The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III | Page 2

the Blue Hills, and in the odorous breath of pines and cedars, it
chances to be the most enchanting bit of unlaced disheveled country
within fifty miles of Boston, which, moreover, can be reached in half
an hour's ride by railway. But the nearest railway station (Heaven be
praised!) is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw.
Ponkapog has one mail a day; two mails a day would render the place
uninhabitable.
The village--it looks like a compact village at a distance, but unravels
and disappears the moment you drive into it--has quite a large floating
population. I do not allude to the perch and pickerel in Ponkapog Pond.
Along the Old Bay Road, a highway even in the Colonial days, there
are a number of attractive villas and cottages straggling off toward
Milton, which are occupied for the summer by people from the city.
These birds of passage are a distinct class from the permanent
inhabitants, and the two seldom closely assimilate unless there has been
some previous connection. It seemed to me that our new neighbors
were to come under the head of permanent inhabitants; they had built
their own house, and had the air of intending to live in it all the year
round.

"Are you not going to call on them?" I asked my wife one morning.
"When they call on us," she replied lightly.
"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers."
This was said as seriously as the circumstance demanded; but my wife
turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to her
intuitions in these matters.
She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "Not at
home" would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out of
our way to be courteous.
I saw a great deal of our neighbors, nevertheless. Their cottage lay
between us and the post-office--where he was never to be met with by
any chance--and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working in the
garden. Floriculture did not appear so much an object as exercise.
Possibly it was neither; maybe they were engaged in digging for
specimens of those arrowheads and flint hatchets, which are continually
coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which the
plowshare 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 newcomers 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 ground, 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 hand-saw
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,