Oldport Days | Page 4

keys of a
church, it seemed pleasant to sit, on a week-day, among its empty pews.
The silent walls appeared to hold the pure essence of the prayers of a
generation, while the routine and the ennui had vanished all away. One
may here do the same with fashion as there with devotion, extracting its
finer flavors, if such there be, unalloyed by vulgarity or sin. In the
winter I can fancy these fine houses tenanted by a true nobility; all the
sons are brave, and all the daughters virtuous. These balconies have
heard the sighs of passion without selfishness; those cedarn alleys have
admitted only vows that were never broken. If the occupant of the
house be unknown, even by name, so much the better. And from homes
more familiar, what lovely childish faces seem still to gaze from the
doorways, what graceful Absences (to borrow a certain poet's phrase)
are haunting those windows!
There is a sense of winter quiet that makes a stranger soon feel at home
in Oldport, while the prospective stir of next summer precludes all
feeling of stagnation. Commonly, in quiet places, one suffers from the
knowledge that everybody would prefer to be unquiet; but nobody has
any such longing here. Doubtless there are aged persons who deplore
the good old times when the Oldport mail-bags were larger than those
arriving at New York. But if it were so now, what memories would
there be to talk about? If you wish for"Syrian peace, immortal
leisure,"--a place where no grown person ever walks rapidly along the
street, and where few care enough for rain to open an umbrella or walk
faster,--come here.
My abode is on a broad, sunny street, with a few great elms overhead,

and with large old houses and grass-banks opposite. There is so little
snow that the outlook in the depth of winter is often merely that of a
paler and leafless summer, and a soft, springlike sky almost always
spreads above. Past the window streams an endless sunny panorama
(for the house fronts the chief thoroughfare between country and
town),--relics of summer equipages in faded grandeur; great, fragrant
hay-carts; vast moving mounds of golden straw; loads of crimson
onions; heaps of pale green cabbages; piles of gray tree-prunings,
looking as if the patrician trees were sending their superfluous wealth
of branches to enrich the impoverished orchards of the Poor Farm;
wagons of sea-weed just from the beach, with bright, moist hues, and
dripping with sea-water and sea-memories, each weed an argosy,
bearing its own wild histories. At this season, the very houses move,
and roll slowly by, looking round for more lucrative quarters next
season. Never have I seen real estate made so transportable as in
Oldport. The purchaser, after finishing and furnishing to his fancy, puts
his name on the door, and on the fence a large white placard inscribed
"For sale". Then his household arrangements are complete, and he can
sit down to enjoy himself.
By a side-glance from our window, one may look down an ancient
street, which in some early epoch of the world's freshness received the
name of Spring Street. A certain lively lady, addicted to daring
Scriptural interpretations, thinks that there is some mistake in the
current versions of Genesis, and that it was Spring Street which was
created in the beginning, and the heavens and earth at some subsequent
period. There are houses in Spring Street, and there is a confectioner's
shop; but it is not often that a sound comes across its rugged pavements,
save perchance (in summer) the drone of an ancient hand-organ, such
as might have been devised by Adam to console his Eve when Paradise
was lost. Yet of late the desecrating hammer and the ear-piercing saw
have entered that haunt of ancient peace. May it be long ere any such
invasion reaches those strange little wharves in the lower town, full of
small, black, gambrel-roofed houses, with projecting eaves that might
almost serve for piazzas. It is possible for an unpainted wooden
building to assume, in this climate, a more time-worn aspect than that
of any stone; and on these wharves everything is so old, and yet so
stunted, you might fancy that the houses had been sent down there to

play during their childhood, and that nobody had ever remembered to
fetch them back.
The ancient aspect of things around us, joined with the softening
influences of the Gulf Stream, imparts an air of chronic languor to the
special types of society which here prevail in winter,--as, for instance,
people of leisure, trades-people living on their summer's gains, and,
finally, fishermen. Those who pursue this last laborious calling are
always lazy to the eye, for they are on shore only in lazy moments.
They work by night or at