Main Street: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") — John Shaqi
Main Street: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")Hawthorne, Nathaniel
General
Main Street: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Historical fiction, American; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
But have you observed the lady who leans upon the arm of Endicott?—-a
rose of beauty from an English garden, now to be transplanted to a
fresher soil. It may be that, long years—centuries indeed—after this
fair flower shall have decayed, other flowers of the same race will
appear in the same soil, and gladden other generations with hereditary
beauty. Does not the vision haunt us yet? Has not Nature kept the mould
unbroken, deeming it a pity that the idea should vanish from mortal
sight forever, after only once assuming earthly substance? Do we not
recognize, in that fair woman’s face, a model of features which still
beam, at happy moments, on what was then the woodland pathway, but has
long since grown into a busy street?
“This is too ridiculous!—positively insufferable!” mutters the same
critic who had before expressed his disapprobation. “Here is a
pasteboard figure, such as a child would cut out of a card, with a pair
of very dull scissors; and the fellow modestly requests us to see in it
the prototype of hereditary beauty!”
“But, sir, you have not the proper point of view,” remarks the showman.
“You sit altogether too near to get the best effect of my pictorial
exhibition. Pray, oblige me by removing to this other bench, and I
venture to assure you the proper light and shadow will transform the
spectacle into quite another thing.”
“Pshaw!” replies the critic; “I want no other light and shade. I have
already told you that it is my business to see things just as they
are.”
“I would suggest to the author of this ingenious exhibition,” observes
a gentlemanly person, who has shown signs of being much interested,—“I
would suggest that Anna Gower, the first wife of Governor Endicott, and
who came with him from England, left no posterity; and that,
consequently, we cannot be indebted to that honorable lady for any
specimens of feminine loveliness now extant among us.”
Having nothing to allege against this genealogical objection, the
showman points again to the scene.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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