Deephaven and Selected Stories & SketchesJewett, Sarah Orne
General
Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches
Jewett, Sarah Orne
Maine -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The elderly people, though laying claim to no slight degree of present
consequence, modestly ignored it, and spoke with pride of the grand way
in which life was carried on by their ancestors, the Deephaven families
of old times. I think Kate and I were assured at least a hundred times
that Governor Chantrey kept a valet, and his wife, Lady Chantrey, kept a
maid, and that the governor had an uncle in England who was a baronet;
and I believe this must have been why our friends felt so deep an
interest in the affairs of the English nobility: they no doubt felt
themselves entitled to seats near the throne itself. There were formerly
five families who kept their coaches in Deephaven; there were balls at
the governor's, and regal entertainments at other of the grand mansions;
there is not a really distinguished person in the country who will not
prove to have been directly or indirectly connected with Deephaven. We
were shown the cellar of the Chantrey house, and the terraces, and a few
clumps of lilacs, and the grand rows of elms. There are still two of the
governor's warehouses left, but his ruined wharves are fast
disappearing, and are almost deserted, except by small barefooted boys
who sit on the edges to fish for sea-perch when the tide comes in. There
is an imposing monument in the burying-ground to the great man and his
amiable consort. I am sure that if there were any surviving relatives of
the governor they would receive in Deephaven far more deference than is
consistent with the principles of a republican government; but the
family became extinct long since, and I have heard, though it is not a
subject that one may speak of lightly, that the sons were unworthy their
noble descent and came to inglorious ends.
There were still remaining a few representatives of the old families,
who were treated with much reverence by the rest of the townspeople,
although they were, like the conies of Scripture, a feeble folk.
Deephaven is utterly out of fashion. It never recovered from the effects
of the embargo of 1807, and a sand-bar has been steadily filling in the
mouth of the harbor. Though the fishing gives what occupation there is
for the inhabitants of the place, it is by no means sufficient to draw
recruits from abroad. But nobody in Deephaven cares for excitement, and
if some one once in a while has the low taste to prefer a more active
life, he is obliged to go elsewhere in search of it, and is spoken of
afterward with kind pity. I well remember the Widow Moses said to me, in
speaking of a certain misguided nephew of hers, "I never could see what
could 'a' sot him out to leave so many privileges and go way off to
Lynn, with all them children too. Why, they lived here no more than a
cable's length from the meetin'-house!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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