Lower Town

“ In the little town, or thinly-scattered neighbourhood, every one is measuring out his imaginary dignity to see if it does not exceed, at least by some inches, that of one or other of his neighbours. The lower you descend in the scale, the more exacting becomes the spirit of exclusiveness. The professions look down upon the trades ”

“ As further and more outward land is occupied, the outer houses are erected in a style and with accommodation suited to still newer and relatively more luxurious needs, and they consequently (thanks to our improving means of transit) supersede the more inward suburb, which thereupon sinks to a lower value, until the increasing needs of the centre again raise its character and supplant its buildings possibly by substituting commercial for domestic houses. ”

“ To the westward of the town of Battel, on the London road, is a large tree, called the Watch-Oak which is supposed to have derived its epithet from some watch set either the night before or the night after the battle; but the tradition is very vague. One other place may be noticed: this is Stan-dard-hill, in the adjacent parish of Ninfield, where somebody's standard, William's or Harold's, was set up. So says tradition; but there seems nothing to support such a notion. Harold's standard was first pitched here, and here it remained until it was supplanted by the oriflamme of the Conqueror ”

“ The inserted stones are mostly laid herring-bone fashion, and the joints are of ordinary gravel mortar, without any admixture of pounded tile. A few yards more bring us to a postern-gate communicating with a footpath crossing the inner area and with the high street of the town of Pevensey . Just southward of this is tower K, at 120 feet from which the Roman work forms a junction with the medieval castle. ”

“ With all this record of fight and fire and flood, the Old Town was the reverse of strenuous. Its prevailing note was of sweetness and rest. The west wind that cut like a knife in November was soft in June as the touch of a woman’s hand. The grass was never as green in meadow; the wild blossoms that nodded on the river bank were never so sweet; nor ever did bird sing in forest or field as sang the skylark to its mate in my childhood’s home, as it soared toward the sky. ”

“ The arms assigned to most cities and antient boroughs are borrowed from those of early feudal lords: thus the arms of the borough of Lewes are the chequers of the Earls of Warren, to whom the barony long appertained, with a canton of the lion and cross-crosslets of the Mowbrays, lords of the town in the fourteenth century. Some of the quaint devices which pass for the arms of particular towns have nothing heraldric about them, and seem to have originated in the caprice of the artists who engraved their seals. ”

“ In order to form a tolerably correct idea of what our old town was at the beginning of the 15th century, we must dismiss altogether from our mind’s eye the large populous town with which we are acquainted, and picture to ourselves a village of small cottages with thatched roofs being gradually improved by the erection of houses of a better class. ”

“ These little towns do not look to the passer-by comfortable as homes. Partly, there is the difficulty of distinguishing your village from the others. It would be as bad as being married to a Jap. And then towns should be on hills or in valleys, however small. A town dumped down, apparently by chance, on a flat expanse wears the same air of discomfort as a man trying to make his bed on a level, unyielding surface such as a lawn or pavement. He feels hopelessly incidental to the superficies of the earth. He is aware that the human race has thigh-bones.... ”

“ A long suburb of red brick houses—some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself—a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came, by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring, where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black road-side.
Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with a dismal gloom. ”

“ Fine flowers grow spontaneously, for they have neglected the gardens, expecting a change of government. The town is immediately on the bay—the most beautiful water prospect I ever saw; and from 10 o’clock in the morning until 10 at night we have the finest sea-breeze. There is something in it so exhilarating, so pure, so wholesome, it enlivens the whole system. All the houses look in ruins, old as time. Many squares of the town appear grown over with the thickest shrubs, weeping-willows, and the Pride of China: all look neglected. ”

“ Fair Mount hill, looked out upon the wide-spread city; or, trod again its streets teeming with a gay and busy populace—each well-known antique habitation or hall, remembered by both, was spoken of with affection, as a memento of happy days—the wide and dreary prairie, over which the autumn wind was sighing cold and sadly, was forgotten now—scenes far away rose like shadows around the inhabitants of the log mansion, and the hum of the old city drowned the voice of the west wind, as it moaned around their dwelling. ”

“ The old inhabitants, reinforced by the new military and ecclesiastical populations, found the northern half of the city too strait for them, and a new walled town sprang up at the foot of the hill, and soon stretched out a long, narrow suburb southward, along the high-road, defended by parallel dykes. ”

“ The change from the barren, rather stern outlook from the Old Town, where the sea-wind stunted tree and thicket so that it always sloped down to nothing in the west as if some giant scythe had trimmed it so, to the beech woods with their shelter and quiet and their luxury of color and vegetation, was very alluring. ”

“ When the starling sang his evening song in the big poplar, the Old Town was white with the bloom of the elder. He left it dyed a deep purple, for he was as fond of elderberries as we were of the soup our mothers made of them, and the stain of them abides. In between the blossoming and the berrying when his youngsters were grown, he took himself off with his wife for several weeks, leaving only the children behind. ”

“ To English eyes accustomed to dingy brick houses in the suburbs of big cities, to the dreary squalor of some new [Pg 71] little town which straggles around a filthy railway station, with refuse-heaps in undeveloped fields, and a half-finished "High Street," where a sweetstuff-shop, a stationer, and an estate agent establish themselves in the gloomy hope of business, these American villages look wonderfully clean, bright, and pleasant! ”

“ Having now a horse whereon to mount, I rode every day, either into the eastern town to pay a visit to the sheikh, or to the vizier, or roving around the whole circuit of the capital, and peeping into the varied scenes which the life of the people exhibited. The precincts of the town with its suburbs are just as interesting as its neighbourhood (especially during the months that precede the rainy season) is monotonous and tiresome in the extreme. ”

“ Never did the town of his adoption seem less, indeed, like a kindergarten than when he took his way northward to dinner, or when, later in the early evening, he made his way over to the West Side to call at the Brainards. The thousands of acres of ramshackle that made up the bulk of the city, and the tens of thousands of raw and ugly and half-built prairie that composed its environs, seemed together to constitute a great checker-board over whose squares of "section" and "township" keenness and rapacity played their daring and wary game. ”

“ But as the voyageurs and their immediate progeny gradually pass away, the community creeps out from the shadow of the past and asserts itself. The ancient town appears to be taking on a new and healthy growth, in strange contrast to the severe and battered architecture of frontier times. ”

“ The town is, certainly, the most moral of towns. You pass from the railroad station through a long, lonely suburb, with dusty rows of stunted trees on either side, and some few miserable beggars, idle boys, and ragged old women under them. ”

“ The town of Muddleton-upon-Slush, once little more than a village, has swelled to the proportions of a prosperous factory town, with its smoky chimneys, its gasometers, its rows upon rows of jerry-built houses, its new town hall, its salvation army barracks, its police station, its chapels of every conceivable denomination, to say nothing of its numerous public-houses, young men's Christian association, its baths and wash-houses, its low theatre, where questionable pieces are represented by indifferent actors to pander to the modern taste. ”

“ And yet, by one of those strange contradictions we are constantly finding in human nature, there were natives of the town who would come back thirty or forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under this same threatening mountainside, as old men sun themselves against southward-facing walls. The old dreams and legends of danger added to the attraction. ”

“ Far upon the horizon there is a gleam [Pg 228] of silver: it is the sea, sleeping in a calm. The bells of the Old Town peal forth their even song. The cows come home from the meadows. In the Cloister shadows trembling hands are trimming the evening lamp, tired old feet tottering to their rest. A day is ended. Above blossoming gardens the stork looks down from its nest, wiser than the world of men: another will dawn. So that its evening be peace, what matters the rest? It is the message of the Old Town.
“It’s come.”
[Pg 229]
CHAPTER IX OUR BEAUTIFUL SUMMER ”

“ In my imagination the village perched on the hill is astir with the hum of busy men, and the sharp, quick buzz of women; and from the country come men and women on foot or on horseback, to see and be seen, to hear and to be heard, to barter and exchange what they have with the merchant and the laborer. There are Jack Armstrong and William Green, Kelso and Jason Duncan, Alley and Carman, Hill and McNamar, Herndon and Rutledge, Warburton and Sincho, Bale and Ellis, Abraham and Ann. ”

“ In these respects, and in a hundred refinements of living, the town, which has so largely drawn its young, enterprising population from the extreme East, has little the appearance of a frontier place; it is the push, the public spirit, the mixture of fashion and slouching negligence in street attire, the mingling of Eastern smartness with border emancipation in manner, and the general restlessness of movement, that proclaim the newness. ”

“ The greatest defect of this beautiful town seems to be that, though it is very rich and increasing in wealth and trade, and consequently in people, there is not room to enlarge the town by building, which would be certainly done much more than it is, but that the river on the land side prescribes them, except at the north end without the gate ”

“ As a matter of fact there is very little actual “rural life.” The villages are so close together that it is often hard to tell where one town ends and another begins, and a country road is as nearly well settled as a city suburb in America. ”

“ The town itself is simply a mean and straggling street, lined on either side by whitewashed, red-roofed, green-shuttered houses which become less and less pretentious and more and more scattered as you make your way up the ever narrowing valley until it loses itself in the hills. ”

“ Down-town—"'way down-town," in the vernacular—in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World architecture. ”

“ A traveler approaching it expects to find a business center. Many stores and dwellings were of brick, but whole rows were vacant at the time. The soothing melody of the squalling infant was only a memory to the village druggist; the itinerant butcher and milkman had ceased their daily rounds; and all that was left to distinguish the half-deserted village from the desert was an occasional swallow that went down the parched mouth of a chimney. There is another town characteristic of the plains. ”

“ The Old Town was set in a meadow, grass to the right of it, grass to the left of it, stretching away toward the horizon until in the south and east it came up against the black moor, and toward the sunset a little way met the sands of the western sea. What sport was there for boys in such a country? ”

“ For instance, you may find a town which, by the incidence of the railroad and the springing up of great industries, has shot far ahead of the other sleepy little places; its population may treble itself, its trade be ten times as large, its attractions one would imagine incalculably greater. Nothing of the kind: its annual fair is not nearly so important an event to the village mind as that of an old-world slumberous place removed from the current of civilisation. ”

“ They should be taught to see in the town common or village green a survival of that primitive institution of land-community upon which town and state are based. They should be taught the meaning of town and family names; how the word 'town' means, primarily, a place hedged in for the purposes of defence; how the picket-fences around home and house-lot are but a survival of the primitive town idea; how home, hamlet, and town live on together in a name like Hampton, or Home-town. They should investigate the most ordinary thing for these are often the most archaic. ”