The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862

THE WHITE HILLS IN OCTOBER

Our town friends, who fly from the heat and dust, and menacing diseases and insupportable ennui, of their city residence during the months of July and August, may have an escape, but they have little enjoyment. We admire the heroism with which they endure, year after year, the discomforts of a country hotel, or the packing in the narrow, half-furnished bed-rooms and rather warm attics of rural lodging-houses, and the general abatement and contraction of creature-comforts, in such startling contrast to the abounding luxuries of their own city palaces. But they are right. The country, at any discount, is better, in the fearful heats of July and August, than the town with its hot, unquiet nights and polluted air. Any hillside or valley in the country, and a shelter under any roof in or upon them, with the broad cope of heaven above, (not cut into patches and fragments by intervening walls and chimney-tops,) and broad fields, and grass, and corn, and woodlands, and their flowers and freshening dews and breezes, and all Nature's infinite variety, is better than every appliance and contrivance of luxury, with the din, the suffocation, and unrest of city life.

Yes, our city friends are right in their summer flight from

'–the street,Filled with its ever-shifting train;'

but they must not flatter themselves that their mere glimpse of country life—their mere snatch at its midsummer beauty, the one free-drawn breath of their wearied spirit—is acquaintance with it. As well might one who had seen Rosalind, the most versatile of Shakspeare's heroines, only in her court-dress at her uncle the duke's ball, guess at her infinite variety of charm in the Forest of Ardennes. Nature holds her drawing-room in July and August. She wears her fullest and richest dresses then; if we may speak flippantly without offense to the simplicity of her majesty, she is then en pleine toilette. But any other of the twelve is more picturesque than the summer months: blustering March, with its gushing streams tossing off their icy fetters; changeful April, with its greening fields and glancing birds; sweet, budding, blossoming May; flowery June; fruitful September; golden, glorious October; dreary, thoughtful November; and all of Winter, with its potent majesty and heroic adversity.

But let our citizens come to our rural districts; the more, the better for them! Only let them not imagine they get that 'enough' which is 'as good as a feast.'

This preamble was naturally suggested by our autumnal life in the country, and by a recurrence to a late delightful passage through the 'White Hills of New Hampshire.'

'That resort of people that do passIn travel to and fro'

during the intense months of July and August, we found in October so free from visitors, that we might have fancied ourselves the discoverers of that upland region of beauty, unparalleled, so far as we know, in all the traveled parts of our country. And for the benefit of those who shall come after us, for all who have their highest enjoyment, perhaps their best instruction, in Nature's 'free school,' we intended to give some brief notices of our tour, in the hope of extending the traveling season into October by imparting some faint idea of the startling beauty of this brilliant month in the mountains; but what we might have said was happily superseded.

At a little inn in a small town, after we came down from the 'high places,' we met a party of friends who had preceded us along the whole route by a day. A rain came on, and we were detained together for twenty-four hours. We agreed to pass the evening in a reciprocal reading of the brief notes of our journey. It came last to the turn of my friend, a very charming young person, whom I shall take the liberty to call Mary Langdon. She blushed and stammered, and protested against being a party to the contribution.

'Mine,' she said, 'is a long letter to my cousin, which I began before we left home.'

'So much the better,' we rejoined, 'for the pleasure will be the longer.'

'But it has been written in every mood of feeling.'

'Therefore,' we urged, 'the more variety.'

At last, driven to the wall, she threw a nice morocco letter-case into my lap, saying:

'Take it and read it to yourself, and you will see why I positively can not read it aloud.'

So we gave up our entreaties. I read the letter-journal after I went to my room. The reading cheated me of an hour's sleep; perhaps because I had just intensely enjoyed the country my friend described; and in the morning I begged Miss Langdon's permission to publish it. She at first vehemently objected, saying it would be in the highest degree indelicate to publish so much of her own story as was inextricably interwoven with the journey.

'But, dear child,' I urged, 'who that reads The Continental knows you? And besides, when this is published, (if indeed the Messrs. Editors of that popular journal graciously permit it to see the light,) you will be on the other side of the Atlantic; and before you return, this record will be forgotten, for, alas! we contributors to Monthlies do not write for immortality.'

'But for the briefest mortality I am not fitted to write,' she pleaded.

I rather smiled at the novelty of one hesitating to write for the public because not fitted for the task; and, thinking of 'the fools that rushed in,' (there is small aptness in the remainder of the familiar quotation,) I continued to urge till my young friend yielded, on my promising to omit passages which relate to the emotions and rites of the inner temple; Mary Langdon not partaking that incomprehensible frankness or child-like hallucination which enables some of our very best writers—Mrs. Browning, for instance—to impart, by sonnets and in various vehicles of prose and verse, to the curious and all-devouring public those secrets from the heart's holy of holies that one would hardly confess to a lover or a priest.

It is to our purpose, writing, as we profess to do, pour l'utile, that our young friend indulged little in sentiment that her circumstances rendered dangerous to her peace, and that, being a country-bred New-England girl, she conscientiously, set down the coarser realities essential to the well-being of a traveler—breakfasts, dinners, etc. But before proceeding to her journal, I must introduce my debutante, if she who will probably make but a single appearance before the public may be so styled.

Mary Langdon is still on the threshold of life; at least those who have reached threescore would deem her so, as she is not more than three-and-twenty. The freshness of her youth has been preserved by a simple and rather retired country-life. A total abstinence from French novels and other light reading has left the purity and candor of her youth unscathed by their blight and weather-stain. Would that this tree of the knowledge of evil—not good and evil—were never transplanted into our New World. 'If ye eat of it,' your love of what is natural and simple 'will surely die;' ye will lose your perception of the sweet odors of the flowers Providence has sown along your path, and the vile exhalations from these fruits of corrupted genius will hide from you the star of duty—perhaps Nature's sternest light, but her best.

Mary Langdon's simplicity is that of truth, not of ignorance. Her father has given her what he calls 'a good old-fashioned English education;' that means, he says, that 'she thoroughly knows how to read, write, and cipher, which few girls brought up at French boarding-schools do.' As might be suspected from the practical ideas in her narrative, our young friend has had that complete development of her faculties which arises out of the necessities of country-life in its best aspects. There is hardly a position in our country, now, so isolated but one may 'follow the arts' if one chooses, foreign artists and accomplished exiles pervading our country parts. Mary has availed herself of the facilities thus afforded to cultivate a musical talent and temperament, and acquire enough of the foreign languages to open their literature to her. Strangers do not call Mary Langdon handsome; but her friends do, and they marvel that her fair oval face, her spirited expression, tempered by the sweetest mouth and most pearly and expressive teeth, do not strike all eyes. And then she is so buoyant, so free of step and frank of speech, that while others are slowly winding their way to your affections, she springs into your heart.

With due respect to seniority, we should have presented Mr. Langdon before his daughter. On being called on for his journal, he said he was not 'such a confounded fool as to keep one for any portion of his life. He should as soon think of crystallizing soap-bubbles. He had dotted down a few memoranda in his memorandum book, as warnings to future travelers, and we were welcome to them; though he thought we were too mountain-mad to profit by them, if indeed any body ever profited by any body else's experience!' The fact was, the dear old gentleman had left home in a very unquiet state of mind. He hated at all times leaving his home, abounding in comforts. He detested travel under what he termed 'alleviating circumstances.' He was rather addicted to growling; this English instinct came over with his progenitor in the Mayflower, and half a dozen generations had not sufficed to subdue it. But Mr. Langdon's 'bark is worse than his bite.' In truth his 'bite' is like that of a teething child's, resulting from a derangement of sweet and loving elements.

We found our old friend's memoranda so strongly resembling the grumbling of our traveling cousins from over the water, that we think it may be edifying to print it in a parallel column, as a per contra, illustrating the effects of the lights or shadows that emanate from our own minds. Providence provides the banquet; its relish or disrelish depends on the appetite of the guest.

But to Mary Langdon's letter, which, as it was begun before she left home, bears its first date there:

'Lake-Side, 28th September.—My Dear Sue: I have not much more to tell you than my last contained. Carl Heiner left our neighborhood last week, determined to return by the next steamer to Dusseldorf. We were both very wretched at this final parting. But as I have often seen people making great sacrifices to others, and then letting them lose all the benefit of the sacrifice, by the manner of it, I summoned up courage, and appeared before my father calm and acquiescing, and—you will think me passionless, perhaps hard-hearted—I soon became so. I read, over and over again, your arguments, and I confess I was willing to be persuaded by them. But, after all, my point of sight is not yours, and you can not see objects in the proportions and relations that I do. You say I have exaggerated notions of filial duty, that I have come to mature age and ripe judgment, and that I should decide and act for myself; that in the nature of things the conjugal must supersede the filial relation, and that I have no right to sacrifice my life-long happiness to the remnant of my father's days; and above all, that I am foolish to give in to his prejudices, and selfishness, you added, dear, and did not quite efface the word. Now I see there is much reason in what you say, and I have only to answer that I can not leave my father with a shadow of his disapprobation. I can not and I will not. Our hearts have grown together. God forms the bond that ties the child to the parent, and we make the other, and rotten it often proves. Susy, you lost your parents when you were so young, that you can not tell what I feel for my surviving one. Since my mother's death and Alice's marriage, he has lived in such dependence on me, that I can't tell what his life would be if I were to leave him; and I will not. You tell me this is unnatural, and a satisfactory proof to you that I do not love Carl Heiner. O Sue–'

'Here must be our first hiatus. We can only say that the outpouring of our young friend's heart satisfied us that beneath her serene surface there was an unfathomable well of feeling, and that her friend must have been convinced that 'love's reason' is not always without reason. The letter proceeds:

'I very well know that my father is prejudiced, Sue, but old men's prejudices become a part and parcel of themselves, and they can not be cured of them. My father's do not spring from any drop of bitterness, for he has not one—nor from egotism, for he has none of it; but, as you know, his early life was in Boston, and his only society is there, and he naturally partakes the opinions of his cotemporaries, who—the few surviving—believe all foreigners to be a sort of 'outside barbarians,' and especially regard those who have participated in the revolutionary movements of Europe as impertinent invaders of our exclusive birthright to 'liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.' Artists, in the creed of these good old gentlemen, are mere vagrants; and so my father comes to look upon Carl's intense love of his art, and his confidence in his future success, justified as it is by that already achieved, as a mere hallucination. So it is all ended—for the present. How subtle is hope! it still lurks in my heart in spite of the strongest probability that all is ended forever.'

Glen-House, White Hills, October 3d.—I am resuming my unfinished letter to you, my dear Sue, much nearer heaven than I began it. The day of Carl's sailing from New-York, my father proposed to me to go to Boston, take up Alice there, and come up to the hill-country. Dear father! he was offering me a lump of sugar after the bitter medicine, and I accepted it, sure at least of a momentary sweet sensation, and very sure that my poor father felt comforted by the self-complacency flowing from the enormous sacrifice he was making in coming up to the highlands at this cold season. My sister was glad enough to get a holiday from her nursery, so, on Monday, the second of October, a mellow, beautiful day, we came into Boston to take the two o'clock cars for Portland. We had three hours upon our hands, which were pleasantly filled up by visits to a studio and a picture-shop, and finally to refresh our mortal part, which had been running down while we were feasting the immortal, to a restaurateur's.

We groped our way up-stairs into a little back-room in School street, where, if we did not find luxuries and elegance, we did wholesome fare and civility. The rail-ride to Portland was dusty but brief, and we arrived there in time to see its beautiful harbor while the water reflected the roses thrown by the last rays of the sun upon the twilight clouds. We eschewed the hotel, and were kindly received at the boarding-house of a Miss Jones, a single woman somewhere between thirty and forty, who so blends dignity with graciousness, that she made us feel more like guests than customers. One might well mistake her reception for a welcome. Her house is a model, adding variety and abundance to the perfection, in all but these attributes, of the table of an English inn, and having the quiet and completeness, neatness and elegance, that have made the English tavern a classic type of comfort. It seems this house with its high repute, was the inheritance of two sisters from their mother, of whom we were told an anecdote which may be apocryphal, but which certainly would not be discordant with the character of Sir Roger de Coverley. The old lady finished her patriarchal days serenely, and when she was dying, begged that the order of her house might be in no wise disturbed by the event of her decease, but that 'the gentlemen would play their evening game of whist as usual'!

Miss Jones's morning face was as benign as her evening countenance had been. No lady could have administered hospitality with more refinement. We were to be at the station before seven, and just as our carriage-door was closing, it was reopened, and a rough but decent country-woman was shoved in, the driver muttering something about there being no other conveyance for her. My father looked a little awry, not with any thought of remonstrating against the procedure—no native American would do that, you know—but he was just lighting his after-breakfast segar, and he shrunk from the impropriety of smoking in such close quarters, with even such a woman-stranger. 'I hope, madam,' he said, 'a segar does not offend you?' 'La! no, sir,' replied our rustic friend most good-naturedly, 'I like it.' My father's geniality is always called forth by the touch of his segar. He said, with a smile at the corners of his mouth: 'Perhaps, madam, you would try one yourself.' 'I would!' she answered eagerly. My father hospitably selected his best segar, which she took, saying: 'Thank you kindly, sir. I s'pose I can light it at the end of yours.' My dear, fastidious father heroically breasted this juxtaposition, and the good woman, unconscious of any thing but her keen enjoyment of the unlooked-for boon, smoked away vigorously. Alice, who never loses sight of her duty to avert a possible mischance from any human being, rather verdantly suggested, 'that the segar might make her sick.' 'Mercy, child! I am used to pipes,' she replied; which, indeed, we might have inferred from her manner of holding the segar. Her rapid puffs soon resulted in the necessity usually engendered by smoking, and half-rising from her seat it was too evident that she mistook the pure plate-glass for empty space. My father let down the glass as if he had been shot, but she, no wise discomposed, even by our laughing, (for Alice and I could not resist it,) merely said, coolly: 'Why, I didn't calculate right, did I?' There are idiosyncrasies in Yankeedom, there is no doubt of it. We had a long drive to the cars, but there our close companionship, and our acquaintance, too, ended, except that the woman's husband—for she had a husband, some Touchstone, whose 'humor' it was to 'take that no other man would,' came to me, and asked me to put my window down, for his 'wife was sick.' But as I had just observed the good woman munching a bit of mince-pie, I thought that, coming so close upon the segar might possibly offend her stomach more than the fresh, untainted air, so I declined, as courteously as possible, with the answer I have always ready for similar requests, 'that I keep my window open to preserve the lives of the people in the car.' 'That's peculiar!' I heard her murmur; but her serenity was no wise discomposed by my refusal, or her sickness. Surely the imperturbable good-nature of our people is national and peculiar.

By the way, there were notices posted up in these cars, which reminded us that we were near the English Provinces, and under their influence. The notices ran thus: 'Gentlemen are requested not to put their feet on the cushions, and not to spit on the floor, and to maintain a respectable cleanliness. The Conductors are required to enforce these requests.' Must we wait for the millennium to see a like request and like enforcement in our own cars?

We found ourselves surrounded by intelligent people of the country—habitués who gave us all the local information we asked, told us when we came to 'Bryant's Pond,' and that the poor little shrunken stream that still brawled and fretted in its narrowed channel, along which we were gliding, was the Androscoggin. At Gorham, but seven miles from the Glen-House, we found a wagon awaiting passengers, 'the last of the season,' we were told. 'The houses are all closed,' (he spoke technically) added our driver, 'and the cold has already been so tedious that the bubble has burst on Mt. Washington.' 'What! the bubble! What means the man?' exclaimed my father. 'Oh!' said I, 'it is only a poor joke upon some 'nothing venture, nothing have' people who have come here since the company season is past, they have told them the bulb had burst.' 'Oh! the bulb! the bulb!' exclaimed my father; 'oh! that's it, and I don't in the least doubt it' And as we went on slowly making the long ascent, he looked 'sagely sad.' However, Alice was, as she always can be, 'bright without the sun,' and my father kindly protested that the slight sprinkling that, ever and anon, reminded us of our exposure in an open wagon, was no annoyance to him, and he even responded to our exclamations of delight at the wreaths of mist that floated around the mountains, and dropped over their summits, so that our imaginations were not kept in abeyance by definite outlines, and we were at liberty to fancy them just as high as we wished them. The air was as soft as in the early days of September, and our steeds very considerately lingered, thus prolonging our pleasure, so that we came into the Glen-House with keen appetites, a needful blessing, we thought, when Mr. Thompson, its host, said: 'We are not prepared for company in October, and I don't know that we shall find any thing but pork and beans to give you!' My father looked blank, and blanker yet when we were ushered into a parlor where, instead of finding the crackling wood-fire that we had fancied indigenous in these mountains, there was one of those frightful black stoves that have expelled from our life all the poetry of the hearthstone—but, courage, we can open the stove-door, and see a sparkle of light and life.

10 P.M.—Before bidding you good night, dear Sue, I must tell you 'pour encourager les autres' who may come after us that our scrupulous host performed so much better than he promised, that when we were summoned to our dinner it was served in a cosy little room, as neatly as a home dinner, and hot, which a hotel meal, in the season, never is, and that the ghost of the pork and beans which had terrified us, was exorcised by actual tender chickens, fresh eggs, and plentiful accessories of vegetables and pies; and our man, William, the driver, was converted into a waiter, doing his part as if he were 'native to the manner.'

[N.B.—Our old friend's memorandum was scanty, and so we publish but a small extract from it. We smile at his infirmities—more in love than ridicule—and are not fond of proclaiming them, and only do so in this brief extract to justify our assertion that his traveling temper reminded us of English tourists, who would seem to make it a point to turn their plates bottom-side upward. The father's and daughter's records of the same scenes are both true. The one is the right, the other the wrong side of the tapestry. Strange, that any eye should make the fatal mistake of looking at the last rather than the first.]

September 29th, Anno Domini 18—. – Left my comfortable lowland home for unknown parts, and known mountain regions of snow and ice. The Lord willing, I am sure of one pleasure—coming home!

Monday Evening.—We had three mortal hours on our hands this morning in Boston. I called on my dear old surviving friends of the – family. Not one of them, they tell me, has yet risked his life in a rail-car. Wisdom is not extinct! Called on dear Widow O–, who gave me a nice lunch of pickled oysters, rolls and butter, and a glass of old Madeira. Meantime the girls were ranging round studios(?) and picture-shops. This rage for art has come in with the foreign tongues, since my time. Picked them up at a restaurateur's. What a misnomer! What refreshment could be found in the little back-parlor of a shop, with herds coming in and herd going out, and a few faint rays of light stealing in between the windows and the walls of back-buildings surrounding them? Came in the cars to Portland. Dust disgusting! Shall never again see the original color of my coat! Dust laid on inches deep, the continual presence of a mob, and peril to life and limb; death staring you in the face, ready to grab you at any moment. This is what we get by the modern improvement of rail-cars over a gentleman's carriage, with select and elect friends, and leisure to look at a beautiful country! Travelers now are prisoners under sentence of probable death—their jailer being called a conductor. Oh! I cry with my old friend Touchstone: 'When I was at home, I was in a better place!'

Rather a nice house, this of the Misses Jones—old-fashioned, neatness, and comfort. But the lady should not favor us with the company of her guest! Bad butter for tea. And my daughters pronounce the house perfect!

Tuesday Morning.—Bad butter again! could eat nothing.

Tuesday Afternoon.—Happy illustration from a smoking old woman, this morning, of the pleasant accessories of railroad traveling. Found only an open wagon at Gorham, and a rain impending. Convenience of travelers much talked of, but in my opinion, the convenience of those who transport them is alone consulted.