Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer | Page 4

making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

LITERATURE AND LIFE--Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer
by William Dean Howells

STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER
Monday afternoon the storm which had been beating up against the
southeasterly wind nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in the
northwest. The gale increased, and blackened the harbor and whitened
the open sea beyond, where sail after sail appeared round the reef of
Whaleback Light, and ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorages
within.
Since noon cautious coasters of all sorts had been dropping in with a
casual air; the coal schooners and barges had rocked and nodded
knowingly to one another, with their taper and truncated masts, on the
breast of the invisible swell; and the flock of little yachts and
pleasure-boats which always fleck the bay huddled together in the safe
waters. The craft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were

mackerel seiners from Gloucester. They were all of one graceful shape
and one size; they came with all sail set, taking the waning light like
sunshine on their flying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them,
with their seines piled in black heaps between the thwarts. As soon as
they came inside their jibs weakened and fell, and the anchor-chains
rattled from their bows. Before the dark hid them we could have
counted sixty or seventy ships in the harbor, and as the night fell they
improvised a little Venice under the hill with their lights, which
twinkled rhythmically, like the lamps in the basin of St. Mark, between
the Maine and New Hampshire coasts.
There was a dash of rain, and we thought the storm had begun; but that
ended it, as so many times this summer a dash of rain has ended a
storm. The morning came veiled in a fog that kept the shipping at
anchor through the day; but the next night the weather cleared. We
woke to the clucking of tackle, and saw the whole fleet standing
dreamily out to sea. When they were fairly gone, the summer, which
had held aloof in dismay of the sudden cold, seemed to return and
possess the land again; and the succession of silver days and crystal
nights resumed the tranquil round which we thought had ceased.

I.
One says of every summer, when it is drawing near its end, "There
never was such a summer"; but if the summer is one of those which slip
from the feeble hold of elderly hands, when the days of the years may
be reckoned with the scientific logic of the insurance tables and the sad
conviction of the psalmist, one sees it go with a passionate prescience
of never seeing its like again such as the younger witness cannot know.
Each new summer of the few left must be shorter and swifter than the
last: its Junes will be thirty days long, and its Julys and Augusts
thirty-one, in compliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so
small a compass that fourteen of them will rattle round in a week of the
old size like shrivelled peas in a pod.
To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas

put to soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we
first spent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four
hours long. Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where
there is nothing to hurry them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and
muse beside the sea and shore, which are so netted together at Kittery
Point that they hardly know themselves apart. The days, whatever their
length, are divided, not into hours, but into mails. They begin, without
regard to the sun, at eight o'clock, when the first mail comes with a few
letters and papers which had forgotten themselves the night before. At
half-past eleven the great mid-day mail arrives; at four o'clock there is
another indifferent and scattering post, much like that at eight in the
morning; and at seven the last mail arrives with the Boston evening
papers and the New York morning papers, to make you forget any
letters you were looking for. The opening of the mid-day mail is that
which most throngs with summer folks the little postoffice under the
elms, opposite the weather-beaten mansion of Sir William Pepperrell;
but the evening mail attracts a large and mainly disinterested circle of
natives. The day's work on land and sea is then over, and the village
leisure, perched upon fences and stayed against house walls, is of a
picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad, and which I
am not willing to slight on our own ground.

II.
The