Town dweller

“ Picture to yourself nine-tenths of the town in ashes—or in charred blackened ruins—with thousands of the wretched inhabitants, who could not, or did not, make good their escape, wandering about homeless and starving, filling the air with their lamentations. ”

“ Here a door would be standing open, day after day, because the very last dweller in the house had crawled out into the street to die, while from an open window would hang the head of a woman whose last cry for help had been unheeded. ”

“ The old yards up and down the old street were much trampled, shrubbery broken, fences down, the street thick dust, and still strewn with accoutrements that had been thrown away, with here and there a broken wagon. Street and pavement, there was passing and repassing—the life of the rear of an army, and the faring to and fro on many errands of the people of the relieved town. There were the hospitals and there were the wounded in private houses. There were the dead, and all the burials for the morrow—the negroes digging in the old graveyard, and the children gathering flowers. ”

“ How miserable a spectacle was then presented, when each man was suddenly and treacherously murdered wherever he happened to be, in the field or on the road, in the town, in his own home, or in the street, in market or temple, in bed or at table! ”

“ And yet last night, when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures mourn. ”

“ The way of the silent little procession led through back streets—where women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by—and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's most bedraggled outskirts. ”

“ In bright alcoves, In woodland cottages with earthy walls, In noisome cells of the tumultuous town, Mothers have clasped with joy the new-born babe. Graves, by the lonely forest, by the shore Of rivers and of ocean, by the ways Of the thronged city, have been hallowed out, And filled, and closed. ”

“ A dreadful malady walked the land, and its victims lay in every house! The villages were depopulated, the little clusters of houses at cross roads were stricken, the lone shealing on the mountain side, the miserable cottage of the dreary moor, were each the scenes of desolation and death. ”

“ Horsemen, footmen, carriages squeezed, jammed, intermingled, the pavement blocked up with timbers, hammering and knocking, and falling fragments stunning the ears and threatening the head; not a mob here and there, but the town all mob, thronging, bustling, gaping, and gazing at everything, at anything, or at nothing ”

“ It winds its way through dark alleys and courts to dives and slums, and wherever criminals, hoboes, outcast women, stray and truant children congregate; but it never leads to the smiling windows and doorways of a happy home, except for plunder and crime. There is not a town in the land that it does not touch, and there are but few hamlets that have not sent out at least one adventurer to explore its twists and turnings. ”

“ The stroke of death makes a wider space in the village circle, and is an awful event in the tranquil uniformity of rural life. The passing bell tolls its knell in every ear; it steals with its pervading melancholy over hill and vale, and saddens all the landscape. ”

“ In old towns all the water that fills the wells is dead water,—dead and dirty too; the rinsings of the streets, the soakings of stables, the slop of markets, the wash and offscouring of the town ; even the filterings of the graveyard settle therein, and the child is fed with its grandsire's bones. Men would perish if left alone, dying of their drink. ”

“ A town entirely abandoned by its inhabitants, must be, at all times, a strange, and a mournful sight; but when to this unnatural solitude are added the marks of recent warfare, houses riddled with shot, churches half in ruins, and flights of vultures, congregating around the carcase of some dead animal in the streets, it is difficult to imagine a more striking picture of desolation. ”

“ The most able people of the whole city and suburbs were out of town; if any remained, it were such as were engaged by parish officers to remain; no habit of a gentleman or woman continued; the woeful calamity of that year was grievous, people dying in the open fields and in open streets. ”

“ There were graves enough for a household, and likely a household was there. It maybe a father who had fled from Old England to seek in the wilderness a place where he might worship God according to the dictates of his heart; a Pilgrim wife and mother, whose gentle love mellowed and softened the harshness of frontier life, and sons and daughters, cut off before the growth of commerce tempted the survivors to the town, or the reports of new and fertile territories induced them to abandon the rugged but not ungrateful paternal fields. ”

“ In their eyes the town, the settled abode, were abominations, indicating deep-seated effeminacy and corruption: the only life worth living was that of the herdsman, roving free as air, with his tent of white felt. ”

“ From their lurking-place near the village, the three friends could hear many a wild whoop, now fierce and startling, now plaintive and mourning,—the one, as Nathan and Ralph said, the halloo for revenge, the other the whoop of lamentation,—at intervals chiming strangely in with unmeaning shrieks and roaring laughter, the squeaking of women and the gibbering of children, with the barking of curs, the utterance of obstreperous enjoyment, in which the whole village, brute and human, seemed equally to share. ”

“ All lonely lies the village,
Far off from seas and towns.
Yet when her own folk slumbered
I heard within her street
Murmur of men unnumbered
And march of myriad feet.
For all she lies so lonely,
Far off from towns and seas,
The village holds not only
The roofs beneath her trees:
While Life is sweet and tragic
And Death is veiled and dumb,
Hither, by singer's magic,
The pilgrim world must come.
Among The Tombs
She is a lady fair and wise,
Her heart her counsel keeps,
And well she knows of time that flies
And tide that onward sweeps ”

“ They reconcile to its contradictions those who suffer as well as those who enjoy, and dimly, dumbly, the dweller in the cottage is aware that his rheumatism is of one uric acid with the gout of the dweller in the great house. Every such mansion is the centre of the evenly distributed civilization which he shares, and makes each part of England as tame, and keeps it as wild, as any other. ”

“ There the graveyards are so big and so far away. There the dead must take care of themselves. The old town has its dead in its very midst, always present, always living in loving memory. I thank you, my mother's friends in the old town. I don't know you any more, but I send you my heartfelt gratitude.
I finish my morning wandering on Rough-Hill, and there I stay. ”

“ Following our winding path, we reached at last a white saint-house, which dominated a little hill overgrown with gnarled grey olives, and acted guardian over a large and flourishing village which lay below,—at least it was a collection of mud huts, and more of them than usual, but, like so many of these "villages," seemed to all intents and purposes deserted—a city of the dead. Many of the inhabitants were out no doubt, but those who were in were not tempted by curiosity to stare at us: without windows there can be no signs of the rites which are carried on inside the houses. ”

“ Look at England; every village there has its rural burying-ground, which on Sundays is filled with the well-dressed citizens and villagers, who walk among the green graves of parents, children, or friends, [Pg 151] deriving from their reflections the most solemn and impressive lesson the human heart can learn. In America, on the contrary, the footsteps of a solitary individual, the slow and heavy tramp of a funeral procession, or the sacrilegious intrusion of idle school-boys—who approach a grave but to deface its marble—are the only disturbers of the graveyard's loneliness. ”

“ History, history, history—it lay thick as dust about the town, and only needed a little stirring of the town’s soil to send the dust up into people’s eyes, making them think of times dead and gone and ghosts closer still about them, perhaps, than they cared to think. ”

“ In town a strange corpse passes along, amid thousands of strangers, and human nature seems shorn of that interest which it ought, especially in its last stage, to possess. In the country, every man, woman, and child goes down to the dust amid those who have known them from their youth, and all miss them from their place. ”

“ They swept the town clean of food and raiment; many houses they wantonly burned; what they could not carry with them they destroyed. My own home did not escape: rude men ransacked every closet and drawer, and cut in ribbons the old portraits on the wall. ”

“ Along the banks were scattered the huts of workmen, though, with strange perversity, the greater number had clustered together on a sandy declivity almost in front of the great house, discarding the convenience of nearness to wood and water,—the men, perhaps, as well as the women, preferring to be where all the varied life of the great house might pass before their eyes, while custom made pleasant to its inmates the nearness of the squalid village, with its throngs of bare-footed, half nude, and wholly unkempt inhabitants. ”

“ An acrid smell and a smudge of smoke told of what had really been, and a black heap of ruins where the familiar house had stood for so long confirmed their fears for their own property; but to see the village content and smiling, except for a poor building or two, was joy enough to overbalance the personal loss. ”

“ I have seen a whole village stricken as by a plague—a poor pedlar deprived of the use of his limbs and put in peril of his life—and a young maiden, once the pride and ornament of your own village, snatched from a fond father's care, and borne to an untimely grave. These things I have seen with my own eyes; and I am resolved that the perpetrators of these enormities, Mothers Demdike and Chattox, shall be brought to justice. As to you, the deluded victims of the impious hags, I can easily understand why you shut your eyes to their evil doings. ”

“ A village appeared at a distance, cheering us with a prospect of rest. It gave us new strength to proceed; but it was a wretched place, and afforded us but little relief. It had been once large and populous, but now the houses were roofless, and the ruins that lay scattered about, the gardens covered with the white dust of the torn cottages, the black burnt beams, and squalid looks of the inhabitants, presented in every direction the melancholy aspect of devastation. ”

“ The dead for the most part had been buried out of sight; and if grief and misery sat at the heart of many a household in the town—mourning for relations slain, or property plundered or destroyed,—in the camp without, no such feelings existed among the fierce and fanatical men. ”

“ In a village you become forcibly interested in surrounding humanity, and enter into the lives and feelings of others. A young woman died yesterday in child-birth, and was buried to-day. Everybody felt as if the awful shadow that descended upon the lonely house across the river had passed close to him and her, and left a chill in the heart. ”

“ Under the most favorable circumstances, the removal of families from the land of their birth is attended by many painful incidents. About to embark upon a long and perilous voyage, to seek the untried hospitalities of a stranger soil, the old landmarks and associations which the heartstrings grasp with a cruel tenacity are viewed through the mist of tears and agony.
The old church—the weather-worn homestead—the ancient school house, the familiar play ground, and more sadly dear than all, the green graveyard, offer a mute appeal "more eloquent than words." ”

“ But by day, with its broken, jerry-built houses, the village has no relieving features, it is merely a heap of broken bricks, rubble and mud. Some [104] day, when ivy and lichen grow up the walls and cover green the litter that was Loos, a quaint, historical air may be given to the scene, but now it showed nothing but a depressing sameness of latchless doors, hingeless shutters, destruction and decay. Gone was all the fascinating, pathetic melancholy of the night when we took possession, but such might be expected: the dead is out of keeping with the day. ”

“ Among the young her beauty excited envy, and they virtuously rejoiced that her pride would yet bring her sorrow. All, young and old, loved an intrigue for itself; and would not have spoiled their sport for the world. The servants at the Grange carried their tales to the village, and the village gossips drew together in the fields, on the road, by the pump, at cottage doors, to roll the sweet morsel of scandal under their tongues. ”

“ Underground dungeons taught them revenge, cruelty, persecution to the death: they might look down into one and see lying there some victim of slow starvation or slow torture. Nearly every leading vicious trait born in them seized upon the house itself for development, and began to clamber up its walls as naturally as castle ivy. ”

“ There is not a neighborhood where these heartrending scenes are not displayed. There is not a village or road that does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts whose mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from all that their hearts hold dear. ”