Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
Odd Sticks, and Certain Reflections Concerning Them
By Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907)T
Up to that day Portsmouth had been a very secluded little community, and had had the courage of its seclusion. From time to time it had calmly produced an individual built on plans and specifications of its own, without regard to the prejudices and conventionalities of outlying districts. This individual was purely indigenous. He was born in the town, he lived to a good old age in the town, and never went out of the place, until he was finally laid under it. To him, Boston, though only fifty-six miles away, was virtually an unknown quantity—only fifty-six miles by brutal geographical measurement, but thousands of miles distant in effect. In those days, in order to reach Boston, you were obliged to take a great, yellow, clumsy stage-coach, resembling a three-story mud-turtle—if the zoölogist will, for the sake of the simile, tolerate so daring an invention; you were obliged to take it very early in the morning, you dined at noon at Ipswich, and clattered into the great city with the golden dome just as the twilight was falling, provided always the coach had not shed a wheel by the roadside or one of the leaders had not gone lame. To many worthy and well-to-do persons in Portsmouth this journey was an event which occurred only twice or thrice during life. To the typical individual with whom I am for the moment dealing, it never occurred at all. The town was his entire world; he was as parochial as a Parisian; Market street was his Boulevard des Italiens, and the North End his Bois de Boulogne.
Of course there were varieties of local characters without his limitations: venerable merchants retired from the East India trade; elderly gentlewomen, with family jewels and personal peculiarities; one or two scholarly recluses in by-gone cut of coat, haunting the Atheneum reading-room; ex-sea-captains, with rings on their fingers, like Simon Danz’s visitors in Longfellow’s poem—men who had played busy parts in the bustling world, and had drifted back to Old Strawberry Bank in the tranquil sunset of their careers. I may say, in passing, that these ancient mariners, after battling with terrific hurricanes and typhoons on every known sea, not infrequently drowned themselves in pleasant weather in small sail-boats on the Piscataqua River. Old sea-dogs who had commanded ships of six or seven hundred tons had naturally slight respect for the potentialities of sail-boats twelve feet long. But there was to be no further increase of these Odd Sticks—if I may call them so, in no irreverent mood—after those innocent looking parallel bars indissolubly linked Portsmouth with the capital of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. All the conditions were to be changed, the old angles to be pared off, new horizons to be regarded. The individual, as an eccentric individual, was to undergo great modifications. If he were not to become extinct—a thing little likely—he was at least to lose his prominence.
However, as I have said, local character, in the sense in which the term is here used, was not instantly killed: it died a lingering death, and passed away so peacefully and silently as not to attract general, or perhaps any, notice. This period of gradual dissolution fell during my boyhood. The last of the cocked-hats had gone out, and the railway had come in, long before my time; but certain bits of color, certain half obsolete customs and scraps of the past were still left over. I was not too late, for example, to catch the last Town Crier—one Nicholas Newman, whom I used to contemplate with awe, and now recall with a sort of affection.
Nicholas Newman—Nicholas was a sobriquet, his real name being Edward—was a most estimable person, very short, cross-eyed, somewhat bow-legged, and with a bell out of all proportion to his stature. I have never since seen a bell of that size disconnected with a church-steeple. The only thing about him that matched the instrument of his office was his voice. His “Hear All!” still deafens memory’s ear. I remember that he had a queer way of sideling up to one, as if nature had originally intended a crab, but thought better of it, and made a town crier. Of the crustacean intention only a moist thumb remained, which served Mr. Newman in good stead in the delivery of the Boston evening papers, for he was incidentally news-dealer. His proper duties were to cry auctions, funerals, mislaid children, travelling theatricals, public meetings, and articles lost or found. He was especially strong in announcing the loss of reticules, usually the property of elderly maiden ladies. The unction with which he detailed the several contents, when fully confided to him, would have seemed satirical in another person, but on his part was pure conscientiousness. He would not let so much as a thimble or a piece of wax, or a portable tooth, or any amiable vanity in the way of tonsorial device, escape him. I have heard Mr. Newman spoken of as “that horrid man.” He was a picturesque figure. Peace to his manes!
Possibly it is because of his bell that I connect the Town Crier with those dolorous sounds which I used to hear rolling out of the steeple of the Old North every night at nine o’clock—the vocal remains of the Colonial curfew. Nicholas Newman has passed on, perhaps crying his losses elsewhere, but this nightly tolling is, I believe, still a custom. I can more satisfactorily explain why I associate with it a vastly different personality, that of Sol Holmes, the barber, for every night at nine o’clock his little shop on Congress street was in full blast. Many a time at that hour I have flattened my nose on his window-glass. It was a gay little shop (he called it “an Emporium”), as barber-shops generally are, decorated with circus-bills, tinted prints, and gaudy fly-catchers of tissue and gold paper. Sol Holmes—whose antecedents to us boys were wrapped in thrilling mystery—we imagined him to have been a prince in his native land—was a colored man, not too dark “for human nature’s daily food,” and enjoyed marked distinction as one of the few exotics in town. At this juncture the foreign element was at its minimum, and we had Home Rule. Every official, from selectman down to the Dogberry of the watch, bore a name that had been familiar for a hundred years or so. Holmes was a handsome man, six feet or more in height, and as straight as a pine. He possessed his race’s sweet temper, simplicity, and vanity. His martial bearing was a positive factor in the effectiveness of the Portsmouth Greys, whenever those bloodless warriors paraded. As he brought up the rear of the last platoon, with his infantry cap stuck jauntily on the left side of his head and a bright silver cup slung on a belt at his hip, he seemed to youthful eyes one of the most imposing things in the display. To himself he was pretty much “all the company.” He used to say, with a drollness which did not strike me until years afterward, “Boys, I and Cap’n Towle is goin’ to trot out ‘the Greys’ to-morroh.” Sol Holmes’s tragic end was in singular contrast with his sunny temperament. One night, long ago, he threw himself from the deck of a Sound steamer, somewhere between Stonington and New York. What led or drove him to the act never transpired….
In this Arcadian era it was possible, in provincial places, for an undertaker to assume the dimensions of a personage. There was a sexton in Portsmouth, his name escapes me, but his attributes do not, whose impressiveness made him own brother to the massive architecture of the Stone Church. On every solemn occasion he was the striking figure, even to the eclipsing of the involuntary object of the ceremony. His occasions, happily, were not exclusively solemn: he added to his other public services that of furnishing ice-cream for evening parties. I always thought, perhaps it was the working of an unchastened imagination, that he managed to throw into his ice-creams a peculiar chill not attained by either Dunyon or Peduzzi—arcades ambo—the rival confectioners.
Perhaps I should not say rival, for Mr. Dunyon kept a species of restaurant, and Mr. Peduzzi limited himself to preparing confections to be discussed elsewhere than on his premises. Both gentlemen achieved great popularity in their respective lines, but neither offered to the juvenile population quite the charm of those prim, white-capped old ladies who presided over certain snuffy little shops, occurring unexpectedly in silent side-streets where the footfall of commerce seemed an incongruous thing. These shops were never intended in nature. They had an impromptu and abnormal air about them. I do not recall one that was not located in a private residence and was not evidently the despairing expedient of some pathetic financial crisis, similar to that which overtook Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon in “The House of the Seven Gables.” The horizontally divided street door—the upper section left open in summer—ushered you, with a sudden jangle of bell that turned your heart over, into a strictly private hall haunted by the delayed aroma of thousands of family dinners. Thence, through another door, you passed into what had formerly been the front parlor, but was now a shop, with a narrow brown wooden counter, and several rows of little drawers built up against the picture-papered wall behind it. Through much use the paint on these drawers was worn off in circles round the polished brass knobs. Here was stored almost every small article required by humanity, from an inflamed emery cushion to a peppermint Gibraltar—the latter a kind of adamantine confectionery which, when I reflect upon it, raises in me the wonder that any Portsmouth boy or girl ever reached the age of fifteen with a single tooth left unbroken. The proprietors of these little nick-nack establishments were the nicest creatures, somehow suggesting venerable doves. They were always aged ladies, sometimes spinsters, sometimes relicts of daring mariners, beached long before. They always wore crisp muslin caps and steel-rimmed spectacles; they were not always amiable, and no wonder, for even doves may have their rheumatism; but, such as they were, they were cherished in young hearts, and are, I take it, impossible to-day.
When I look back to Portsmouth as I knew it, it occurs to me that it must have been in some respects unique among New England towns. There were, for instance, no really poor people in the place; every one had some sufficient calling or an income to render it unnecessary; vagrants and paupers were instantly snapped up and provided for at “the Farm.” There was, however, in a gambrel-roofed house here and there, a decayed old gentlewoman, occupying a scrupulously neat room with just a suspicion of maccoboy snuff in the air, who had her meals sent in to her by the neighborhood—as a matter of course, and involving no sense of dependency on her side. It is wonderful what an extension of life is given to an old gentlewoman in this condition!
I would like to write about several of those ancient Dames, as they were affectionately called, and to materialize others of the shadows that stir in my recollection. But the two or three I have limned, inadequately, though I trust not ungently, must serve. The temptation to deal with some of the queer characters that flourished in this seaport just previous to the Revolution is very strong. I could set in motion an almost endless procession; but this would be to go outside the lines of my purpose, which is simply to indicate one of the various sorts of changes that have come over the vie intime of formerly secluded places like Portsmouth—the obliteration of odd personalities, or, if not the obliteration, the disregard of them. Everywhere in New England the impress of the past is fading out. The few old-fashioned men and women—quaint, shrewd, and racy of the soil—who linger in pleasant mouse-colored old homesteads strung along the New England roads and byways, will shortly cease to exist as a class, except in the record of some such charming chronicler as Sarah Jewett, on whose sympathetic page they have already taken to themselves a remote air, an atmosphere of long-kept lavender and pennyroyal.
Peculiarity in any kind requires encouragement in order to reach flower. The increased facilities of communication between points once isolated, the interchange of customs and modes of thought make this encouragement more and more difficult each decade. The naturally inclined eccentric finds his sharp outlines rubbed off by unavoidable contact with a larger world than owns him. Insensibly he lends himself to the shaping hand of new ideas. He gets his reversible cuffs and paper collars from Cambridge, the scarabæus in his scarf-pin from Mexico, and his ulster from everywhere. He has passed out of the chrysalis state of Odd Stick; he has ceased to be parochial; he is no longer distinct; he is simply the Average Man.