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Our fairly old people remember when they hunted deer and were hunted by the red Indian on our town site, while their grandchildren have only the memories of the town-born, of the cottage-organ, the novel railroad, and the two-story brick block with ornamental false front. In short, we round an epoch within ourselves, historically and socially.
The skin is daily rubbed, after negro fashion, with lemon-juice, inducing a fiery red hue: this is done for cleanliness, and is supposed also to harden the cuticle. Altogether the appearance is coquet, sportsmanlike, and decidedly appropriate. The game-chicks are sent to the country, like town-born babes in France or the sons of Arabian cities to the Bedawin's black tents.
The soldiers lost their air of security and defiance as these words were passed from one side of the square to the other like the waves of the sea, and caught up in every direction by those on the adjacent streets, until it seemed as if the very air was tremulous with the cry: "Town-born, turn out!"
The richest goblet, then, was of birch-bark. Governor Winthrop, after a journey afoot from Boston, drank here, out of the hollow of his hand. The elder Higginson here wet his palm, and laid it on the brow of the first town-born child.
It is the town-born who shall relieve the town from the burden under which it groans, and it is the town-born who this night should appear before the main guard as their masters, not as their servants." "To the main guard! To the main guard!" The multitude caught up the cry, and as if in a twinkling the throng was in motion, each pressing forward by the nearest way toward the barracks.
'But, mother, what are lilies like? I have never seen one, you know, asked the boy, when she had ceased reading and had closed the book. In simple language, she endeavoured to describe to her town-born child the exquisite beauties of the flowers of the field, and he, with an innate love of the beautiful, caught readily at all she said, and seemed as though he saw them all as she depicted.
Not that this pair are alone in their wild Eden, for here comes Goodwife Massey, the young spouse of Jeffrey Massey, from her home hard by, with an infant at her breast. Dame Conant has another of like age; and it shall hereafter be one of the disputed points of history which of these two babies was the first town-born child. But see! Roger Conant has other neighbors within view.
My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopædia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in king John's days. I know less geography than a school-boy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions; nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first-named of these two Terræ Incognitæ. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain; the place of any star; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the West, I verily believe, that, while all the world were gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies; and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great painstaking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages; and, like a better man than myself, have "small Latin and less Greek." I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers not from the circumstance of my being town-born for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it in "on Devon's leafy shores," and am no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious; and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; every body is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tête-
Such is the age we would assign to the town, judging by the aspect of John Massey, the first town-born child, whom his neighbors now call Goodman Massey, and whom we see yonder, a grave, almost autumnal-looking man, with children of his own about him.
Those years of London had obscured all my earlier life; I was like a man town-born and bred, who scarce knows anything but street vistas. The light, the air, had for me something of the supernatural affected me, indeed, only less than at a later time did the atmosphere of Italy. It was glorious spring weather; a few white clouds floated amid the blue, and the earth had an intoxicating fragrance.
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