My Summer with Dr. Singletary: A Fragment Chapter. II.
by John Greenleaf Whittier
Some Account of Peewawkin on the Tocketuck.
Well and truly said the wise man of old, "Much study is a weariness to
the flesh." Hard and close application through the winter had left me
ill prepared to resist the baleful influences of a New England spring.
I shrank alike from the storms of March, the capricious changes of
April, and the sudden alternations of May, from the blandest of
southwest breezes to the terrible and icy eastern blasts which sweep our
seaboard like the fabled sanser, or wind of death. The buoyancy and
vigor, the freshness and beauty of life seemed leaving me. The flesh
and the spirit were no longer harmonious. I was tormented by a
nightmare feeling of the necessity of exertion, coupled with a sense of
utter inability. A thousand plans for my own benefit, or the welfare of
those dear to me, or of my fellow-men at large, passed before me; but I
had no strength to lay hold of the good angels and detain them until
they left their blessing. The trumpet sounded in my ears for the
tournament of life; but I could not bear the weight of my armor. In the
midst of duties and responsibilities which I clearly comprehended, I
found myself yielding to the absorbing egotism of sickness. I could
work only when the sharp rowels of necessity were in my sides.
It needed not the ominous warnings of my acquaintance to convince me
that some decisive change was necessary. But what was to be done? A
voyage to Europe was suggested by my friends; but unhappily I reckoned
among them no one who was ready, like the honest laird of Dumbiedikes,
to inquire, purse in hand, "Will siller do it?" In casting about for
some other expedient, I remembered the pleasant old-fashioned village of
Peewawkin, on the Tocketuck River. A few weeks of leisure, country air,
and exercise, I thought might be of essential service to me. So I
turned my key upon my cares and studies, and my back to the city, and
one fine evening of early June the mail coach rumbled over Tocketuck
Bridge, and left me at the house of Dr. Singletary, where I had been
fortunate enough to secure bed and board.
The little village of Peewawkin at this period was a well-preserved
specimen of the old, quiet, cozy hamlets of New England. No huge
factory threw its evil shadow over it; no smoking demon of an engine
dragged its long train through the streets; no steamboat puffed at its
wharves, or ploughed up the river, like the enchanted ship of the
Ancient Mariner,--
"Against the wind, against the tide,
Steadied with upright keel."
The march of mind had not overtaken it. It had neither printing-press
nor lyceum. As the fathers had done before them, so did its inhabitants
at the time of my visit. There was little or no competition in their
business; there were no rich men, and none that seemed over-anxious to
become so. Two or three small vessels were annually launched from the
carpenters' yards on the river. It had a blacksmith's shop, with its
clang of iron and roar of bellows; a pottery, garnished with its coarse
earthen-ware; a store, where molasses, sugar, and spices were sold on
one side, and calicoes, tape, and ribbons on the other. Three or four
small schooners annually left the wharves for the St. George's and
Labrador fisheries. Just back of the village, a bright, noisy stream,
gushing out, like a merry laugh, from the walnut and oak woods which
stretched back far to the north through a narrow break in the hills,
turned the great wheel of a grist-mill, and went frolicking away, like a
wicked Undine, under the very windows of the brown, lilac-shaded house
of Deacon Warner, the miller, as if to tempt the good man's handsome
daughters to take lessons in dancing. At one end of the little
crescent-shaped village, at the corner of the main road and the green
lane to Deacon Warner's mill, stood the school-house,--a small, ill-
used, Spanish-brown building, its patched windows bearing unmistakable
evidence of the mischievous character of its inmates. At the other end,
farther up the river, on a rocky knoll open to all the winds, stood the
meeting-house,--old, two story, and full of windows,--its gilded
weathercock glistening in the sun. The bell in its belfry had been
brought from France by Skipper Evans in the latter part of the last
century. Solemnly baptized and consecrated to some holy saint, it had
called to prayer the veiled sisters of a convent, and tolled heavily in
the masses for the dead. At first some of the church felt misgivings as
to the propriety of hanging a Popish bell in a Puritan steeple-house;
but their objections were overruled by the minister, who wisely
maintained that if Moses could use the borrowed jewels and ornaments of
the Egyptians to adorn and beautify the ark of the Lord, it could not be
amiss to make a Catholic bell do service in an Orthodox belfry. The
space between the school and the meeting-house was occupied by some
fifteen or twenty dwellings, many-colored and diverse in age and
appearance. Each one had its green yard in front, its rose-bushes and
lilacs. Great elms, planted a century ago, stretched and interlocked
their heavy arms across the street. The mill-stream, which found its
way into the Tocketuek, near the centre of the village, was spanned by a
rickety wooden bridge, rendered picturesque by a venerable and gnarled
white-oak which hung over it, with its great roots half bared by the
water and twisted among the mossy stones of the crumbling abutment.
The house of Dr. Singletary was situated somewhat apart from the main
street, just on the slope of Blueberry Will,--a great, green swell of
land, stretching far down from the north, and terminating in a steep
bluff at the river side. It overlooked the village and the river a long
way up and down. It was a brown-looking, antiquated mansion, built by
the Doctor's grandfather in the earlier days of the settlement. The
rooms were large and low, with great beams, scaly with whitewash,
running across them, scarcely above the reach of a tall man's head.
Great-throated fireplaces, filled with pine-boughs and flower-pots, gave
promise of winter fires, roaring and crackling in boisterous hilarity,
as if laughing to scorn the folly and discomfort of our modern stoves.
In the porch at the frontdoor were two seats, where the Doctor was
accustomed to sit in fine weather with his pipe and his book, or with
such friends as might call to spend a half hour with him. The lawn in
front had scarcely any other ornament than its green grass, cropped
short by the Doctor's horse. A stone wall separated it from the lane,
half overrun with wild hop, or clematis, and two noble rock-maples
arched over with their dense foliage the little red gate. Dark belts of
woodland, smooth hill pasture, green, broad meadows, and fields of corn
and rye, the homesteads of the villagers, were seen on one hand; while
on the other was the bright, clear river, with here and there a white
sail, relieved against bold, wooded banks, jutting rocks, or tiny
islands, dark with dwarf evergreens. It was a quiet, rural picture,
a happy and peaceful contrast to all I had looked upon for weary,
miserable months. It soothed the nervous excitement of pain and
suffering. I forgot myself in the pleasing interest which it awakened.
Nature's healing ministrations came to me through all my senses. I felt
the medicinal virtues of her sights, and sounds, and aromal breezes.
From the green turf of her hills and the mossy carpets of her woodlands
my languid steps derived new vigor and elasticity. I felt, day by day,
the transfusion of her strong life.
The Doctor's domestic establishment consisted of Widow Matson, his
housekeeper, and an idle slip of a boy, who, when he was not paddling
across the river, or hunting in the swamps, or playing ball on the
"Meetin'-'us-Hill," used to run of errands, milk the cow, and saddle the
horse. Widow Matson was a notable shrill-tongued woman, from whom two
long suffering husbands had obtained what might, under the
circumstances, be well called a comfortable release. She was neat and
tidy almost to a fault, thrifty and industrious, and, barring her
scolding propensity, was a pattern housekeeper. For the Doctor she
entertained so high a regard that nothing could exceed her indignation
when any one save herself presumed to find fault with him. Her bark was
worse than her bite; she had a warm, woman's heart, capable of soft
relentings; and this the roguish errand-boy so well understood that he
bore the daily infliction of her tongue with a good-natured unconcern
which would have been greatly to his credit had it not resulted from his
confident expectation that an extra slice of cake or segment of pie
would erelong tickle his palate in atonement for the tingling of his
ears.
It must be confessed that the Doctor had certain little peculiarities
and ways of his own which might have ruffled the down of a smoother
temper than that of the Widow Matson. He was careless and absent-
minded. In spite of her labors and complaints, he scattered his
superfluous clothing, books, and papers over his rooms in "much-admired
disorder." He gave the freedom of his house to the boys and girls of
his neighborhood, who, presuming upon his good nature, laughed at her
remonstrances and threats as they chased each other up and down the
nicely-polished stairway. Worse than all, he was proof against the
vituperations and reproaches with which she indirectly assailed him from
the recesses of her kitchen. He smoked his pipe and dozed over his
newspaper as complacently as ever, while his sins of omission and
commission were arrayed against him.
Peewawkin had always the reputation of a healthy town: and if it had
been otherwise, Dr. Singletary was the last man in the world to
transmute the aches and ails of its inhabitants into gold for his own
pocket. So, at the age of sixty, he was little better off, in point of
worldly substance, than when he came into possession of the small
homestead of his father. He cultivated with his own hands his corn-
field and potato-patch, and trimmed his apple and pear trees, as well
satisfied with his patrimony as Horace was with his rustic Sabine villa.
In addition to the care of his homestead and his professional duties,
he had long been one of the overseers of the poor and a member of the
school committee in his town; and he was a sort of standing reference in
all disputes about wages, boundaries, and cattle trespasses in his
neighborhood. He had, nevertheless, a good deal of leisure for reading,
errands of charity, and social visits. He loved to talk with his
friends, Elder Staples, the minister, Deacon Warner, and Skipper Evans.
He was an expert angler, and knew all the haunts of pickerel and trout
for many miles around. His favorite place of resort was the hill back
of his house, which afforded a view of the long valley of the Tocketuck
and the great sea. Here he would sit, enjoying the calm beauty of the
landscape, pointing out to me localities interesting from their
historical or traditional associations, or connected in some way with
humorous or pathetic passages of his own life experience. Some of these
autobiographical fragments affected me deeply. In narrating them he
invested familiar and commonplace facts with something of the
fascination of romance. "Human life," he would say, "is the same
everywhere. If we could but get at the truth, we should find that all
the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare have been reproduced in this
little village. God has made all of one blood; what is true of one man
is in some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but the
essential elements and spring of action are the same. On the surface,
everything about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see only
a sort of bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist of
daily trifles. But underneath all this there is an earnest life, rich
and beautiful with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, and
remorse. That fisherman by the riverside, or that woman at the stream
below, with her wash-tub,--who knows what lights and shadows checker
their memories, or what present thoughts of theirs, born of heaven or
hell, the future shall ripen into deeds of good or evil? Ah, what have
I not seen and heard? My profession has been to me, in some sort, like
the vial genie of the Salamanca student; it has unroofed these houses,
and opened deep, dark chambers to the hearts of their tenants, which no
eye save that of God had ever looked upon. Where I least expected them,
I have encountered shapes of evil; while, on the other hand, I have
found beautiful, heroic love and self-denial in those who had seemed to
me frivolous and selfish."
So would Dr. Singletary discourse as we strolled over Blueberry Hill, or
drove along the narrow willow-shaded road which follows the windings of
the river. He had read and thought much in his retired, solitary life,
and was evidently well satisfied to find in me a gratified listener. He
talked well and fluently, with little regard to logical sequence, and
with something of the dogmatism natural to one whose opinions had seldom
been subjected to scrutiny. He seemed equally at home in the most
abstruse questions of theology and metaphysics, and in the more
practical matters of mackerel-fishing, corn-growing, and cattle-raising.
It was manifest that to his book lore he had added that patient and
close observation of the processes of Nature which often places the
unlettered ploughman and mechanic on a higher level of available
intelligence than that occupied by professors and school men. To him
nothing which had its root in the eternal verities of Nature was "common
or unclean." The blacksmith, subjecting to his will the swart genii of
the mines of coal and iron; the potter, with his "power over the clay;"
the skipper, who had tossed in his frail fishing-smack among the
icebergs of Labrador; the farmer, who had won from Nature the occult
secrets of her woods and fields; and even the vagabond hunter and
angler, familiar with the habits of animals and the migration of birds
and fishes,--had been his instructors; and he was not ashamed to
acknowledge that they had taught him more than college or library.
