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Updated: May 11, 2025
You do not find us altering our houses in December, or building out new piazzas even in March. We wait till the people have actually come to occupy them. The preparation for visitors is made after the visitors have arrived. This may not be the way in which things are done in what are called "smart business places." But it is our way in Oldport.
At eleven the next day Blinker signed his name thirty times with a new pen provided by Lawyer Oldport. "Now let me go to the woods," he said surlily. "You are not looking well," said Lawyer Oldport. "The trip will do you good. But listen, if you will, to that little matter of business of which I spoke to you yesterday, and also five years ago.
It makes us smile a little, therefore, to observe that universal delusion among the summer visitors, that we spend all winter in active preparations for next season. Not so; we all devote it solely to meditations on the season past. I observe that nobody in Oldport ever believes in any coming summer. Perhaps the tide is turned, we think, and people will go somewhere else.
I used to wander in those woods, summer after summer, till I had made my own chart of their devious tracks, and now when I close my eyes in this Oldport midsummer, the soft Italian air takes on something of a Scandinavian vigor; for the incessant roll of carriages I hear the tinkle of the quarryman's hammer and the veery's song; and I long for those perfumed and breezy pastures, and for those promontories of granite where the fresh water is nectar and the salt sea has a regal blue.
It was rather an uncommon thing, so late in the season; for the lightning, like other brilliant visitors, usually appears in Oldport during only a month or two of every year. The coach set me down at my own door, so soaked that I might have floated in. I peeped into Severance's room, however, on the way to my own.
The high front door still retains its Ionic cornice; and the western entrance, looking on the bay, is surmounted by carved fruit and flowers, and is crowned, as is the roof, with that pineapple in whose symbolic wealth the rich merchants of the last century delighted. Like most of the statelier houses in that region of Oldport, this abode had its rumors of a ghost and of secret chambers.
It may savor of self-confidence, but it has always seemed to me, that, with one day's control of a bank, even in these degenerate times, something might be done which would quite astonish the stockholders. Longer acquaintance has, however, revealed the fact, that these Oldport institutions stand out as models of strict discipline beside their suburban compeers.
When I first came to Oldport, it appeared to me that every institution was conducted by a boy and his grandfather. This seemed the case, for instance, with the bank that consented to assume the slender responsibility of my deposits.
The houses looked so incapable of producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in banks for him to spend. In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine. Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody was out of town.
For no man of middle age can dare trust himself to portray life in its full intensity, as he has studied or shared it; he must resolutely set aside as indescribable the things most worth describing, and must expect to be charged with exaggeration, even when he tells the rest. IT was one of the changing days of our Oldport midsummer.
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