Domestic fiction; Short stories; Suburban life -- Fiction
hand-bags and wraps and sun-umbrellas, into some compact shape for
removal into the cars, during the very scant minute that the train stops
at Charlesbridge. Then when you are all aboard, and the tardy member has
been duly taken up at the next station, and you would be glad to spend
the time in looking about on the familiar variety of life which every
car presents in every train on every road in this vast American world,
you are oppressed and distracted by the cares which must attend the
pleasure-seeker, and which the more thickly beset him the more deeply he
plunges into enjoyment.
I can learn very little from the note-book of the friend whose
adventures I am relating in regard to the scenery of Somerville, and the
region generally through which the railroad passes between Charlesbridge
and Boston; but so much knowledge of it may be safely assumed on the
part of the reader as to relieve me of the grave responsibility of
describing it. Still, I may say that it is not unpicturesque, and that
I have a pleasure, which I hope the reader shares, in anything like salt
meadows and all spaces subject to the tide, whether flooded by it or
left bare with their saturated grasses by its going down. I think, also,
there is something fine in the many-roofed, many-chimneyed highlands of
Chelsea (if it is Chelsea), as you draw near the railroad bridge, and
there is a pretty stone church on a hill-side there which has the good
fortune, so rare with modern architecture and so common with the old, of
seeming a natural outgrowth of the spot where it stands, and which is
as purely an object of aesthetic interest to me, who know nothing of
its sect or doctrine, as any church in a picture could be; and there is,
also, the Marine Hospital on the heights (if it is the Marine Hospital),
from which I hope the inmates can behold the ocean, and exult in
whatever misery keeps them ashore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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