Only an Incident | Page 2

certainly only one short step removed from it. And added to all these
good traits, Joppa was a beautiful place. There were a few common,
ugly little houses in it, of course, but they were all tucked away out of
sight at one end, constituting what was known as "the village," while
the real Joppa meant in the thoughts of the inhabitants only the West
End so to speak, where was a series of pretty villas and commodious
mansions running along a broad, handsome street, and stretching for
quite a distance along the border of the lake. For, oh! best of all, Joppa
had a lake. To speak of Joppa in the presence of a Joppite, and not in
the same breath to mention the lake with an appreciative adjective, was
to make as irrevocable a mistake as to be in conversation with a poet
and forget to quote from his latest poem; for next to their wives, their
dinners, and their ease, the Joppites loved their beautiful little lake. And
they had cause thus to love it, for apart from its exquisite charm as the
main feature of their landscape, it gave them a substantial reason for
existence. What could they have done with their dolce far niente lives,
but for the fishing and rowing and sailing and bathing and sliding and
skating which it afforded them in turn? It was all they had to keep them
from settling down into a Rip Van Winkle sleep, this dear little restless

lake, that coaxed them out of their land-torpor, and forced them
occasionally to lend a manly hand to a manly pursuit. For there was this
distinguishing peculiarity about Joppa, that no one in it seemed to need
to work, or to have any manner of business whatever. Its society,
outside of the village, was formed wholly of cultivated, refined,
wealthy people, who had nothing in the world to do, but idly to eat and
drink up the riches of the previous generation. It is a widely admitted
truth, that one generation always gathers for another, never for itself,
and that the generation which is thus generously gathered for, is
invariably found willing to sacrifice without a murmur any latent duty
to harvest on its own account, consenting to live out its life softly upon
the hard-earned savings of its predecessors, without regard to posterity,
and calling itself "gentlemen" where its fathers were content to be
known as "men."
So this was Joppa, a place mighty in its own conceit, and high too in
the estimate of others, to whom it was becoming known as the gayest
and the prettiest of all dear little summer resorts; and thither strangers
were beginning to flock in considerable numbers each year, made
warmly welcome by the Joppites as an occasion for breaking out into
an unending round of parties and picnics and dinners and lunches and
teas, and even breakfasts when there was not room to crowd in any
thing else. The summer was one continual whirl from beginning to end.
There were visitors and visits; there was giving and receiving; there
were flirtations and rumors of flirtations; there was everything the
human heart could desire in the way of friendly hospitality and liveliest
entertainment. Saratoga might be well enough, and Newport would do
in its way; but for solid perfection, said the Joppites, there was no place
in the world quite like Joppa.
But unknown to itself, Joppa nursed one apostate in its midst, one
unavowed but benighted little heretic, who so far from sharing these
sentiments and offering up nightly thanksgiving that despite her great
unworthiness she had been suffered to be born in Joppa, made it one of
her most fervent and reiterated petitions that she might not always have
to live there; that some time, if she were very good and very patient, it
might be granted her to go. She was so weary of it all: of the busy

idleness and the idle business, of the unthinking gayety and the gay
thoughtlessness, and of the nothingness that made up its all. She
wanted, she did not exactly know what, only something different; and
to go, she did not quite know where, only somewhere else. But she had
been born in Joppa, (quite without her permission,) and in Joppa she
had lived for all of twenty-four healthful, tranquil, uneventful years,
spending semi-occasional winters in New York, and, unlike all other
Joppites, returning always more and more discontented with her native
place. Who could ever have expected such treason in the heart of dear
little Phebe Lane? Of course it would not have mattered much had it
been suspected, since it was only Phebe Lane after all who entertained
it,--little Phebe Lane, whose ancestors, though good and well-born
enough, did not hail