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Updated: June 30, 2025
Any handful of young men in the smallest country-village, with a very few dollars and a little mechanical skill, can put up in any old shed or shoe-shop a few simple articles of machinery, which will, through many a winter evening, vary the monotony of the cigar and the grocery-bench by an endless variety of manly competitions.
On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls, the old man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the country-people have called it "the haunted house," the owners have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account of the noises, so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking, take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone, how do you think he will like it?
Don't talk of the loneliness of a deserted and ruinous castle; the crickets have not left it, and, if you don't have a merry time with their shrill jokes, it will be your own fault. But if you would have a sense of being terribly alone, come from long residence in some quiet country-home on the border of a quiet country-village, into the hurry-skurry of a strange city, just after nightfall.
Why could not people live with quiet thoughts, and peaceful quietness of life, in this little country-village, where there seemed nothing to wake up torrents? Sophie stood beside me, with a tempting little cup in her hand; upon the table lay a breakfast, for somebody destined, I was sure. "I thought I'd waken you, so that you might not lose your night's sleep," she said. "Thank you.
This might have described the original owner of the pin and ring, who had died years before, and left the ornaments for her namesake and niece, when she was too young to remember or care for her, but not the niece herself. She was young, blooming, twenty-two, and the belle of the country-village where she dwelt.
Long years of monotonous servitude had made a very machine of me. I could only rust in inaction. Some other power, to rack and grind and urge me on, was necessary to my very existence. So it happened, that, at last, my holiday having spun out to the end of my means, I left the city, and engaged work at very low wages in a country-village.
If there are not, very well too: I like to ride all the same. I like everything in this world but Saratoga. Once or twice our monotony was broken up by short halts before country-inns. At one an excitement was going on. "Had a casualty here this afternoon," remarked a fresh passenger, as soon as he was fairly seated. A casualty is a windfall to a country-village.
Show me a person who lives in a country-village absolutely without curiosity or interest on these subjects, and I will show you a cold, fat oyster, to whom the tide-mud of propriety is the whole of existence.
On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many years ago, and rumors of ugly spots on the walls, the old man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the country-people have called it "the haunted house," the owners haven't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account of the noises, so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking, take the man who didn't mind the real risk of the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone, how do you think he will like it?
The viscous intelligence of a country-village is not easily stirred by the winds which ripple the fluent thought of great cities, but it holds every straw and entangles every insect that lights upon it. It soon became rumored in the town that the young master was a wonderful shot with the pistol.
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