Riverboro

“ It carried her through weary months of nursing—nursing of other soldiers for Tom's dear sake; it sent her home a better woman; and though she had never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between, and had grown into the counterfeit presentment of her sister and of all other thin, spare, New England spinsters, it was something of a counterfeit, and underneath was still the faint echo of that wild heart-beat of her girlhood. ”

“ Then came the sight of Abijah Flagg shelling beans in the barn, and then the Perkins attic windows with a white cloth fluttering from them. She could spell Emma Jane's loving thought and welcome in that little waving flag; a word and a message sent to her just at the first moment when Riverboro chimneys rose into view; something to warm her heart till they could meet.
The brick house came next, looking just as of yore; though it seemed to Rebecca as if death should have cast some mysterious spell over it. ”

“ Then, oh, ever new Paradise! Then, oh, ever lovely green and growing world! For Rebecca had that something in her soul that
“Gives to seas and sunset skies The unspent beauty of surprise.”
At the top of Guide Board hill she could see Alice Robinson's barn with its shining weather vane, a huge burnished fish that swam with the wind and foretold the day to all Riverboro. The meadow, with its sunny slopes stretching up to the pine woods, was sometimes a flowing sheet of shimmering grass, sometimes—when daisies and buttercups were blooming—a vision of white and gold. ”

“ I'd like a year in a city, with just as much money as I wanted to spend, horses and splendid clothes and amusements every minute of the day; and I'd like above everything to live with people that wear low necks." (Poor Huldah never took off her dress without bewailing the fact that her lot was cast in Riverboro, where her pretty white shoulders could never be seen.) ”

“ THERE were two grand places for gossip in the community; the old tavern on the Edgewood side of the bridge and the brick store in Riverboro. The company at the Edgewood Tavern would be a trifle different in character, more picturesque, imposing, and eclectic because of the transient guests that gave it change and variety. Here might be found a judge or lawyer on his way to court; a sheriff with a handcuffed prisoner; a farmer or two, stopping on the road to market with a cartful of produce; and an occasional teamster, peddler, and stage-driver. ”

“ Probably you think at once of the particular New England old town you know, and imagine Hillsboro of that date as an elm-shaded, well-kept street, with big, white, green-shuttered houses, full of shining mahogany furniture and quaint old silver. But my grandmother gives an entirely different picture of old times in this corner of Vermont. Conditions here, at that time, were more as they had been in Connecticut and Massachusetts a hundred and forty years before. Indeed, the Pilgrim Fathers endured no more hardships as pioneers in a wild, new country than did the first Vermonters. ”

“ It would have made a scientific librarian faint, the Hillsboro system, but the result was that not a book was bought which did not find readers eager to welcome it. A stranger would have turned dizzy trying to find his way about, but there are no strangers in Hillsboro. The arrival even of a new French-Canadian lumberman is a subject of endless discussion.
It can be imagined, therefore, how electrified was the village by the apparition, on a bright June day, of an automobile creaking and wheezing its slow way to the old tavern. ”

“ It is like coming into a warmed and lighted room, full of friendly faces, after wandering long by night in a forest peopled only with flitting shadows. In the phantasmagoric pantomime of the city, we forget that there are so many real people in all the world, so diverse, so unfathomably human as those who meet us in the little post-office on the night of our return to Hillsboro.
Like any other of those gifts of life which gratify insatiable cravings of humanity, living in a country village conveys a satisfaction which is incommunicable. ”

“ It's the truth, Dan, you wouldn't know Maysboro. It's big and dirty and prosperous; full of strangers too. There's a tire factory on the field where we played ball. Green Hill, where you and I went coasting, is now our most exclusive suburb, dotted with Italian villas and handsome colonial mansions somewhat the worse for soft-coal smoke. I was out there the other day and it reminded me of the time you broke your sled—your new one—and I could see you standing there in the snow with the tears frozen on your face and the red muffler round your neck, just as plain as though it was yesterday. ”

“ When he set out again the rest of the village folk were all in the meeting-house. The sight of the deserted street, walled in by the forest, lying drowsily in the spring sunshine, was like balm to him. He loitered along, free from observation, his eyes shining. A fat, old negro woman sat on a doorstep in the sun, the only other person not in meeting. She was a worn-out slave, from a Connecticut seaport, who had been thrown in for good measure in a sharp bargain driven by the leading man of Hillsboro. ”

“ It is usually dark when the shabby little narrow-gauge train brings us home to Hillsboro from wanderings in the great world, and the big pond by the station is full of stars. Up on the hill the lights of the village twinkle against the blurred mass of Hemlock Mountain, and above them the stars again. It is very quiet, the station is black and deserted, the road winding up to the village glimmers uncertainly in the starlight, and dark forms hover vaguely about. Strangers say that it is a very depressing station at which to arrive, but we know better. ”

“ I couldn't even take very much interest in the lonely egg on the [75] lonely slice of dry toast. I was thinking about things.
Hillsboro is a very peculiar little speck on the universe; even more peculiar than being like a hen. It is one of the oldest towns in Tennessee and the moss on it is so thick that it can't be scratched off except in spots. But it has a lot of racehorse and distillery money in it and when it gets poked up by anything unusual it takes a gulp of its own alcoholic atmosphere and runs away on its own track at a two-five gait, shedding moss as it goes. ”

“ All that we hear from that part of America which is not Hillsboro is the wild yell of excitement going up from the great cities, where people seem to be doing everything that was ever done or thought of except just living. ”

“ Greensboro was founded and became the county-seat in 1808, was organized as a town in 1829, and was first chartered as a city in 1870.
↑ One of the first cotton mills in the South and probably the first in this state was established at Greensboro in 1832. It closed about 20 years afterwards, and in 1889 new mills were built. Three very large mills were built in the decade after 1895, and three mill villages, Proximity, Revolution and White Oak, named from these three mills, lie immediately N. of the city; in 1908 their population was estimated at 8000. ”

“ Just so the children we have spoiled, the people we have lived with, will continue to keep us living with them. We shall have time to grow quite used to whatever awaits us after the tangled rose bushes of Hillsboro burying-ground bloom over our heads, before we shall have gradually faded painlessly away from the life of men and women. ”

“ The grade from Beallsville to Hillsboro is for the most part ascending, the hill going out west from Beallsville being one of the longest on the road, and Hillsboro is situate on a lofty eminence overlooking a wide range of hills, and many fertile slopes and valleys. On the summit above Hillsboro, the traveler coming east, gets the first glimpses of Laurel Hill, thirty miles distant in the mountains. Crumrine’s history of Washington county, before quoted, informs us that Hillsboro was laid out in the year 1819, a date coincident with the completion of the road. ”

“ The majority of his followers, who were little better than highway robbers, had gathered to his standard as the best representative of the king in North Carolina, after the defeat at Moore's Creek.
There is not and never has been a Willisborough in North Carolina. There is a Williamsboro in Granville county, but has never been the seat of government even for a few days. Hillsboro, practically, was the capital in 1781.
The nearest to an organization of Highlanders, after Moore's Creek, was Hamilton's Loyal North Carolina regiment; but this was made up of refugees from over all the state. ”

“ Josiah Camden, king of the Chicago wheat pit, whose carelessly bestowed bounty meant the happy termination of Hillsboro's long and arduous struggles.
The memory of man could not go back to the time when that town had not had a public library. It was the pride of the remote village, lost among the Green Mountains, that long before Carnegie ever left Scotland there had been a collection of books free to all in the wing of Deacon Bradlaugh's house. Then as now the feat was achieved by the united efforts of all inhabitants. ”

“ The clouds are clearing away before the breeze, and letting us have a sparkling sea, a fine blue sky, and landscapes dappled with light and shadow.
Parsboro, a village on the north shore of the Basin, enjoys more than its share of broad, gravelly beach, overhung with clifted and woody bluffs. One fresh from the dead walls of a great city would be delighted with the sylvan shores of Parsboro. The beach, with all its breadth, a miracle of pebbly beauty, slants steeply to the surf, which is now rolling up in curling clouds of green and white. ”

“ Carter and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man. Of that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in a Tennessee valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and clucking over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses set back from the street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. Lots of times young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the nests and go off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by the world. ”

“ She was for a long time the sole inhabitant of Hillsboro, who came up to the expectations of our visiting friends from the city, on the lookout for Mary Wilkins characters. We always used to take such people directly to see Cousin Tryphena, as dwellers in an Italian city always take their foreign friends to see their one bit of ruined city wall or the heap of stones which was once an Inquisitorial torture chamber, never to see the new water-works or the modern, sanitary hospital. ”

“ When they became magistrates of a county of North Carolina they continued to act on the lines they had already marked out. The increase of population had brought an increase of wealth. The settlers were still frontiersmen, clad in buckskin or homespun, with rawhide moccasins, living in log-cabins, and sleeping under bearskins on beds made of buffalo hides; but as soon as they ventured to live on their clearings the ground was better tilled, corn became abundant, and cattle and hogs increased as the game diminished. Nashborough began to look more like an ordinary little border town. ”

“ The road from Winston to Greensboro has resulted in the creation of a city alongside of ancient Salem which is, in every respect the compeer of Durham in the swiftness of its growth and the amount of its trade and manufactures. Winston, Durham and Reidsville have arisen almost like magic, and are expanding into such importance that Charlotte, Salisbury and Greensboro have all felt the consequences of their growth in trade and population. ”

“ The city has ten churches, an admirable public school system, a twenty thousand dollar high school and a fine courthouse. Hillsboro has pure artesian water and an electric light plant, and owns its waterworks and sewerage system. ”

“ We realize that only in Hillsboro and places like it can one have "deep, full life and contact with the vitalizing stream of humanity." We know that in the very nature of humanity the city is a small and narrow world, the village a great and wide one, and that the utmost efforts of city dwellers will not avail to break the bars of the prison where they are shut in, each with his own kind. They may look out from the windows upon a great and varied throng, as the beggar munching a crust may look in at a banqueting hall, but the people they are forced to live with are exactly like themselves ”

“ Our young people, returning from college, or from visits to the city, freshen and bring up to date our ideas on literature as rigorously as they do our sleeves and hats; but after a short stay in Hillsboro even these conscientious young missionaries of culture turn away from the feeble plots of Ibsen and the tame inventions of Bernard Shaw to the really exciting, perplexing, and stimulating events in the life of the village grocer. ”

“ Hillsboro is a small place, containing something more than 3,000 people. The inhabitants are rather better educated than is usually the case in small towns, and its society is indeed noted in that part of the country for its quietude, culture, and refinement. ”

“ Sometimes people from Hillsboro leave our forgotten valley, high among the Green Mountains, and "go down to the city," as the phrase runs, They always come back exclaiming that they should think New Yorkers would just die of lonesomeness, and crying out in an ecstasy of relief that it does seem so good to get back where there are some folks. After the desolate isolation of city streets, empty of humanity, filled only with hurrying ghosts, the vestibule of our church after morning service fills one with an exalted realization of the great numbers of the human race. ”