By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
It is close upon daybreak. The great wall of pines andhemlocks that keep off the west wind from Stillwater stretchesblack and indeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull,metallic sound, like the guttural twang of a violin string, risesform the frog-invested swamp skirting the highway. Suddenly thebirds stir in their nests over there in the woodland, and breakinto that wild jargoning chorus with which they herald the adventof a new day. In the apple-orchards and among the plum-trees ofthe few gardens in Stillwater, the wrens and the robins and theblue-jays catch up the crystal crescendo, and what a melodiousracket they make of it with their fifes and flutes andflageolets!
The village lies in a trance like death. Possibly not a soulhears this music, unless it is the watchers at the bedside of Mr.Leonard Tappleton, the richest man in town, who has lain dyingthese three days, and cannot last until sunrise. Or perhaps somemother, drowsily hushing her wakeful baby, pauses a moment andlistens vacantly to the birds singing. But who else?
The hubbub suddenly ceases,--ceases as suddenly as itbegan,--and all is still again in the woodland. But it is not sodark as before. A faint glow of white light is discernible behindthe ragged line of the tree-tops. The deluge of the darkness isreceding from the face of the earth, as the mighty waters recededof old.
The roofs and tall factory chimneys of Stillwater are slowlytaking shape in the gloom. Is that a cemetery coming into viewyonder, with its ghostly architecture of obelisks and brokencolumns and huddled head-stones? No, that is only Slocum's MarbleYard, with the finished and unfinished work heaped up likesnowdrifts,--a cemetery in embryo. Here and there in an outlyingfarm a lantern glimmers in the barn-yard: the cattle are havingtheir fodder betimes. Scarlet-capped chanticleer gets himself onthe nearest rail-fence and lifts up his rancorous voice like someirate old cardinal launching the curse of Rome. Something crawlsswiftly along the gray of the serpentine turnpike,--a cart, withthe driver lashing a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by,and is lost in the forest.
Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along thehorizon.
Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun hasbegun to twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic chapel andmake itself known to the doves in the stone belfry of the SouthChurch. The patches of cobweb that here and there clingtremulously to the coarse grass of the inundated meadows haveturned into silver nets, and the mill-pond--it will be steel-bluelater--is as smooth and white as if it had been paved with onevast unbroken slab out of Slocum's Marble Yard. Through a row ofbutton-woods on the northern skirt of the village is seen asquare, lap-streaked building, painted a disagreeable brown, andsurrounded on three sides by a platform,--one of seven or eightsimilar stations strung like Indian heads on a branch thread ofthe Great Sagamore Railway.
Listen! That is the jingle of the bells on the baker's cart asit begins its rounds. From innumerable chimneys the curdled smokegives evidence that the thrifty housewife--or, what is rarer inStillwater, the hired girl--has lighted the kitchen fire.
The chimney-stack of one house at the end of a smallcourt--the last house on the easterly edge of the village, andstanding quite alone--sends up no smoke. Yet the carefullytrained ivy over the porch, and the lemon verbena in a tub at thef