Part 5

Then it was that the orator of the above party, being loudly called upon, spoke out. He was a thin-faced man, pale and agitated with the importance of his message, which he desired to present in the most translucent way; for he knew the benefits of education, having come to that benighted region from the very heart of New-England, where its blessings are as free as air. 'My respected friends,' said he, 'we want you all to be satisfied in your own minds. It doos seem to be a pity that all this land should lie idle, when you might just as well sell it for thousands of dollars, and have the money in your own pockets; or what is a great deal better, edicate your children with it. Just këount up what it would come to, if there's any of you acquainted with arithmetic, and you'll find there's plenty, kalkalating only the interest, for all purposes of eddication. And what good do you gëit ëout of it nëow? Why every man sends his këow to pastur', and it's mighty _poor_ pastur', that's a fact. (_Cheers._) Wal, I s'pose some folks will say the poor man and the rich man get served both alike, for when the mashes are mowed, both have the same right. That isn't so, my respected friends. For the rich man can afford to send four times as many hands, and carry off four times as much hay. (_Cheers._) Now the time doos seem to be come to remedy this evil, and to get a fair distribution of the proceeds. We don't _want_ to 'take your rights away,' my christian friends; we want to give every man his _own_ rights. I've got reason to think that many of you look at this matter in the right light, sence it's been set before you, and made all plain; and this speaks much for that wonderful nat'ral-born intelligence which is common to the people of Quog. (_Cheers._) _Nëow_ is the time to decide this matter; that's the only fault, that you've been a-thinkin' about it too long; but my friends, you can make up for lost time; put your shoulder to the wheel, and whatever you do, do it nëow! _nëow!_ NËOW!'

This praiseworthy speech produced considerable sensation on the ground. One said it was reasonable enough; another said he couldn't pick any flaw in what the speaker had set forth; another declared he was a smart man. In short, a very general buzz of approbation ran through the assembly; and the slow dawn of intelligence beginning to break gradually over the faces of those present, gave evidence that 'the cause' had never before made such a long stride in the town of Quog. The question was now about to be taken, when somebody requested the chairman to 'hold on a minute; it was well enough to hear all sides first; and may be Uncle Billy had got a word to say.' The reform party looked a little frightened, as they had augured very favorably from not having discovered the 'Influential Man' upon the ground. He had only retired to the bar-room, however, and held himself in readiness as soon as the proper moment should arrive. He now edged his way up to the tribune, with a smiling, rubicund face, and swinging his hat around, 'Boys,' said he, with a gay, familiar tone, 'don't you hold up your hands for no such thing. Now you've got something to give to your children when you die, and they can't spend it, nor run away with it. Let the aristocrats get hold of the money, and they'll put it into their pockets, and then see where you'll be; the plains, mashes, money, all gone. That aint all. The next thing they'll do will be to sell your fishing-privileges; (_great excitement;_) and when you go upon the grounds you'll be druv off. What'll you do then? No clammin', no eelin', and no pastur' to feed your cow onto. That's what it'll nat'rally lead to. Now you see, I'm an old man, and know how these things work; but by ----! I won't stand by, not while my gray hairs is above ground, and see your rights taken away. So hold on to your rights, boys! hold on to your rights!'

A shout arose, a triumphant shout, from the whole mass, the above Doric eloquence having turned them completely about. Who would have thought that the aspect of things could become so changed? But this comes of having the last word. Pleasant smiles were diffused over the face of Uncle Billy; and the meeting being now ripe for the question, it was put, and the inhabitants, as it were with one voice, decided that the town-lands should remain 'just as they were.' The philanthropists departed from the ground wofully chapfallen, amid the jeers and calumniations of the crowd; and the old chorus met their ears from the tavern-doors and windows as they passed:

'I HEARD a song the other day, Made in old Quog, as they do say, And all the tune that they could play, Was to take our common rights away. Ti de id lo, ti de a! To take our common rights away!'

It is a good maxim never to despair; and perseverance in a just cause will at last accomplish its most difficult ends. For the present generation it is to be feared that nothing can be done. Their case is indeed peculiar. They never will sell the town-lands until they get education, and they never will get education until they sell the town-lands. Thus the matter stands; and it grieves me to say, in conclusion, that never was the pall of ignorance more dark than that which hangs at this moment over the benighted regions of Quog.

F. W. S.

THE BROKEN VOW.

----'SHE was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all.'

* * * * *

HE has learned a sad lesson! he trusted away A heart that loved wildly, but oh! how sincere! He deemed that such happiness could not decay, But the full-flowing fountain has shrunk to a tear.

He thought that the sun, which at morn shone so bright, Would surely shine on, till the star-light appeared; But sorrow came down on the cold wings of night, And all his best feelings were trampled and seared.

The being he worshipped, as angels adore, The bird he had nestled so close to his heart, That one! oh, no other can ever restore The joys of his Eden; from her he must part!

He must strive to forget her, and never again Send a dove to the world with the hope of return; He must close every portal but sighing and pain, In a bosom that sorrow can never unlearn.

J. T. F.

_Boston, Oct., 1843._

CHRONICLES OF THE PAST.

NUMBER TWO.

THE application of names to places is often a matter of mere fancy, without a semblance of appropriateness. The belligerent little State of Rhode-Island, for example, bears no more likeness to the Isle of Rhodes, from which it takes its name, than does a West Indian war-club to the queue of a Chinese mandarin. The Bay State is no more the State possessing a bay, than are half the sea-board States in the Union; nor has Connecticut any more claim to the river which enriches her meadows, nor Vermont to the greensward of her hills, than has Massachusetts to the one, or Western Virginia to the other. Far more mal-apropos, however, than all we have mentioned, is the application of _palmetto_ to the chivalrous land of nullification, since neither on upland nor lowland, rice field nor cotton-field, saving only the dwarf specimens upon the sand-banks of Sullivan's Island, is that fantastic tree of the tropics to be found any where within the State. In truth, as a general thing, there is neither character nor cleverness in the application of names to places; and he who should form his notions of the different sections of our country from the appellations they have received, would be much in the condition of Bossuet's student of history, who had taken for his text-books Gulliver's Voyages and Rabelais's Pantagruel.

There is, however, _one_ notable exception to the general fact. New-Hampshire is rightly and truly designated the Granite State. Not only in the bare sides of her stupendous mountains, and the broad bases of her rugged hills, does she partake largely of this firm conglomerate, but in her people also she seems to have compounded no small share of the hard material. Stern, unbending, indomitable, with physical frames like the gnarled oak, and characters rough as the huge boulders upon her soil, New-Hampshire may boast a race of men unequalled for energy and endurance by any other in the world. It would seem as if the old Saxon legend, which makes Tor, the war-god, hew the first man, with hammer and chisel, out of a block of stone, and give him life with a flash of lightning, were fully verified in these hardy sons of the mountains; for they are almost literally men of granite, with electric spirits. It has been my fortune, in a not uneventful life, to have travelled over many portions of the world's surface, and to have seen much of human manners and character; and I can truly say that I have always returned to the barren soil of New-Hampshire with a higher respect and a warmer love for the rude virtues of her sons; and it is now my firm belief, should the day ever come, which may Heaven avert! when dissensions will rend asunder that great charter of our freedom, the Constitution, that Liberty, like the bird we have chosen for her emblem, scared from her resting-place in the capitol, would find her last and secure home among the dwellers on the hill-sides of the Granite State.

This is not equally true, however, of every portion of New-Hampshire. Along the southern borders of her territory the spindle and shuttle have introduced a race who are strangers to the simple virtues of her husbandmen; so that even they, tempted by the lucre of gain, have sadly fallen from the primitive plainness which was once their most enviable characteristic. Neither upon the rich intervales of the Connecticut, where wealth comes unattended by her handmaid labor, will you find the true specimens of her stalwart yeomanry. It is in the distant up-country only, among the townships far removed from the bustle of the manufactory and the crowd of the market-place, that the rough husbandmen of the hard soil, the sterling democracy of our degenerate age, are to be sought and known. There they dwell, the honest country-folk of by-gone days, undisturbed by the changes which time brings over other portions of the world, contented lords of the heritage of their fathers.

Whether it is to be attributed to some peculiarities of climate or of soil, or to some one of those other thousand influences which are ever operating upon the physical frame, it is certain that the maximum of bodily size and human life, over a considerable portion of the Granite State, is at a higher standard than in any other part of our country. It is capable of being demonstrated by the student of history, that more of pure, unadulterated Saxon blood runs in the veins of the backwoodsmen of New-Hampshire, than in any other class of our people; but whether this has any thing to do with the fact we have stated, cannot of course be determined. That fact, however, is established beyond a doubt; and he who would see a peasantry of sturdier frames and greater age than is to be found elsewhere in the whole world, may find them scattered over the rough soil and along the narrow valleys of the White Mountains. Six feet in height, and one hundred and sixty pounds in weight, make elsewhere a man above the customary standard; but in New-Hampshire scores of young men, from six feet two inches to six feet five, and weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, never deem themselves above the ordinary size. I have in my mind's eye at this moment ten young men, who would weigh two hundred pounds, _without a single ounce of surplus flesh_, and I doubt not thousands over the State could be found to match them in every way.

The portion of the State of which this is peculiarly true, lies north of the Winnepisseogee lake. It is a country of all others most uninviting to the farmer, and one wonders what could have tempted its first settlers to have selected it as a home. Huge rocks, tumbled from the mountains, lie thickly scattered over the tillage-ground and pastures; ledges, bare or covered with dark green moss, run for miles often through farms and homesteads; precipitous banks and abrupt precipices swell and break over the whole landscape; and the entire country is ploughed with deep ravines, and barren with a scanty soil, beyond what any description can convey. To the lover of nature, indeed, it is a country full of beauty. Those old hills, black with forests of Norway pine, lying like the sleeping guardians of the beautiful lake by their side; and those rustic cottages, scattered along the narrow valley which the retreating waters have left between themselves and the mountains; and finer than all, the numerous water-falls that leap and dash and gurgle onward over scaur and precipice and wooded cliff toward the Winnepisseogee, which seems waiting like some gentle mother to welcome her joyous children to her bosom; are well worth the journey of many a long mile to the scenery-loving tourist. But the people are poor. Toiling from year to year with unceasing industry, they gain from the hard soil a bare livelihood, from youth to old age. Happy indeed in their poverty; contented, unaspiring, and satisfied if the last days of December shall find them no poorer than they commenced the year, and the produce of the farm has proved sufficient to pay the tax of poll and parsonage, and yield a sufficiency for the winter's store.

The features of the country strike the eye accustomed to a more dense population as singularly unique. One may travel those roads, winding through the mountain passes and along the high palisades, for days, and see neither village nor hamlet, nothing indeed but the low, unpainted houses, sometimes prettily covered with jessamine and ivy, but more often bare of all taste or adornment, saving the solitary lilac-trees which stand in the corners of the court-yards, or the old scented thorn-bushes by the side of the door. Looking down sometimes from an elevation he has gained, they seem to the traveller, those cottages, like martins' nests, dotting the curving shores of some beautiful bay; and again from some deep ravine, they appear like fairy domicils, perched high on the cliffs and ramparts of the mountains. Interspersed in every few miles are the district school-houses and the parish churches, the one almost invariably standing upon the fork of two or more roads, and the other crowning the summit of the highest hill attainable by horse and vehicle. And then the country tavern, whose long shed and sanded hall give surety to the stranger and his beast of a comfortable noon-tide baiting; or, in the more solitary townships, where the places of entertainment are few and far between, the quiet nook by the forest road-side, where the dipper hangs beside the overflowing water-trough, and the guide-board measures out the long miles between him and his evening resting-place; each and all objects of pleasant recollection to the traveller, as he muses upon his journeyings in after life.

The effect of a mountain atmosphere upon the health and spirits of mankind has long been known to the medical faculty, and has been treated of by its most distinguished writers. Its equal tendency to the extension of human life, however, naturally as it seems to follow from the other, has been entirely overlooked. And yet this is as capable of satisfactory demonstration as any fact connected with the animal economy. Nor is this the only fact of interest in regard to this subject, which presents itself to the attentive and accurate observer. It is also capable of proof, that up to a certain distance from the equator, the length of life increases in a steady ratio with the degrees of latitude. In some recent statistics which have been carefully taken, and which upon their completion will be given to the world, it has been ascertained that the average length of human life is thirteen per cent. greater in the mountain districts of New-Hampshire than it is upon the sea-board country of Massachusetts or Maine; fourteen per cent. greater than in New-York or Pennsylvania; seventeen per cent. greater than in Virginia; and twenty-two per cent. greater than in any State south of the parallel of thirty-five degrees. There are indeed other causes to be taken into the account, to which we cannot now refer, which are every where recognized as having an important influence upon the _physique_, if not indeed upon the _morale_, of the human race. But entirely aside from these, the principle of an increasing age directly following a diminishing temperature, can be most satisfactorily shown; so that the rough mountaineer of New-Hampshire has as much right to calculate upon the good old age of eighty-six, as has the lordly planter of the Sea Islands to the premature decrepitude of three-score.

This extreme old age to which the agriculturalists of New-Hampshire attain, is perceptible to the most casual observer. Over the whole country we have described, evidences of the truth of this force themselves upon his attention, wherever he goes. The old man of seventy-five years still mows his swath in the summer, and bends his sickle in the autumn, with the elastic vigor of the prime of manhood. The barn rings with the heavy strokes of the flail, swung in alternate succession by the veteran and his grandson. The cozy couple, who could tell you stories of their own experience in revolutionary days, ride each Sabbath morning side by side upon the pillioned saddle to the house of GOD. The simple head-stones in the church-yard also, though they may often record the premature decay of some bright blossom of the social circle, more frequently point out the resting-places of those who were gathered to their graves like the shock of corn that cometh in in its season. In the town of Moultonborough, for example, where the population scarcely reaches to thirteen hundred souls, no less than forty-four persons have died since 1833, _whose average ages were ninety-eight years_. Of these forty-four, twenty-six had exceeded a century, and the youngest of the band was cut off at the premature age of eighty-seven. 'Think of that, Master Brook!' But the oldest of the group, he who was for many years the banner-veteran of our worthies, and whose memory, we opine, will still be foremost for many years to come; he, our hearty Scotchman, whose monument rises by the church-yard gate, he, unshrinking, undismayed, stood erect under the accumulated weight of _six score and seven full-told years_!

Brave old DONALD MCNAUGHTON! thrice honored be thy memory! Year after year didst thou live on in the very greenness of decrepitude; and though old Time filched one by one the glories of thy manhood, it mattered little, so long as listeners would come to thy long stories of the feats of daring at Louisburg and the Plains of Abraham! Thou type of graceful covetousness, thou realization of penurious modesty, it irks me to think that thou, at the last, malgré thy unwearied care and long delay, shouldst have been forced to pass the Lethean stream in leaky Stygian wherry! But Death took thee unawares; and he whom thou hadst so long defied, impatient of the delay, and distrusting perchance his skill to meet thee in open day, stole upon thee in thy midnight slumbers, and carried thee, a poor forked shape, unresisting because unconscious, to the pale kingdom.

The history of Donald McNaughton's life would be replete with worldly wisdom. Commencing life a 'puir bairn,' to use his own phrase, though at the time to which he alluded he must well-nigh have completed his fiftieth year, by unremitted industry and careful economy he amassed a fortune, remarkable in a new and unproductive country. Up to his one hundredth year he labored daily in the field, and his best workmen could seldom surpass him in the amount of labor. Even at that age it was not the decrepitude of years but of an accidental injury, which laid the old man by, and to the very day of his confinement, which preceded his death but a single week, he personally superintended all the business of his homestead. At the distant market-town in the coldest winter weather; at the polls on every day of election through the 'sleety dribble' and miry roads of earliest spring; at church and funeral, auction-sale and country gathering, he was ever the foremost man. Indeed in all matters, whether of state or church, public or private, he prided himself upon his superior sagacity; and not without reason. Shrewd, careful, far-sighted, firm in the tenacity with which he held, and cool in the manner with which he expressed, his opinions, he retained over three generations the undisputed sway of a superior man.

The secret of the great age to which he attained was in contravention of all the principles of dietetics. No man was ever more imprudent in his diet, or in his exposure to the weather. He was, however, habitually cheerful; a consequence rather than a cause of his continued healthfulness; and no war-worn hero ever better loved, by the fireside of the wintry night, or under the summer shade of his broad roof-tree, 'to count his scars, and tell what deeds were done,' than did old Scotch Donald. How well I remember the lighting up of his bright hazle eye as he would commence in his broad highland accent some tale of flood or field; and how readily we boys would quit the game of cricket or marbles, to listen to a story of the wars by old 'Gran'fth McNaughton!'

Nor was it in narrative alone that the old man excelled. No man better loved a ready joke, and no man better turned one, than did he. I remember a pedler one day riding up to his door, the poor beast he bestrode being ladened from shoulder to haunch with the variety of wares which he had to dispose of. Greatly to our surprise, old Donald met him at the door with a most cheerful greeting, for we well knew that pedlers were his utter abomination, and, offering him a chair, inquired what he had to sell. 'Oh, every thing, Sir; every thing,' replied he of the packs; 'ribbons, silks, calicoes, combs, thimbles, needles, scissors, gloves, belts, sewing-silk--every thing, Sir, every thing! What will you have?' 'Got any grind-stones?' asked the old man. 'Oh, no Sir, I came a horse-back.' '_Ah, I thought you came a foot!_' was the reply, uttered in a tone and manner that sent the poor hawker out at the door with a speed that no maledictions could have effected.