My Summer with Doctor Singletary | Page 3

John Greenleaf Whittier
the sudden alternations of May, from the blandest of southwest
breezes to the terrible and icy eastern blasts which sweep our seaboard
like the fabled sanser, or wind of death. The buoyancy and vigor, the
freshness and beauty of life seemed leaving me. The flesh and the spirit
were no longer harmonious. I was tormented by a nightmare feeling of
the necessity of exertion, coupled with a sense of utter inability. A
thousand plans for my own benefit, or the welfare of those dear to me,
or of my fellow-men at large, passed before me; but I had no strength to
lay hold of the good angels and detain them until they left their blessing.
The trumpet sounded in my ears for the tournament of life; but I could
not bear the weight of my armor. In the midst of duties and
responsibilities which I clearly comprehended, I found myself yielding
to the absorbing egotism of sickness. I could work only when the sharp
rowels of necessity were in my sides.

It needed not the ominous warnings of my acquaintance to convince me
that some decisive change was necessary. But what was to be done? A
voyage to Europe was suggested by my friends; but unhappily I
reckoned among them no one who was ready, like the honest laird of
Dumbiedikes, to inquire, purse in hand, "Will siller do it?" In casting
about for some other expedient, I remembered the pleasant
old-fashioned village of Peewawkin, on the Tocketuck River. A few
weeks of leisure, country air, and exercise, I thought might be of
essential service to me. So I turned my key upon my cares and studies,
and my back to the city, and one fine evening of early June the mail
coach rumbled over Tocketuck Bridge, and left me at the house of Dr.
Singletary, where I had been fortunate enough to secure bed and board.
The little village of Peewawkin at this period was a well-preserved
specimen of the old, quiet, cozy hamlets of New England. No huge
factory threw its evil shadow over it; no smoking demon of an engine
dragged its long train through the streets; no steamboat puffed at its
wharves, or ploughed up the river, like the enchanted ship of the
Ancient Mariner,--
"Against the wind, against the tide, Steadied with upright keel."
The march of mind had not overtaken it. It had neither printing-press
nor lyceum. As the fathers had done before them, so did its inhabitants
at the time of my visit. There was little or no competition in their
business; there were no rich men, and none that seemed over-anxious to
become so. Two or three small vessels were annually launched from
the carpenters' yards on the river. It had a blacksmith's shop, with its
clang of iron and roar of bellows; a pottery, garnished with its coarse
earthen-ware; a store, where molasses, sugar, and spices were sold on
one side, and calicoes, tape, and ribbons on the other. Three or four
small schooners annually left the wharves for the St. George's and
Labrador fisheries. Just back of the village, a bright, noisy stream,
gushing out, like a merry laugh, from the walnut and oak woods which
stretched back far to the north through a narrow break in the hills,
turned the great wheel of a grist-mill, and went frolicking away, like a
wicked Undine, under the very windows of the brown, lilac-shaded
house of Deacon Warner, the miller, as if to tempt the good man's
handsome daughters to take lessons in dancing. At one end of the little
crescent-shaped village, at the corner of the main road and the green

lane to Deacon Warner's mill, stood the school-house,--a small, ill-
used, Spanish-brown building, its patched windows bearing
unmistakable evidence of the mischievous character of its inmates. At
the other end, farther up the river, on a rocky knoll open to all the
winds, stood the meeting-house,--old, two story, and full of
windows,--its gilded weathercock glistening in the sun. The bell in its
belfry had been brought from France by Skipper Evans in the latter part
of the last century. Solemnly baptized and consecrated to some holy
saint, it had called to prayer the veiled sisters of a convent, and tolled
heavily in the masses for the dead. At first some of the church felt
misgivings as to the propriety of hanging a Popish bell in a Puritan
steeple-house; but their objections were overruled by the minister, who
wisely maintained that if Moses could use the borrowed jewels and
ornaments of the Egyptians to adorn and beautify the ark of the Lord, it
could not be amiss to make a Catholic bell do service in an Orthodox
belfry. The space between the school and the meeting-house was
occupied by some fifteen or twenty
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