The Lightning Conductor Discovers AmericaWilliamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
General
The Lightning Conductor Discovers America
Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
Automobiles -- Fiction
Anyhow, you enter beside the Great Pond I told you of, which is so
charming in itself and in its flat frame of village green that it
deserves the capital G and P it's always spelt with. I do believe if you
dared begin it with little letters you'd be driven out of town, and not
with "'Fruites,' and corn, and coates," as the Indians were invited to
leave in their day. _They_ had a nice well, in a green plain, perhaps
where the Great Pond is now, for all I know. There's an old Indian Bible
which tells about it, when the Montauks--a fine brave tribe who sold out
_dirt_ cheap to the Puritans--lived in their village, which is still
commemorated by the name Amagansett. (By the way, I promised Jack to
tell Monty that "sett" means meeting-place, which explains why "sett" is
the tag end of so many village names here.)
As I said, you come to the Great Pond, and you feel ashamed of being in
a motor car, though hundreds of other people are equally guilty. It's
all so green and sweet and peaceful, that speed seems a crime. The
street, if you can call it a street, is as broad as a generous mind.
Never was an English village-green as perfect as this, I suppose because
the self-banished English folk who created it worked from an idealized
picture treasured in their hearts. And there are old gray and white
houses as beautiful as houses in dreams, and pretty new houses which
carefully contrive not to look out of keeping with the old ones. Also
there are windmills, sketched on clear open backgrounds--windmills which
the English settlers didn't mind copying from the Dutch on the other
side of the Island.
Now can you fancy what Easthampton is like? But even if you can, you'll
never, never smell (unless you pack up and come here) the wonderful
fragrance of salt sea and sweet flowers which I shall always have in my
mind's nostrils (why can't one have nostrils as well as eyes in one's
mind?) when I think of this place. And oh, I nearly forgot to tell you
about that _great_ feature, the museum and library, though we spent two
hours browsing in it, and "musing" (appropriate word for Easthampton!)
by the fountain in its garden. They've made the building look as
Elizabethan as though it had been shipped from Surrey; and its books and
pictures and relics are _fascinating_. So are the girls who are the
guardians of the place. They are the only young things there.
Luckily it was the one day of the week when people are allowed to go
inside the quaintest of the houses in the village (I _hate_ calling it a
_town_, though perhaps I ought to), the wee bit hoosie where John Howard
Payne lived. If you don't know that he wrote "Home, Sweet Home," you
ought to. It's the dearest little gray nest you can imagine, and I envy
the people who own it. No wonder J. H. P. was able to write such a song!
But how surprised he'd have been, all the same, if any one had told him
that a hundred years or so later crowds of pilgrims would come to
worship at that humble shrine!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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