfare to the right and the left, and here and there a Queen Anne
cottage showed its chimneys and gables on them. The roadway under
the elms that kept it dark and cool with their hovering shade, and swept
the wagon-tops with their pendulous boughs at places, was unpaved;
but the sidewalks were asphalted to the last dwelling in every direction,

and they were promptly broken out in winter by the public
snow-plough.
Miss Kilburn saw them in the spring, when their usefulness was least
apparent, and she did not know whether to praise the spirit of progress
which showed itself in them as well as in other things at Hatboro'. She
had come prepared to have misgivings, but she had promised herself to
be just; she thought she could bear the old ugliness, if not the new.
Some of the new things, however, were not so ugly; the young
station-master was handsome in his railroad uniform, and pleasanter to
the eye than the veteran baggage-master, incongruous in his stiff silk
cap and his shirt sleeves and spectacles. The station itself, one of
Richardson's, massive and low, with red-tiled, spreading veranda roofs,
impressed her with its fitness, and strengthened her for her encounter
with the business architecture of Hatboro', which was of the florid,
ambitious New York type, prevalent with every American town in the
early stages of its prosperity. The buildings were of pink brick, faced
with granite, and supported in the first story by columns of painted iron;
flat-roofed blocks looked down over the low-wooden structures of
earlier Hatboro', and a large hotel had pushed back the old-time tavern,
and planted itself flush upon the sidewalk. But the stores seemed very
good, as she glanced at them from her carriage, and their
show-windows were tastefully arranged; the apothecary's had an
interior of glittering neatness unsurpassed by an Italian apothecary's;
and the provision-man's, besides its symmetrical array of pendent sides
and quarters indoors, had banks of fruit and vegetables without, and a
large aquarium with a spraying fountain in its window.
Bolton, the farmer who had always taken care of the Kilburn place,
came to meet her at the station and drive her home. Miss Kilburn had
bidden him drive slowly, so that she could see all the changes, and she
noticed the new town-hall, with which she could find no fault; the
Baptist and Methodist churches were the same as of old; the Unitarian
church seemed to have shrunk as if the architecture had sympathised
with its dwindling body of worshippers; just beyond it was the village
green, with the soldiers' monument, and the tall white-painted flag-pole,
and the four small brass cannon threatening the points of the compass

at its base.
"Stop a moment, Mr. Bolton," said Miss Kilburn; and she put her head
quite out of the carriage, and stared at the figure on the monument.
It was strange that the first misgiving she could really make sure of
concerning Hatboro' should relate to this figure, which she herself was
mainly responsible for placing there. When the money was subscribed
and voted for the statue, the committee wrote out to her at Rome as one
who would naturally feel an interest in getting something fit and
economical for them. She accepted the trust with zeal and pleasure; but
she overruled their simple notion of an American volunteer at rest, with
his hands folded on the muzzle of his gun, as intolerably hackneyed
and commonplace. Her conscience, she said, would not let her add
another recruit to the regiment of stone soldiers standing about in that
posture on the tops of pedestals all over the country; and so, instead of
going to an