The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | Page 4

homes on high terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a
greater age here, for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed; and in these
rides he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village. The nurse used
to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the
child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and
steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed
embankment, and violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and
golds and purples and curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out
in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the
tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.
When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently dragged nurse,
and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that almost perpendicular
hill he would venture, each time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city. He
would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial
gables to the shady Benefit Street corner, where before him was a wooden antique with
an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a
bit of primal farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen
vestiges of Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan elms cast a
restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long lines of the
pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals. On the
eastern side they were set high over basements with railed double flights of stone steps,
and the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, and red
heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming
so visible.
Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old "Town Street" that
the founders had laid out at the river's edge in 1636. Here ran innumerable little lanes
with leaning, huddled houses of immense antiquity; and fascinated though he was, it was
long before he dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn out a
dream or a gateway to unknown terrors. He found it much less formidable to continue
along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St. John's hidden churchyard and the rear of the
1761 Colony House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington
stopped. At Meeting Street - the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other periods -
he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the highway
had to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the west, glimpsing the old brick
colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient Sign of Shakespeare's
Head where the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was printed before the
Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist Church of 1775, luxurious with its

matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian roofs and cupolas hovering by. Here and to the
southward the neighbourhood became better, flowering at last into a marvellous group of
early mansions; but still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west,
spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the
wicked old water-front recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot vice and squalor,
rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with such surviving alley names as
Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and
Cent.
Sometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young Ward would venture down
into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps, twisted
balustrades, swarthy faces, and nameless odours; winding from South Main to South
Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers still touched, and
returning northward at this lower level past the steep-roofed 1816 warehouses and the
broad square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773 Market House still stands firm on its
ancient arches. In that square he would pause to drink in the bewildering beauty of the
old town as it rises on its eastward bluff, decked with its two Georgian spires and
crowned by the vast new Christian Science dome as London is crowned by St. Paul's. He
like mostly to reach this point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the
Market House and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around
the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor. After a long