Transcribed from the 1907 Archibald Constable & Co. edition byDavid Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
To a certain handful of dear New England women of names unknown tothe world, dwelling in a certain quiet village, alike unknown:—
We have worked together to make our little corner of the great universea pleasanter place in which to live, and so we know, not only one another’snames, but something of one another’s joys and sorrows, caresand burdens, economies, hopes, and anxieties.
We all remember the dusty uphill road that leads to the green churchcommon. We remember the white spire pointing upward against abackground of blue sky and feathery elms. We remember the soundof the bell that falls on the Sabbath morning stillness, calling usacross the daisy-sprinkled meadows of June, the golden hayfields ofJuly, or the dazzling whiteness and deep snowdrifts of December days. The little cabinet-organ that plays the doxology, the hymn-books fromwhich we sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,”the sweet freshness of the old meeting-house, within and without—howwe have toiled to secure and preserve these humble mercies for ourselvesand our children!
There really is a Dorcas Society, as you and I well know,and one not unlike that in these pages; and you and I have lived throughmany discouraging, laughable, and beautiful experiences while we emulatedthe Bible Dorcas, that woman “full of good works and alms deeds.”
There never was a Peabody Pew in the Tory Hill Meeting-House, andNancy’s love story and Justin’s never happened within itscentury-old walls; but I have imagined only one of the many romancesthat have had their birth under the shadow of that steeple, did we butrealize it.
As you have sat there on open-windowed Sundays, looking across purpleclover-fields to blue distant mountains, watching the palm-leaf fansswaying to and fro in the warm stillness before sermon time, did notthe place seem full of memories, for has not the life of two villagesebbed and flowed beneath that ancient roof? You heard the humof droning bees and followed the airy wings of butterflies flutteringover the gravestones in the old churchyard, and underneath almost everymoss-grown tablet some humble romance lies buried and all but forgotten.
If it had not been for you, I should never have written this story,so I give it back to you tied with a sprig from Ophelia’s nosegay;a spring of “rosemary, that’s for remembrance.”
K. D. W.
August, 1907
Edgewood, like all the other villages along the banks of the Saco,is full of sunny slopes and leafy hollows. There are little, rounded,green-clad hillocks that might, like their scriptural sisters, “skipwith joy,” and there are grand, rocky hills tufted with gauntpine trees—these leading the eye to the splendid heights of aneighbour State, where snow-crowned peaks tower in the blue distance,sweeping the horizon in a long line of majesty.
Tory Hill holds its own among the others for peaceful beauty andfair prospect, and on its broad, level summit sits the white-paintedOrthodox Meeting-House. This faces a grassy common where six roadsmeet, as if the early settlers had determined that no one should lacksalvation because of a difficulty in reaching its visible source.
The old church has had a dignified and fruitful past, dating fromthat day in 1761 when young Paul Coffin received his call to preachat a stipend of fifty pounds sterling a year; answering “thatnever having heard of any Uneasiness among the people about his Doctrineor manner of life, he declared himself pleased to Settle as Soon asmight be Judged Convenient.”
But that was a hundred and fifty ye