Authors, American -- 19th century -- Biography; Leland, Charles Godfrey, 1824-1903
There was a "home-pasture," a great field behind my grandfather's house,
where I loved to sit alone, and which has left a deep impression on my
memory, as though it were a fairy-haunted or imagined place. It was very
rocky, the stones being covered with clean, crisp, dry lichens, and in
one spot there was the gurgling deep down in some crevice of a mysterious
unseen spring or rivulet. Young as I was, I had met with a line which
bore on it--
"Deep from their vaults the Loxian murmurs flow."
And there was something very voice-like or human in this murmur or
chattering of the unseen brook. This I distinctly remember, that the
place gave me not only a feeling, but a faith that it was haunted by
something gentle and merry. I went there many a time for company, being
much alone. An Indian would have told me that it was the _Un a games-
suk_--the spirit-fairies of the rock and stream. These beings enter far
more largely, deeply, and socially into their life or faith than elves or
fairies ever did into those of the Aryan races, and I might well have
been their _protege_, for there could have been few little boys living,
so fond as I was of sitting all alone by rock and river, hill and
greenwood tree. There are yet in existence on some of this land which
was once ours certain mysterious walls or relics of heavy stone-work,
which my friend Eben C. Horsford thinks were made by the Norsemen. I
hope that they were, for I have read many a saga in Icelandic, old
Swedish, and Latin, and the romance thereof is deep in my soul; and as my
own name is Godfrey, it is no wonder that the god Frey and his Freya are
dear to me. In my boyhood--and it may be still the case--the "Injuns"
got the credit of having built these mysterious works.
Not far from Holliston is Mendon, where I had an uncle, Seth Davenport,
who had a large, pleasant, old-fashioned New England farm, which was more
productive than my grandfather's, since there were employed on it sixteen
men, three of whom were Natick Indians of the old local stock. There
were many of them when my mother was young, but I suppose that the last
of the tribe has long since died. One of these Indians, Rufus Pease, I
can recall as looking like a dark-ruddy gypsy, with a pleasant smile. He
very was fond of me. He belonged to a well-known family, and had a
brother--and thereby hangs a tale, or, in this case, a scalp-lock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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