Our New Neighbors At Ponkapog | Page 2

is scarcely an acre in which the
ploughshare has not turned up some primitive stone weapon or
domestic utensil, disdainfully left to us by the red men who once held
this domain--an ancient tribe called the Punkypoags, a forlorn
descendant of which, one Polly Crowd, figures in the annual Blue Book,
down to the close of the Southern war, as a state pensioner. At that
period she appears to have struck a trail to the Happy Hunting Grounds.
I quote from the local historiographer.

Whether they were developing a kitchen garden, or emulating Professor
Schliemann at Mycenæ, the new-comers were evidently persons of
refined musical taste: the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable
sweetness, although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a
morning by the high gate and listen to her executing an arietta,
conjecturally at some window upstairs, for the house was not visible
from the turnpike. The husband, somewhere about the grounds, would
occasionally respond with two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal,
Arcadian business. They seemed very happy together, these two
persons, who asked no odds whatever of the community in which they
had settled themselves.
There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I
admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest in
the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who had
run off and got married clandestinely. I willingly acquitted them,
however, of having done anything unlawful; for, to change a word in
the lines of the poet,
"It is a joy to think the best We may of human kind."
Admitting the hypothesis of elopement, there was no mystery in their
neither sending nor receiving letters. But where did they get their
groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them--that is an enigma
apart--but the groceries themselves. No express wagon, no butcher's
cart, no vehicle of any description, was ever observed to stop at their
domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment
in the village--an inexhaustible little bottle of a shop which, I advertise
it gratis, can turn out anything in the way of groceries, from a handsaw
to a pocket-handkerchief. I confess that I allowed this unimportant
detail of their ménage to occupy more of my speculation than was
creditable to me.
In several respects our neighbors reminded me of those inexplicable
persons we sometimes come across in great cities, though seldom or
never in suburban places, where the field may be supposed too
restricted for their operations--persons who have no perceptible means
of subsistence, and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold

no government bonds, they possess no real estate (our neighbors did
own their house), they toil not, neither do they spin; yet they reap all
the numerous soft advantages that usually result from honest toil and
skilful spinning. How do they do it? But this is a digression, and I am
quite of the opinion of the old lady in "David Copperfield," who says,
"Let us have no meandering!"
Though my wife had declined to risk a ceremonious call on our
neighbors as a family, I saw no reason why I should not speak to the
husband as an individual, when I happened to encounter him by the
wayside. I made several approaches to do so, when it occurred to my
penetration that my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. I
resolved to put the suspicion to the test, and one forenoon, when he was
sauntering along on the opposite side of the road, in the vicinity of
Fisher's sawmill, I deliberately crossed over to address him. The
brusque manner in which he hurried away was not to be misunderstood.
Of course I was not going to force myself upon him.
It was at this time that I began to formulate uncharitable suppositions
touching our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some
of my choicest fruit trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to
keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe to
pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference
between meum and tuum does not seem to be very strongly developed
in the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.
I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister
impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I
despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road
until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was--well, not
exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at intervals,
and passed him without recognition; at