Hillsboro People | Page 6

Flossie
Merton, the ex-factory girl, who came up from Albany to wait at the
tavern, and who is said to have a taste for drink herself.
Old Mrs. Perkins, whom everybody had thought sunk in embittered
discontent about the poverty and isolation of her last days, roused
herself not long ago and gave Ellen her cherished tortoise-shell
back-comb, and her pretty white silk shawl to wear to village parties;
and racked with rheumatism, as the old woman is, she says she sits up
at night to watch the young people go back from choir rehearsal so that
she can see which girl Nelse is "beauing home." Could the most artfully
contrived piece of fiction more blessedly sweep the self-centered
complainings of old age into generous and vitalizing interest in the
lives of others?
As for the "pity and terror," the purifying effects of which are so
vaunted in Greek tragedies, could Aeschylus himself have plunged us
into a more awful desolation of pity than the day we saw old Squire
Marvin being taken along the street on his way to the insane asylum?
All the self-made miseries of his long life were in our minds, the wife
he had loved and killed with the harsh violence of a nature he had never
learned to control, the children he had adored unreasonably and spoiled
and turned against, and they on him with a violence like his own, the
people he had tried to benefit with so much egotistic pride mixed in his
kindness that his favors made him hated, his vanity, his generosity, his

despairing outcries against the hostility he had so well earned ... at the
sight of the end of all this there was no heart in Hillsboro that was not
wrung with a pity and terror more penetrating and purifying even than
Shakespeare has made the centuries feel for Lear.
Ah, at the foot of Hemlock Mountain we do not need books to help us
feel the meaning of life!
Nor do we need them to help us feel the meaning of death. You, in the
cities, living with a feverish haste in the present only, and clutching at
it as a starving man does at his last crust, you cannot understand the
comforting sense we have of belonging almost as much to the past and
future as to the present. Our own youth is not dead to us as yours is,
from the lack of anything to recall it to you, and people we love do not
slip quickly into that bitter oblivion to which the dead are consigned by
those too hurried to remember. They are not remembered perfunctorily
for their "good qualities" which are carved on their tombstones, but all
the quaint and dear absurdities which make up personality are
embalmed in the leisurely, peaceable talk of the village, still enriched
by all that they brought to it. We are not afraid of the event which men
call death, because we know that, in so far as we have deserved it, the
same homely immortality awaits us.
Every spring, at the sight of the first cowslip, our old people laugh and
say to each other, "Will you ever forget how Aunt Dorcas used to take
us children out cowslipping, and how she never thought it 'proper' to
lift her skirt to cross the log by the mill, and always fell in the brook?"
The log has moldered away a generation ago, the mill is only a heap of
blackened timbers, but as they speak, they are not only children again,
but Aunt Dorcas lives again for them and for us who never saw her ...
dear, silly, kind old Aunt Dorcas, past-mistress in the lovely art of
spoiling children. Just so the children we have spoiled, the people we
have lived with, will continue to keep us living with them. We shall
have time to grow quite used to whatever awaits us after the tangled
rosebushes of Hillsboro burying-ground bloom over our heads, before
we shall have gradually faded painlessly away from the life of men and
women. We sometimes feel that, almost alone in the harassed and

weary modern world, we love that life, and yet we are the least afraid to
leave it.
It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings us
home to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big
pond by the station is full of stars. Up on the hill the lights of the
village twinkle against the blurred mass of Hemlock Mountain, and
above them the stars again. It is very quiet, the station is black and
deserted, the road winding up to the village glimmers uncertainly in the
starlight, and dark forms hover vaguely about. Strangers say that it is a
very depressing station