Hometown

“ Then, again, the neighbourhood of the town has a charm for a wanderer from the old country; the roads are excellent, the fields and gardens are tidied up, creepers are led up the cottage walls, suburban villas abound, everything looks more clean, more soigné, more snug, more filled and settled than the neighbourhood of any other city I visited in America, and thus forces back upon the mind associations and reflections of dear old home. ”

“ HEREFORD town is one of those slumbrous cities, guiltless of any bait with which to lure the sight-seer, but possessing both a cathedral and an individuality of its own. It is a town which seems to have acquired no suburbs, to have grown up in its proper area out of the flat fields which lie around. But on the night of which I am speaking an unwonted stir was going on, a rumbling of vehicles through streets usually silent, and a great noise of voices and hoofs in the different inn yards. ”

“ The town--a town of brick and tin--stands at the apparent edge of a vast plain of withered grass, from whose inhospitable aspect it turns and nestles, as if for protection, round the scrub-covered hills to northward. From among the crowd of one-storied dwelling-houses, more imposing structures, the seats of Government and commerce, rise prominently to catch the eye and impress the mind with the pleasing prospect of wealthier civilisation. ”

“ I had no doubt that I was in the neighborhood of some town, but of its name, and the part of the country in which it was located, I was ignorant. I at length found that I was receding from the woods altogether, and entering a champaign country, in the midst of which I now perceived a town of considerable magnitude, the inhabitants of which were entirely silent, and the town itself presented the appearance of total solitude. ”

“ In other respects, the English town is more village-like than either of the American ones. The women and budding girls chat together at their doors, and exchange merry greetings with young men; children chase one another in the summer twilight; school-boys sail little boats on the river, or play at marbles across the flat tombstones in the churchyard; and ancient men, in breeches and long waistcoats, wander slowly about the streets, with a certain familiarity of deportment, as if each one were everybody's grandfather. ”

“ But though the new town is to me a glass through which I look at the old, the people I see passing up and down these wynds, sitting, night-capped, on their barrow-shafts, hobbling in their blacks to church on Sunday, are less those I saw in my childhood than their fathers and mothers who did these things in the same way when my mother was young. ”

“ Where the first steamer used to land,
Before even that small craft could ride
At any wharf on Bytown's side.
And not far off, in days of yore
A cottage stood—'tis there no more,
And if there ever was a spot
Where friend and foe a welcome got—
Where generous hospitality
Presided o'er the banquet free,
And friendship's hand for rich and poor
Was ever opening the door—
That spot was where that cottage stood,
Embowered in the cedar wood,
And he who there resided with
An open heart, was old Ralph Smith! ”

“ We pass through this neat little town—the majestic hill on the left hand soaring over the houses, and at every interspace you see the whole of it—its beeches, its firs, its rocks, its scattered cottages, and the one neat little pastor's house at the foot, embosomed in fruit-trees all in blossom, the noisy coomb-brook dashing close by it. ”

“ These experiences are graphically recorded in “A New England Girlhood,” where she testifies to her love for her native town. “There is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heart-strings. A town that has a great deal of country in it, one that is rich in beautiful scenery and ancestral associations, is almost like a living being, with a body and a soul. We speak of such a town as of a mother, and think of ourselves as her sons and daughters. ”

“ There comes a town; a queer, quaint, smelly little fishing village—Ali—whose distinct perfume wafts in through even closed windows. Every house in it possesses atmosphere, character, a certain uncouth distinction all its own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ All through the year memories of the home farm, if he be imaginatively inclined, make Arcadian pictures in his mind, and he many times questions if he has not jumped from the frying-pan into the fire.
A HILL TOWN
THE BACK SHEDS
No one place holds every element of pleasure or comfort. The country has its lacks, so has the city. The ideal home is perhaps in the country village within easy travelling distance of some big town. Thus you may largely avoid the drawbacks of either place, while you have within reach all their pleasures. ”

“ For which relief, Heaven bless the town and the memory of the immortal Bilkins likewise!
There is a charming walk, arched and shaded by trees, on the old walls that form the four sides of this High Town, whence you get glimpses of the streets below, and changing views of the other town and of the river, and of the hills and of the sea. It is made more agreeable and peculiar by some of the solemn houses that are rooted in the deep streets below, bursting into a fresher existence a-top, and having doors and windows, and even gardens, on these ramparts. ”

“ The neighbourhood, it was equally manifest, was of the highest vogue and distinction: on one side was the dwelling of a fashionable tailor, who built a house out of every ten coats that he cut; on the other side was the residence of a retired tavern-keeper; and right opposite, on the other side of the street, was the mansion of one of the first aristocrats in the town, who had had neither a tailor nor a tavern-keeper in the family for a space of three full generations. ”

“ Here we find houses that are really homes, old enough to be mellow, lived in enough to have character, and architecturally unconscious enough to have charm. "This is the part of town I love the best of all." ”

“ And I looked along at the nice, neat little houses, with the front doors standing open to the spring night, and dishes clattering musical here and there in kitchens, getting washed up, and lights up-stairs where children were being put to bed. And I thought, “Never tell me that this little town don’t want everybody that belongs to it to live in it. The town is true. It’s folks that’s false.” I says that over: “The town is true. It’s folks that’s false. How you going to make them know it?”
When it come my turn to have the Homecoming committee meet to my house, things had begun to get exciting. ”

“ The street is narrow, and nothing can exceed the tall, grim ugliness of the village houses, many of them four stories high, contiguous all along, and paved quite across; so that nature is as completely shut out from the precincts of this little town as from the heart of the widest city. ”

“ But the beauty of this town consists in the number of gentry who dwell in and near it, the polite conversation among them, the affluence and plenty they live in, the sweet air they breathe in, and the pleasant country they have to go abroad in. ”

“ Even in the more distinctively residential sections of the town many of them still stand, and they are so very much like toy houses enlarged under some powerful glass that we think of Spotless Town and those wonderful rhymes that we used to see above our heads in the street cars. ”

“ There is a freshness in thy neighbourhood, a quiet beauty in thy streets, a cozy comfort in many of thy dwellings, and a venerable and impressive grandeur in thy religious edifices, belonging alone to an English town of good and ancient descent. ”

“ I have never seen a city anywhere nearly so beautiful as that little village of twenty-five hundred people;—even our town is clumsy compared with it, and the world doesn't joggle as it turns around, there. ”

“ The town, small as it is, affords us some reflection, pale indeed, but veritable, of the sweets of polite intercourse: the adjacent country numbers amid the occupants of its scattered mansions some whose polish is annually refreshed by contact with metropolitan splendour, and others whose robust and homely geniality is, at times, and by way of contrast, not less cheering and acceptable. ”

“ It leads us towards the older town, far from the noisy port hotels, into a winding labyrinth of steep, ill-paved streets, through rows of old houses, every one of which seems to have a history of its own, and whose old-fashioned windows, and wide portals opening into silent court-yards, remind one of time-worn parchment bindings round poems for ever new. ”

“ Every habitation possessing, if not its garden, at least its one tall tree, beneath whose boughs the family congregate during the warm hours, the appearance of an Eastern city, as you look down upon it from any neighbouring height, is entirely devoid of that monotony which renders the roofs and chimneys of an European town so utterly uninteresting. ”

“ We kept our town-house, into which we returned for a winter or two; but gave it up for a permanent residence here, with which we are perfectly content. We see here all the friends we want to see; we all enjoy ourselves, and the children are healthy and happy." And this is but a specimen of thousands of families in the enjoyment of country life, including the families of men in the highest station, and possessed of sufficient wealth. ”

“ And then they visit themselves in waxwork, and go into ecstacies over the stolid representations of their life and their furniture, and they walk about the town—a sort of grown-up school-procession—and go home to thrill the wide-eyed village with tales of the wonderful city. ”

“ Out through the city walls you are in the country at once. Indeed, I can't help thinking of the town as a garden where houses are bedded out instead of flowers; they are so close packed, so varied and pretty. ”

“ It is a residence city—or, as they call it, town—for, although it has a population of one hundred thousand, there is no cathedral, so it cannot aspire to the dignity of being a city. The town is made up in great part of families whose members do business “in the city,” and they live in quiet elegance in beautiful homes. ”

“ Life in this country town and that country town, in this crowded suburb or on that out-back station or selection—a hireling always. The first twenty-five had dragged by under English skies that even in summer had no sun for a motherless, fatherless girl, pupil-teacher from the age of fourteen. ”

“ Who could have believed that such a custom could have survived in the days of telegraph and telephone, and in a city of, say, thirty thousand inhabitants?
The old streets and highways about the town were indescribably attractive, and beyond in the country, the shaded ways beneath large trees offered charming vistas, and shelter from the sun. ”

“ Within the pretty residences of the suburbs may be found all the comforts and recreations of a happy prosperous family life, united with genuine English hospitality, and a cordial welcome for the stranger. The owner of one of these charming homes orders up his cart, and insists upon taking us for a drive through this delightful locality, and for miles and miles our hearts and eyes are captivated by lovely landscapes and enchanting bits of scenery. ”

“ No better example could be found than this old town with its families who had come from well-to-do circumstances, not, as was the case with so many settlers of the new country, in order to escape trouble. ”

“ We have an old walled town, rich in cool public wells of water, on the top of a hill within and above the present business-town; and if it were some hundreds of miles further from England, instead of being, on a clear day, within sight of the grass growing in the crevices of the chalk-cliffs of Dover, you would long ago have been bored to death about that town. It is more picturesque and quaint than half the innocent places which tourists, following their leader like sheep, have made impostors of. ”

“ The main part of the town lies in a depression in the undulating downs, its villas, houses and streets all set down on a liberal scale with plenty of room for trees, in whose luxuriant foliage the place is half hidden. All around stretches the wavelike succession of the hills, diversified with forest and bright with heather and gorse. ”

“ The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. ”