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

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 Mycen?, 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, 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