OUR NEW NEIGHBORS AT PONKAPOG
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
When I saw the little house building, an eighth of a mile beyond my
own, on the Old Bay Road, I wondered who were to be the tenants. The
modest structure was set well back from the road, among the trees,
as if the inmates were to care nothing whatever for a view of the
stylish equipages which sweep by during the summer season. For my
part, I like to see the passing, in town or country; but each has
his own unaccountable taste. The proprietor, who seemed to be also
the architect of the new house, superintended the various details
of the work with an assiduity that gave me a high opinion of his
intelligence and executive ability, and I congratulated myself on
the prospect of having some very agreeable neighbors.
It was quite early in the spring, if I remember, when they moved into
the cottage--a newly married couple, evidently: the wife very young,
pretty, and with the air of a lady; the husband somewhat older, but
still in the first flush of manhood. It was understood in the village
that they came from Baltimore; but no one knew them personally, and
they brought no letters of introduction. (For obvious reasons, I
refrain from mentioning names.) It was clear that, for the present
at least, their own company was entirely sufficient for them. They
made no advance toward the acquaintance of any of the families in
the neighborhood, and consequently were left to themselves. That,
apparently, was what they desired, and why they came to Ponkapog.
For after its black bass and wild duck and teal, solitude is the
chief staple of Ponkapog. Perhaps its perfect rural loveliness
should be included. Lying high up under the wing of the Blue Hills,
and in the odorous breath of pines and cedars, it chances to be the
most enchanting bit of unlaced disheveled country within fifty miles
of Boston, which, moreover, can be reached in half an hour's ride
by railway. But the nearest railway station (Heaven be praised!)
is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw. Ponkapog
has one mail a day; two mails a day would render the place
uninhabitable.
The village--it looks like a compact village at a distance, but unravels
and disappears the moment you drive into it--has quite a large floating
population. I do not allude to the perch and pickerel in Ponkapog Pond.
Along the Old Bay Road, a highway even in the Colonial days, there are
a number of attractive villas and cottages straggling off toward Milton,
which are occupied for the summer by people from the city. These birds
of passage are a distinct class from the permanent inhabitants, and
the two seldom closely assimilate unless there has been some previous
connection. It seemed to me that our new neighbors were to come under
the head of permanent inhabitants; they had built their own house, and
had the air of intending to live in it all the year round.
"Are you not going to call on them?" I asked my wife one morning.
"When they call on us," she replied lightly.
"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers."
This was said as seriously as the circumstance demanded; but my wife
turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to
her intuitions in these matters.
She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "Not at
home" would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out
of our way to be courteous.
I saw a great deal of our neighbors, nevertheless. Their cottage lay
between us and the post-office--where he was never to be met with
by any chance--and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working in
the garden. Floriculture did not appear so much an object as exercise.
Possibly it was neither; maybe they were engaged in digging for
specimens of those arrowheads and flint hatchets, which are continually
coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which
the plowshare has not turned up some primitive stone weapon or domestic
utensil, disdainfully left to us by the red men who once held this
domain--an ancient tribe called the Punkypoags, a forlorn descendant
of which, one Polly Crowd, figures in the annual Blue Book, down to
the close of the Southern war, as a state pensioner. At that period
she appears to have struck a trail to the Happy Hunting Grounds. I
quote from the local historiographer.
Whether they were developing a kitchen garden, or emulating Professor
Schliemann, at Mycenae, the newcomers were evidently persons of refined
musical taste: the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable sweetness,
although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by
the high gate and listen to her executing an arietta, conjecturally at
some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the turnpike.
The husband, somewhere about the ground, would occasionally respond
with two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business.
They seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds
whatever of the community in which they had settled themselves.
There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I
admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest
in the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who
had run off and got married clandestinely. I willingly acquitted them,
however, of having done anything unlawful; for, to change a word in
the lines of the poet,
"It is a joy to think the best
We may of human kind."
Admitting the hypothesis of elopement, there was no mystery in their
neither sending nor receiving letters. But where did they get their
groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them--that is an enigma
apart--but the groceries themselves. No express wagon, no butcher's
cart, no vehicle of any description, was ever observed to stop at their
domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment
in the village--an inexhaustible little bottle of a shop which, I
advertise it gratis, can turn out anything in the way of groceries,
from a hand-saw to a pocket-handkerchief. I confess that I allowed
this unimportant detail of their menage to occupy more of my
speculation than was creditable to me.
In several respects our neighbors reminded me of those inexplicable
persons we sometimes come across in great cities, though seldom or never
in suburban places, where the field may be supposed too restricted for
their operations--persons who have no perceptible means of subsistence,
and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold no government
bonds, they possess no real estate (our neighbors did own their house),
they toil not, neither do they spin; yet they reap all the numerous soft
advantages that usually result from honest toil and skilful spinning.
How do they do it? But this is a digression, and I am quite of the
opinion of the old lady in "David Copperfield," who says, "Let us have
no meandering!"
Though my wife had declined to risk a ceremonious call on our neighbors
as a family, I saw no reason why I should not speak to the husband as
an individual, when I happened to encounter him by the wayside. I made
several approaches to do so, when it occurred to my penetration that
my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. I resolved to put the
suspicion to the test, and one forenoon, when he was sauntering along
on the opposite side of the road, in the vicinity of Fisher's sawmill,
I deliberately crossed over to address him. The brusque manner in which
he hurried away was not to be misunderstood. Of course I was not going
to force myself upon him.
It was at this time that I began to formulate uncharitable suppositions
touching our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some of
my choicest fruit-trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to
keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe
to pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference
between meum and tuum does not seem to be very strongly developed
in the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.
I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister
impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I
despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the persons up the road
until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was--well,
not exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met the gentleman at
intervals, and passed him without recognition; at rarer intervals I
saw the lady.
After a while I not only missed my occasional glimpses of her pretty,
slim figure, always draped in some soft black stuff with a bit of
scarlet at the throat, but I inferred that she did not go about the
house singing in her light-hearted manner, as formerly. What had
happened? Had the honeymoon suffered eclipse already? Was she ill?
I fancied she was ill, and that I detected a certain anxiety in the
husband, who spent the mornings digging solitarily in the garden, and
seemed to have relinquished those long jaunts to the brow of Blue Hill,
where there is a superb view of all Norfolk County combined with sundry
venerable rattlesnakes with twelve rattles.
As the days went by it became certain that the lady was confined to the
house, perhaps seriously ill, possibly a confirmed invalid. Whether she
was attended by a physician from Canton or from Milton, I was unable
to say; but neither the gig with the large white allopathic horse, nor
the gig with the homoeopathic sorrel mare, was ever seen hitched at the
gate during the day. If a physician had charge of the case, he visited
his patient only at night. All this moved my sympathy, and I reproached
myself with having had hard thoughts of our neighbors. Trouble had come
to them early. I would have liked to offer them such small, friendly
services as lay in my power; but the memory of the repulse I had
sustained still rankled in me. So I hesitated.
One morning my two boys burst into the library with their eyes
sparkling.
"You know the old elm down the road?" cried one.
"Yes."
"The elm with the hang-bird's nest?" shrieked the other.
"Yes, yes!"
"Well, we both just climbed up, and there's three young ones in it!"
Then I smiled to think that our new neighbors had got such a promising
little family.
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