Townsite

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The town consists of two parts—the old or lower town, on the banks of the Byk, and the new or upper town, situated on high crags, 450 to 500 ft. above the river. The wide suburbs are remarkable for their gardens, which produce great quantities of fruits (especially plums, which are dried and exported) , tobacco, mulberry leaves for silkworms, and wine. The buildings of the town are sombre, shabby and low, but built of stone; and the streets, though wide and shaded by acacias, are mostly unpaved. ”

“ The “town-house,” or town-hall, of the New England town or village, in its architecture, is a modern structure, often as simple, unpretentious, and unornamented as the “meeting-house” near which it usually stands on the village green or “town common.” It is the arena wherein rich and poor, educated and illiterate, wise and foolish, meet, at least annually, and as much oftener as occasion demands, to decide those questions of Home Rule which are most vital to all concerned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence town sections bordering on the "belt" are rated at higher values, and outside of this "tapu" boundary the suburbs spread out fan-like, with neat and trim-looking cottages, and well-kept gardens, studding the valleys and hill sides; while nearest to the "belt," both on the town and suburban sides, many of the more successful citizens have built themselves picturesque and commodious villas that add to the beauty and attractiveness of the landscape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Several of the thickly settled villages spread out into equally attractive side streets. Here and there a church, a school-house, or a public building adds to the general tidy look of the place. Numerous pleasant wood roads, with a few fresh water ponds and streams, make up a variety of scenery which is certainly equal to any New England town. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The scenery in the neighbourhood is naturally as beautiful and varied as woods, rocks, and rivers, in all their most charming features, can combinedly render it. One of the finest of many noble prospects is, in my mind, that from the heights just over George Town. From this [Pg 213] point the vast amphitheatre of city, valley, and river may be embraced at a glance, or followed out in detail, as time or inclination prompts. ”

“ It is a very pretty town, well planted with trees, the streets wide, the houses well built, and an air of cleanliness pervading everything. It nestles at the base of a long, low mountain, one of a range of hills that fade away in the distance and form a pretty picture in the red and golden tints thrown by the rays of the setting sun. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Seen from the water near the Britannia the old town is indeed charming, with the picturesquely irregular and weathered roofs of the older houses rising tier upon tier, and the grey-blue smoke of chimneys hanging like a perpetual and kindly veil softening crudities of architecture and adding pictorial charm. ”

“ The long straight road that goes northwards up through the town and out of the town, rising, at first by slow degrees, and latterly by a steep ascent, to a point from which one can look down upon town and sea, soon leaves small shops for queer old-fashioned rows of houses ”

“ One straight main street pierces the town, with old gates at each end. In the middle of the market-place there is a quaint old town-hall. The whole town is quaint, “bizarre” as the French call it; small in scale irregular, brown and yellow and black, oddly gabled, and swarming with dirty children. ”

“ The little Canadian boy's question can be asked about every town and village in the land. There are no two places exactly alike; each one has its own history, which, however simple it may be, is quite worth knowing. The busy manufacturing town, with its tens and hundreds of thousands of people, where all is movement and bustle, has its history; and the lonely country village, where everybody knows everybody else, has often a history even more interesting than that of the big town ”

“ The charms of an old English county town do not force themselves on our notice, are missed altogether by the hasty visitor; they have to be found out, they come by surprises, they depend on certain lights and plays of shadow, on the bursting into leaf of certain trees, on the setting up of certain hucksters' stalls. That a great deal of their picturesqueness is passing away is, alas! ”

“ As one passes along its chief streets, or explores its byways in the older part of it, one is delighted on almost every hand by vistas of fine houses, shady and charming courtyards, buildings with strangely constructed roofs, and fantastic gable ends, quaintly shaped bay windows, vaulted colonnades, and here and there, stowed away where least one would expect to find them, smaller courtyards with trellises covered with vines, and perhaps an ancient well of rust-red marble to give a finishing touch to the charming picture. ”

“ No one who now sees the pretty populous villadom which has grown up in every direction round the home of my early married years—the neat cottages and cheerful country houses, the trim lawns and bright flower-gardens, the whole well laid out, tastefully cultivated, and carefully tended suburban district, with its attractive dwellings, could easily conceive the sort of abomination of desolation which its aspect formerly presented to eyes accustomed to the finish and perfection of rural English landscape. ”

“ Sometimes it is used par excellence for a city, as when an inhabitant of Cambridge, itself a large suburban city, speaks of going to Boston as going "into town." But such cases are of course mere survivals from the time when the suburb was a village. In American usage generally the town is something between village and city, a kind of inferior or incomplete city. The image which it calls up in the mind is of something urban and not rural. ”

“ Towns, villages, old towers, villas, ship-yards, and other industrial establishments impart an almost infinite variety to the scenery. One town occupies the top of a hill, and, seen from below, its old walls and towers stand out boldly against the sky; another is built am­phi­thea­tri­cal­ly, close to the strand upon which the fishermen have drawn their boats; a third is hidden in a hollow, and surrounded by vines, olive, orange, and lemon trees. ”

“ Between, deep lawns stretch to the water's edge with fine old houses capping the gentle slope of the shore. Inland lies the business section of the town, with the less pretentious of the dwellings. The whole city is dotted with great elms and maples, planted three quarters of a century ago. ”

“ The town is built close to the Orange River, and promises to be a place of much importance, being on the high road between all eastern ports of the Free State, the diamond fields, and the interior. It is a pretty town, a great number of the houses having gardens around them filled with trees. ”

“ The Local Government Board does not seem to recognise that circumstances alter cases, and that the regulations which may be beneficial in the crowded and filthy slums of a great city, may he mischievous in a village or country town. Andover is an exceedingly healthy little town, as the table on p. 99 will show, and in it there must be very few, if any, houses more than 50 feet high, and the great majority of the houses and cottages have large yards or gardens. ”

“ As one passes along the magnificent avenue, or allée, of trees, through flower-bedecked fields, and with the fresh air from off the river and mountains perfumed by the carpet of blossoms which lies stretched on either side of the road, one is able to realize to the full the rural charm which surrounds the historic and busy town just left behind. ”

“ City and borough then are both rather formal words; town is the word which comes most naturally to the lips when there is no special reason for using one of the others. Of the two formal words, borough is English, city is Latin; it comes to us from Gaul and Italy by some road or other. It is in Domesday that we find, by no means its first use in England, but its first clearly formal use, its first use of it to distinguish a certain class of towns, to mark those towns which are civitates as well as burgi from those which are burgi only. ”

“ The spot seems marked and noted by Nature for the abode of man. The neighbouring prairie is undulating, and the soil uncommonly rich, even in this land of fertility. It is mostly under high cultivation, and upon its northern and western edge is environed by pleasant groves, watered by many a "sweet and curious brook." The public square in the centre of the town is of noble dimensions, [52] occupied by a handsome courthouse and a market, both of brick, and its sides filled up with dwelling-houses, stores, law-offices, a church, bank, and hotel. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Generally, the town, whose enclosure grows in length and breadth with the population and surrounds itself with higher and higher towers, erected, each, by such and such a parish or such guild, and having its own individual character,—generally, I say, the town is divided into four, five or six districts or sections which radiate from the citadel to the ramparts. In preference these districts are inhabitated, each, by one "art" or craft, whereas new trades—the "young arts"—occupy the suburbs, which will soon be enclosed in a new fortified circle. ”

“ There is a good deal to make one believe that 'town ' [see, above, TOWN] continued to be the common popular term for what we may describe in general language as a rural centre of population even into the 18th century. ... The far more general use of the word 'town' than of 'township' in early New England is most naturally explained by supposing that it was the word ordinarily employed in England at the time of the migration,—at any rate, in East Anglia. ”