i had not seen the old place for thirty years, when, four years ago, i found myself in the pretty little town of x——, which had once appeared so lordly and so proud to my poor rustic eyes, with a vacant half-day on my hands. i hired a buggy and a boy, and had him drive me down to that point on the river where our mills at least used to be.
the road was all strange to me, and when i reached my destination that was stranger still. the timber had been cut from the hill and island, and where the stately hickories had once towered and the sycamores drooped there was now a bald knob and a sterile tract of sand, good hardly for the grazing of the few cows that cropped its scanty herbage. they were both very much smaller: the hill was not the mountain it had seemed, the island no longer rivalled the proportions of england.[pg 60]
the grist-mill, whose gray bulk had kept so large a place in my memory, was sadly dwarfed, and in its decrepitude it had canted backwards, and seemed tottering to its fall. i explored it from wheel-pit to cooling-floor; there was not an indian in it, but, ah! what ghosts! ghosts of the living and the dead; my brothers’, my playmates’, my own! at last, it was really haunted. i think no touch of repair had been put upon it, or upon the old saw-mill, either, on whose roof the shingles had all curled up like the feathers of a frizzly chicken in the rains and suns of those thirty summers past. the head-race, once a type of silent, sullen power, now crept feebly to its work; even the water seemed to have grown old, and anything might have battled successfully with the currents where the spool-pig was drowned and the miller’s boy was carried so near his death.
i had with me for company the boy of the present miller, who silently followed me about, and answered my questions as he could. the epoch of our possession was as remote and as unstoried to him as[pg 61] that of the mound-builders. a small frame house, exactly the size and shape of our log-cabin, occupied its site, and he had never even heard that any other house had ever stood there. the “new house,” shingled and weather-boarded with black-walnut, had bleached to a silvery gray, and had no longer a trace of its rich brown. he let me go into it, and wander about at will. it was very little, and the small rooms were very low. it was plastered now; it was even papered; but it was not half so fine as it used to be.
i asked him if there was a graveyard on top of the hill, and he said, “yes; an old one;” and we went up together to look at it, with its stones all fallen or sunken away, and no memory of the simple, harmless man and his little children whom i had seen laid there, going down with each into the dust in terror and desolation of spirit. his widow probably no longer wears dresses of changeable silk; and where is the orphan boy in the oil-cloth cap? in congress, for all i know.
i looked across the bare island to where[pg 62] their cabin had stood, and my eyes might as well have sought the cities of the plain. the boy at my elbow could not make out why the gray-mustached, middle-aged man should care, and when i attempted to tell him that i had once been a boy of his age there, and that this place had been my home, the boy of whom i have here written so freely seemed so much less a part of me than the boy to whom i spoke, that, upon the whole, i had rather a sense of imposing upon my listener.
