The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.), Marshall P. Wilder [management books to read .txt] 📗

PAGE Arkansas Planter, An Opie Read 556 Auto Rubaiyat, The Reginald Wright Kauffman 546 Ballade of the "How To" Books, A John James Davies 416 Bohemians of Boston, The Gelett Burgess 519 Courtin', The James Russell Lowell 524 Crimson Cord, The Ellis Parker Butler 470 Diamond Wedding, The Edmund Clarence Stedman 549 Dislikes Oliver Wendell Holmes 536 Dos't o' Blues, A James Whitcomb Riley 486 Dying Gag, The James L. Ford 569 Elizabeth Eliza Writes a Paper Lucretia P. Hale 454 Garden Ethics Charles Dudley Warner 425 Genial Idiot Suggests a Comic Opera, The John Kendrick Bangs 504 Hans Breitmann's Party Charles Godfrey Leland 446 Hired Hand and "Ha'nts," The E.O. Laughlin 419 In Elizabeth's Day Wallace Rice 572 In Philistia Bliss Carman 567 Letter from Home, A Wallace Irwin 522 Little Mock-Man, The James Whitcomb Riley 540 Little Orphant Annie James Whitcomb Riley 444 Mammy's Lullaby Strickland W. Gillilan 542 Maxioms Carolyn Wells 424 Morris and the Honorable Tim Myra Kelly 488 Mr. Stiver's Horse James Montgomery Bailey 464 My First Visit to Portland Major Jack Downing 409 My Sweetheart Samuel Minturn Peck 544 New Version, The W.J. Lampton 574 Our New Neighbors at Ponkapog Thomas Bailey Aldrich 403 Plaint of Jonah, The Robert J. Burdette 485 Retort, The George P. Morris 584 Rhyme of the Chivalrous Shark, The Wallace Irwin 483 Rollo Learning to Read Robert J. Burdette 448 Selecting the Faculty Bayard Rust Hall 437 Southern Sketches Bill Arp 575 Tower of London, The Artemus Ward 528 Traveled Donkey, A Bert Leston Taylor 428 Tree-Toad, The James Whitcomb Riley 418 Two Automobilists, The Carolyn Wells 573 Two Business Men, The Carolyn Wells 583 Two Housewives, The Carolyn Wells 566 Two Ladies, The Carolyn Wells 548 Two Young Men, The Carolyn Wells 565 Uncle Simon and Uncle Jim Artemus Ward 539 Wamsley's Automatic Pastor Frank Crane 511 Wild Animals I Have Met Carolyn Wells 414 COMPLETE INDEX AT THE END OF VOLUME X.

[Pg 403]

OUR NEW NEIGHBORS AT PONKAPOG BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

When I saw the little house building, an eighth of a mile beyond my own, on the Old Bay Road, I wondered who were to be the tenants. The modest structure was set well back from the road, among the trees, as if the inmates were to care nothing whatever for a view of the stylish equipages which sweep by during the summer season. For my part, I like to see the passing, in town or country; but each has his own unaccountable taste. The proprietor, who seemed to be also the architect of the new house, superintended the various details of the work with an assiduity that gave me a high opinion of his intelligence and executive ability, and I congratulated myself on the prospect of having some very agreeable neighbors.

It was quite early in the spring, if I remember, when they moved into the cottage—a newly married couple, evidently: the wife very young, pretty, and with the air of a lady; the husband somewhat older, but still in the first flush of manhood. It was understood in the village that they came from Baltimore; but no one knew them personally, and they brought no letters of introduction. (For obvious reasons, I refrain from mentioning names.) It was clear that, for the present at least, their own company was entirely sufficient for them. They made no advance toward the acquaintance of any of the families in the neighborhood, and consequently were left to themselves. That, apparently, was what they desired, and why[Pg 404] they came to Ponkapog. For after its black bass and wild duck and teal, solitude is the chief staple of Ponkapog. Perhaps its perfect rural loveliness should be included. Lying high up under the wing of the Blue Hills, and in the odorous breath of pines and cedars, it chances to be the most enchanting bit of unlaced disheveled country within fifty miles of Boston, which, moreover, can be reached in half an hour's ride by railway. But the nearest railway station (Heaven be praised!) is two miles distant, and the seclusion is without a flaw. Ponkapog has one mail a day; two mails a day would render the place uninhabitable.

The village—it looks like a compact village at a distance, but unravels and disappears the moment you drive into it—has quite a large floating population. I do not allude to the perch and pickerel in Ponkapog Pond. Along the Old Bay Road, a highway even in the Colonial days, there are a number of attractive villas and cottages straggling off toward Milton, which are occupied for the summer by people from the city. These birds of passage are a distinct class from the permanent inhabitants, and the two seldom closely assimilate unless there has been some previous connection. It seemed to me that our new neighbors were to come under the head of permanent inhabitants; they had built their own house, and had the air of intending to live in it all the year round.

"Are you not going to call on them?" I asked my wife one morning.

"When they call on us," she replied lightly.

"But it is our place to call first, they being strangers."

This was said as seriously as the circumstance demanded; but my wife turned it off with a laugh, and I said no more, always trusting to her intuitions in these matters.[Pg 405]

She was right. She would not have been received, and a cool "Not at home" would have been a bitter social pill to us if we had gone out of our way to be courteous.

I saw a great deal of our neighbors, nevertheless. Their cottage lay between us and the post-office—where he was never to be met with by any chance—and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working in the garden. Floriculture did not appear so much an object as exercise. Possibly it was neither; maybe they were engaged in digging for specimens of those arrowheads and flint hatchets, which are continually coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which the plowshare has not turned up some primitive stone weapon or domestic utensil, disdainfully left to us by the red men who once held this domain—an ancient tribe called the Punkypoags, a forlorn descendant of which, one Polly Crowd, figures in the annual Blue Book, down to the close of the Southern war, as a state pensioner. At that period she appears to have struck a trail to the Happy Hunting Grounds. I quote from the local historiographer.

Whether they were developing a kitchen garden, or emulating Professor Schliemann, at Mycenæ, the newcomers were evidently persons of refined musical taste: the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable sweetness, although of no great compass, and I used often to linger of a morning by the high gate and listen to her executing an arietta, conjecturally at some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the turnpike. The husband, somewhere about the ground, would occasionally respond with two or three bars. It was all quite an ideal, Arcadian business. They seemed very happy together, these two persons, who asked no odds whatever of the community in which they had settled themselves.

There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this[Pg 406] couple which I admit piqued my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid interest in the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who had run off and got married clandestinely. I willingly acquitted them, however, of having done anything unlawful; for, to change a word in the lines of the poet,