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Long white hair and beard, spectacles with great round, staring glasses, a broad-brimmed hat of ante-Revolutionary pattern, clothes that had apparently descended to him from some ancestor who had come over with Oglethorpe, and a two-handed staff with a head of buckhorn, upon which he leaned as old peasants do in plays, formed such an image as recalled to me the picture of the old man in the illustrations in "The Dairyman's Daughter."
Nay, the very pistols that he wields, those clumsy, rusty, big-mouthed ante-revolutionary machines, which his stout grandsire carried at Camden and Eutaw, have a look of service about them a grim, veteran-like aspect, that makes them quite as perilous to face as to handle. If they burst they will blow on all sides.
This tendency of British seamen to take employment in colonial ships is worthy of note, as foreshadowing the impressment difficulties of a later day. These, like most of the disagreements which led to the War of 1812, had their origin in ante-revolutionary conditions.
Such is the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in ante-Revolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the Maules, at all events, kept their resentments within their own breasts.
But Charles X. did not intend to assume the thin mask worn by his brother. He had marked out a different course. All disguise was to be thrown aside in a Bourbon reign of the ante-revolutionary sort.
Holmes's father was minister to the Congregational church in Cambridge, a man of ability and author of some historical works. He lived in a venerable house of the ante-Revolutionary period which stood near the college grounds, and was demolished a few years ago to make room for a new academic building.
He wore, according to a fashion, even then becoming antiquated, a three-cornered hat, and carried a silver-headed cane, the use of which seemed to be rather for flourishing in the air than for assisting the progress of his legs. His two companions were elderly and respectable yeomen, who, retaining an ante-revolutionary reverence for rank and hereditary wealth, kept a little in the Squire's rear.
Up the old West Cambridge road, now North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal conical ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest of the ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village centres, "Trapelo," "Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had it, and the rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into the hallowed borders of the academic town.
You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a certificate of his fitness to teach, and why I did not choose to urge him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully received. Go he must, that was plain enough. He would not be content otherwise.
The Eastern men, whose levelling spirit and equality of ranks had been so much disliked and dreaded by the representatives from other Colonies in the Ante-Revolutionary Congresses, had undergone little or no social change by the war, and probably had at that period a more correct idea of civil liberty and free government than any other people on the face of the earth.
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