A Day That Is Done
I
WHEN my mother left Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1859 to go as a bride to Hagerstown, Maryland, it was indeed a far cry from the old town on the rushing Piscataqua, with its life, culture, and tradition bound up with the restless sea, to that other town in the heart of the Cumberland Valley held in the gentle embrace of the benign Blue Ridge Mountains.
The story of how it happened was an enchanting one to us children. How my father, who was a member of Congress at the time, had met my grandfather, Mr. Richard Jenness, in Washington. How the older man had taken a liking to the young Mr. Hamilton and invited him to make a visit in Portsmouth. And how one fateful morning as he entered the walk-way leading to the red-brick, elm-shaded house on Pleasant Street the door opened, and framed in the slender columns, with the delicate fanlight above, stood a lovely young lady in a lavender dress and lavender bonnet with pink roses under the brim. Whether it was the bonnet or the face beneath, I do not know, but this is certain —my father opened the gate a free man and stood at the foot of the steps twenty paces away in bondage for life. A year later they were married.
Portsmouth was already a hundred years old when Mr. Jonathan Hager, a German gentleman of means, venturing into this unsettled hinterland of Maryland, bought from the Lord Proprietor a section of land, named it Hager’s First Choice, and over a never-failing spring in a lovely oak dale built a sturdy stone house, half home, half fortress. Soon other Germans came, and on Hager’s Second Choice the village began to grow in pathetic duplication of the old towns across the sea; the low story-and-a-half red-brick houses, with little white dormer windows looking from the roofs like wise eyes, stood clbow to elbow and flush with the brick herringbone pavements. Behind each house ran its long walled flower and vegetable garden. As years went by and people found they could go for water some distance away without remaining at the spring neatly impaled on an arrow, or could return home with their scalps where nature intended them to be, Mr. Hager bought another piece of land on a hill commanding a lovely view of the thirty-mile-wide valley. Here on Mount Prospect, or Hager’s Delight, early in the nineteenth century a fine large Georgian house was built after a design by Benjamin Latrobe. At this house one warm September evening, having left the train in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, twenty miles away, the young New England girl and her husband alighted from the stage and entered its doors to take up their new life.
While she had been spending the previous winter in Boston in the family of Professor Agassiz, pursuing her studies, my grandfather had procured the plan of the Hagerstown house, each piece of furniture had been made in Boston for its appointed place, and all was complete, even to the ‘twelve fruit cakes on the pantry shelf.’ Also installed were two Pennsylvania Dutch servants, who took their young mistress by complete surprise with their extraordinary English and the still more extraordinary dishes of Schnitz and Knepp, Sauerkraut and Schmierkäse, they presented her to eat. It was not long, however, before a colored cook was established in the kitchen, whose dishes were more to her comprehension and liking.
The town founded by the Germans was still German in character, but pressing close to its doors were the large estates of the English county families — estates granted in lavish fashion by the Charleses and Georges.
I wonder if anywhere else in the country there are such stately or quaint names for what the dry legal phrase calls ‘parcels of land.’ Merely to read the title deeds is to step into the country of romance. To the great places the finest names—‘Fountain Rock,’ ‘My Lady’s Manor,’ ‘Rose Hill,’ ‘Stafford Hall,’ ‘Montpelier,’ ‘Tammany,’ ‘Long Meadows,’ and many, many more. But if we have ‘Paradise’ we have also ‘Strife,’ and if there is ‘Peace and Plenty’ there is also ‘None Left,’ ‘Nancy’s Last Shift,’ and even ‘Little I Thought It.’ Of one of these the tale is told that Lord Baltimore, traveling to Virginia, stopped overnight near Hagerstown, or Elizabeth Town as it was first called, at the small house of a Mr. Galloway. He was made heartily welcome, supped, and enjoyed a most quiet night’s sleep. On taking coach the next morning he was informed by his happy host that during the night his good lady had presented him with twins. So pleased was his lordship with his undisturbed rest under such untoward circumstances that on his return home a large grant of land was made to Mr. Galloway. That in all fairness it was due Mrs. Galloway seems to have occurred to no one in the transaction.
To these lovely places the bride from far away was made welcome, and went to many a gay party in the wide-halled houses, in spite of the fact that the black figure of War was daily coming nearer and nearer to tramp with bloody feet the length and breadth of the Valley.
II
Our house was fairly representative of the strange mixture of races that made life in the little town. As we children came along, the kitchen was of all places the most entrancing. Aside from the delightful possibilities of the capacious oven, we listened with breathless interest to the most thrilling conversations and debates held between my beloved black Aunt Kate and my next-oldest sister’s German nurse, Barbara. There was waged a never-ending conflict of ideas — generally concerning matters medical and spiritual. For instance, Barbara held stoutly that a pale, languid child, undoubtedly the victim of ‘opnemma,’ must be taken to an old German dame, who would divest it of clothing, grease it all over, and after swinging it by the heels, the meantime muttering the proper mysterious formula, return it right side up completely cured, the opnemma presumably having dripped out of the top of its head. Sniffing scornfully, Aunt Kate would disclaim any belief in ‘them old Hexes,’ and to prove it displayed, tied around my fat little neck, a cord on which hung a small bag procured from an old colored crone. (On secret investigation this was found to contain a bloody chicken feather and some gravel.) This kept any and all disasters at bay as far as I was concerned. Totally unconscious that we were listening to the exposition of the old enchantments descended from the African jungle or the dim mists of Saxon forests, we impartially believed in both, and enjoyed it in the daytime. It was a different matter at night. Then in the big dark bedroom ‘ha’nts’ and ‘Dutch Hexes’ were somewhat prone to gather at the foot of the bed and glare at their trembling victims.
In the brave hours of daylight, I remember, we essayed the gentle art of hexing on the well-hated French governess of the three older children. (At the time of which I write there were six of us, with two still to come.) A piece of wax candle was cut to resemble remotely a human figure, and, having stuck this full of pins, we set it in the sun to melt, the idea being that pains and discomforts would seize upon Mam’selle as the figure dwindled. Our incantations must have lacked some proper quality, however, for the intended victim only waxed daily healthier and more obnoxious.
A big-eyed listener with us to all these weighty matters was a little darky named Virgil, the son of the laundress. ‘Why did you call him Virgil?’ my mother asked one day, regarding perplexedly the extremely unclassicallooking mite. ‘Laws, Mis’ Hamilton, ain’t you never heard of the Virgil Mary?’ responded the shocked Bessie.
The colored coachman who slipped in at mealtime did not enter into the discussions, but it must have been about this time he was married, for I find in the family scrapbook the newspaper account of the wedding, which may be of assistance to some present-day bride in search of novelty. After naming the contracting parties and their costumes, it goes on to say: ‘A pleasing feature of the ceremony was the presence of ten young ladies dressed in white and each holding a lighted lamp in representation of the ten wise [sic] virgins.’
If the German witches were of terrifying quality, the other delightful German customs we enjoyed quite offset them. Such Christmas trees, for instance! Hung with the beautiful marzipans (tinted fruits made of an edible paste) and clear candies of red and yellow in quaint shapes, camels, roosters, and what not. Festooned with ropes of gilt paper cut in lacy patterns and further adorned with fat gilded gingerbread men and horses. Twinkling with red lit candles, and underneath the tree the fenced-in yard, with house and barn, trees and animals, fashioned with loving care by the German cabinetmakers. Carefully treasured, the little figures and furniture were handed down from generation to generation. Alas! of ours there remains only one small bureau of inlaid cherry and a tiny hickory Windsor chair. We did not, but many people did, have the Inn at Bethlehem under the tree, with Joseph, Mary, the Holy Babe, and the Wise Men on their camels, sometimes beautifully modeled in wax, but more often in carved and painted wood.
Bright and early on Easter morning we ran eagerly to the little old house on Franklin Street where our maiden aunts lived, to hunt for the nests of colored eggs in the tall grass in the upper ‘lot.’ We no more doubted the Easter Rabbit laid them than we doubted the sun danced on that one sacred morning as it rose above the mountain, although we never quite got up in time to see it.
We also had Bellsnickels at Christmas time—did you ever hear of Bellsnickels? Bands of young people, with terrifying masks and fantastic dress, bursting into the houses and only consenting to go out when given largesse of candies and cakes.
You must not think, when I write of our family of eight, that it was in any way remarkable. In our acquaintance of ten mothers there numbered one hundred and three children. Of course we had a flying start with two families of fifteen each and four of ten. So eight was getting on the smallish side. To be sure, when any of our proud matrons journeyed over the mountain to Frederick, twenty-six miles away, she hung a diminished head before the sixteen girls and two boys of a family there. Not every child of these families lived to grow up, and we went often with a little friend to the cemetery to gaze with respect on two tombstones, on one of which was inscribed ‘Dudley, aged ten minutes,’ and on the other ‘Walter M., aged half an hour.’
When one hears of the appalling amount of money it takes now to introduce an infant into this vale of tears one’s heart might well faint at the thought of fifteen. It was quite a different matter in the sixties and seventies, for the doctor’s fee was twenty-five dollars if the arrival was a boy and ten if a girl. A naive but unmistakable expression of the comparative value of the sexes. The nurse, usually a colored freedwoman who had been brought up in the household of a careful mistress, got five dollars a week. This was in line with the general standard of wages. For years after my mother came to Hagerstown a cook was paid one dollar and a quarter a week and a housemaid seventy-five cents; and excellent servants they were, too, who expected to, and did, stay in one household for years — we had one cook for twenty-five years — and were closely knit with the family life.
III
Writing of the cemetery, a few lines back, naturally turned my thoughts to mourning. And how we did mourn! The father of one of our young friends passed on, and for three mortal years that young girl wore a heavy nun’sveiling veil over her face. Looking about the church on Sunday one would naturally have inferred a great national calamity had taken place, so prevalent were the dense black garments and long crape veils — many of them worn after the faces of the dear departed could have been but dim memories. Our banner case was a handsome, stately woman who, left a widow with four children at the age of nineteen, died at the age of eighty-one, still wearing the badge of woe. A far cry indeed from the casual mourning of to-day. A bitter gentlewoman of the old school remarked caustically, not long ago, ‘Nowadays, nobody stays at home but the corpse.’
In these days of chain stores and impersonal relations between merchant and customer it is pleasant to remember our little shops of yesteryear. They were mostly converted dwellings, and tinkling bells heralded a buyer into what had originally been a parlor. On the hot summer evenings those in the ice-cream parlors tinkled themselves quite hoarse, so many customers went in to sit at the marble-topped tables. The very young gentlemen of our ‘set’ escorted us to these abodes of delight, and if they were flush we each had a five-cent saucer. If in straitened circumstances, we had one saucer with two spoons. I think in the latter case the kindly presiding genius saw to it that the saucer held all it possibly could.
Our shoes were half-soled and reheeled by a German cobbler, encouraged in his labors by two or three taciturn friends the color of old leather and a chattering and extremely odoriferous monkey. In the intervals of work the cobbler read and digested Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kant, and discussed them with such of his customers as could cope with them. We eagerly took our shoes to him, not, I regret to say, for the intellectual fare offered, but for the never-failing fascination of the monkey. We loved, too, to go to the Saturday market, where the rosycheeked, placid Dunkard women and girls, dressed in their sober habit and bonnets, dispensed very shrewdly the profusion of the kindly fruits of the earth that surrounded them. It was strange, and no doubt irritating, to our elders that we had no difficulty in picking up the outlandish phrases of the Pennsylvania Dutch heard at all the stalls, while we resisted learning Mam’selle’s polished French to the utmost of our abilities.
Another delight was the Clock Mender. He moved in his world of wheels and delicate instruments like a gentle old necromancer, his spectacles pushed up on the soft white hair and the faded blue eyes peering intently at his invalid clocks in the dusk of the little shop. You will enjoy one of his delightful bills preserved in the scrapbook.
May 14, 1877
To Hon. Wm. T. Hamilton and Lady:
I have the pleasure to let you know that through the assistance of Him who giveth wisdom and understanding to the humble and feeble the work I undertook on the second day of April last, viz: The repairing of your clock is finished and completed and I have also the pleasure now to congratulate you upon looking on that time honored relic again for the study of the accurate movements of the hours of the days and likewise the showing of the moon’s phases by night and the date of each day.
Respectfully your humble servant,
J. WOESSNER
When people say, ‘Oh, life was so much simpler then,’ I wonder what thought they give the catchword. ‘Simple’ does not seem to describe that life as I remember it. I see a big house overflowing with life. I see two laundresses in the English basement washing and ironing the week through that we might be turned out morning and evening in spotless and apparently countless small garments. I see a busy seamstress, week in and week out, making and mending those garments — for there were no ‘ready-to-wears.’ As Hagerstown had no waterworks, water had to be carried from the cisterns in the yard to nine bedrooms and carried away twice a day. The house had a furnace that made but a feeble effort to heat, and all the upstairs rooms had Stanley stoves, and what seemed a forest of wood was fed into their voracious maws. Downstairs the big fireplaces glowed with cannel coal.
I see the long walnut table with rarely less than ten and generally more around it, for those were the days of visitors who came to stay anywhere from a week to three months. Not for us the scrap of toast and cup of coffee that constitute a breakfast now. At six o’clock sounded the pound of old Laura’s mallet on the block, and at the eight o’clock breakfast, beside the fresh hot beaten biscuit, were the great beefsteaks and fried potatoes and an untold number of corn or buckwheat cakes.
There had been a much earlier breakfast for my father, who was up by half-past five. A lawyer by profession, he had a passion for land and, as he accumulated money, accumulated farms. So in the early morning he drove off to one farm or the other. The apple of his eye was a place he had loved from the time he was a small boy. In those days Maryland imprisoned for debt, and often he stood on the sidewalk and watched the handsome, gay owner riding on his fine horse, with his colored body servant in fine livery riding behind, on their way to the little stone jail, where they took up their abode in the Sheriff’s house — the servant to wait on his master, and the master to play cards with his friends who gathered to make durance less vile. I suppose he won enough from someone occasionally to restore him to his family. It was not remarkable that, piece by piece, his heritage slipped from him, and finally the coveted place was sold and my father got his heart’s desire.
As we lived in a limestone country, with its free-blowing, gritty dust, house cleaning took on activities that a dirt-free New England town never dreamed of. Every spring the heavy carpets must be taken up — for every room was carpeted to the walls — and cool mattings put down, except in the long parlors, where heavy linen crash was put over the carpets, on which we danced the summer through. The furniture turned ghostly in its linen covers, and, instead of the long velvet curtains, Venetian blinds let just enough light filter through airy lace ones. The twined grape leaves of the bronze chandeliers were bridelike in tarlatan, and the Belleek and Wedgwood vases on the mantels saw but dim reflections of their white beauty in the veiled mirrors. Over every bed hung great tents of mosquito netting, for screens there were none, and as at the end of every garden was a stable, a supply of flies was bred yearly that would have done amply for the whole of the country. I remember our joy in two strange contrivances of wrought iron, at each end of the dining table, shaped like little towers. When wound up, horizontal wings of gauze revolved rapidly and discouraged the flies from taking all the food before we could get any.
My pretty, charming mother had brought with her from New England that special quality called ‘faculty,’ and this complicated household moved along with the smoothness of her serene and well-balanced nature. To add to the ‘simple’ living, every winter for many years the caravan was packed up and moved away, for after three terms in Congress my father was elected to the Senate, and following that was Governor of Maryland.
IV
It does not seem much now, nor is it, to go to Baltimore, for the automobile makes light work of the mountain range and the seventy miles, but it was something else to travel on the old main line of the B. & O. for five weary hours. To begin with, the train left at six in the morning, if you please, which meant rising at four to get us dressed and breakfasted and duly installed in the train, together with the large basket of lunch, the little dog Dick, the canary, and a loathsome family of while mice belonging to my next-oldest brother. By the time we had reached Weverton, twenty-five miles away, the lunch had been consumed and we were clamoring for bananas. And alas! when the train lurched around the curves of the Patapsco Valley with a motion only equaled, I imagine, by the waves of the Roaring Forties, the red plush, cinder-encrusted seats were sure to be adorned by three or four prostrate and utterly car-sick little Hamiltons.
Surely never were there such entertaining parties as the Hagerstown parties; nor did any small town ever have so many. After all these years I can see two lines of chairs ranged the forty-foot length of the two parlors. My father sat at the head of one, Judge Syester at the other; the game, twenty questions. Hagerstown then had a brilliant Bar, men who knew their classics as well as their law, but it often befell that after the Solons had bent their best minds on the mystery some sharp-witted woman would casually pick the answer out of the air, as it were, leaving them completely overthrown and confounded.
Vast was our excitement when the great men of the Civil War came in these after years to visit Antietam Battlefield, but twelve miles from the town. We girls would beg to have the maids displaced so that we could hand the refreshments to the Count of Paris, General McClellan, or whoever might be the celebrity of the occasion. We found Federal or Confederate equally thrilling. But these were affairs of the outside world and did not have the flavor of our own efforts. For instance, the plight of one hostess who decided to have two parties a week apart. This seemed innocent, even if an innovation, but unfortunately some malicious-minded person spread the word that we had been divided into Cream and Skim Milk. So it happened that the first or Cream was a great success, but the Skim Milks stayed away to a man, leaving the family to eat fried oysters and chicken salad steadily for a week.
It was the same hostess who gave the Famous Lovers party, the idea being that one drew a paper on which was written one lover, whereupon he sought his mate for the evening. It was not a great success, as unfortunately our general education did not rise to the occasion, and as Laura had never heard of Petrarch, nor Dante of Beatrice, and so on ad infinitum, we milled aimlessly around the rooms rather like a flock of mildly anxious sheep, and the party went off like damp fireworks.
We were much excited when we heard that another hostess had put the house in the hands of the decorators, which raised the affair at once from a party to a function. The lone potted geranium on the piano somewhat fell below our expectation of what a decorator with carte blanche might achieve, but I dare say we enjoyed the party just the same.
I include private theatricals in our parties, for they were little more than that, except for the one grand occasion when Julius Cœsar was essayed. I think we can modestly claim that to Hagerstown alone belongs the honor of having presented Csesar adorned with luxuriant red whiskers — treasures which our tragedian could on no account be induced to part with — and the chaste Julia and her ladies in large bustles beneath their severely proper nightgowns.
It was only in the eighties, when the town began to spread a bit, that we ceased to walk to our parties. Then, in rivalry with Paris, a cab system appeared — ten cents a trip to anywhere in town, and fifty cents for a grand function like the New Year’s Ball, which was an all-night affair. There was one cab in particular much in demand — not for its comfort, for it was an open Dayton with cold leather seats, nor for its celerity, for the old gray horse, blind of one eye, that drew it was no Maud S. The attraction was the owner and driver of the equipage, such a character as only a small town can produce. In a sense his patrons were his guests, for with perfect bonhomie he shared in all the conversations, and his shrewd remarks, accompanied by a hoarse, low chuckle, were retailed with delight. I remember his dry comment on a member of his family who had spent thirty-five years, off and on, in the penitentiary. ‘The old man was all right,’ said Jerry, meditatively flicking the old horse; ‘the only trouble was, he could n’t leave nuthin’ lay.’
On one occasion we had a young lady visitor from New York, whose life had run along strictly formal lines. Engaging Jerry to drive us to a dinner party, in deference to our guest we pled for a general clean-up. ‘ Leave it to me,’ said Jerry; ‘I’ve got a new cab, and we’ll show New York.’ We did. New York never saw the like. It was all the faithful ‘gray flier’ could do to pull the heavy secondhand brougham up the hill to a triumphant halt at the door. Every window glittered, and was furthermore adorned with stiff Nottingham lace curtains tied back with red ribbon bows. A large bunch of paper roses in a glass vase added the last touch of beauty. Jerry himself sat, proud as Lucifer, on the box resplendent in a tight blue brass-buttoned coat and rakish semi-jockey cap. Somewhat stricken, but game, the last word in Paris fashions took its place beside me and we drove down Washington Street in the bright light of a spring evening, attracting most deserved attention.
After a week or so of driving, Jerry, who could neither read nor write, would collaborate with his small boy and a bill would be evolved and presented. I append one, which, if not a model of spelling, at least left no doubt as to the items.
For tending a party at Tamany House with Miss Lena.. 30 cts.
For tending a party this week at Missis Minney with Missis Hamilton. 30 cts.
For shopping with Missis Hamilton ... 50 cts.
For halling Miss Julia home. 10 cts.
For halling Miss Lena and the lady from New York to Major Douglas and halling them home again. 20 cts.
For halling Miss Lena to Miss Fanny Mason’s wedding and going back and waiting in the lane for Dick and halling them home again... 50 cts.
V
We took our politics seriously, and with good reason. If you will trouble to glance at the map of Maryland, you will see that Hagerstown lies in the little western neck of land between Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Pennsylvania line but four miles away and the Virginia line six. Truly the battlefield of different sentiments. In addition to the Northern and Southern difference of opinion, there was the deep-rooted republicanism of the German farmers and the equally strong democracy of the slave-holding land owners, or descendants therefrom, and professional men. At election time these various cross currents met in a lively and sometimes violent maelstrom, with fights and broken heads galore. The fact that in those halcyon days mountain whiskey was peddled through the streets and sold from the cart’s tail for fifteen cents a gallon helped make election day one which kept the feminine part of the population off the streets.
The town elections were particularly hard-fought, and there was a classic of a very close one where the astute Democrats, on the promise of a dollar each and plenty of whiskey, had locked forty colored citizens in a stable for safe keeping until voting time. Alas for the best-laid plans! The unprincipled Republicans stole them away, in the dead of night, and, raising the one dollar to two, triumphantly carried the day.
Such parades as we had! Certainly no town ever produced a band that played so valiantly. To be sure, the instruments were generally more than secondhand, and each performer seemed to follow his own sweet will as regards the tune and time; but any small defects were lost in the grand enthusiasm displayed and the overwhelming magnificence of the drum major. A phenomenally tall, lithe negro, in private life the town whitewasher, in his gold-laced uniform, and twirling his baton with incredible agility, he was transformed, in the eyes of youth, into something more than mortal.
The funeral hacks with the tops down were converted into chariots of state and were filled with prominent citizens, selected not so much for personal merit as for being the possessors of the sine qua non for a political procession, a silk hat. We as a family had a peculiar and personal interest in these demonstrations, for if the celebration was Democratic our house was lit all over, the double front doors thrown open, the high porch thronged, and the band in passing nearly blew our ears off out of compliment to my father. If Republican, however, not a light gleamed, and the band marched by with a dreary drum-tapping that chilled the blood, only to burst into riotous and derisive clamor four doors down the hill, while we peeped at the display behind the drawn shades.
At the time of Cleveland’s second election, when we fairly outdid ourselves in jubilation, there came at the end of the procession a number of open carts, each one bearing a man carrying a transparency with pregnant sentences from the campaign speeches printed thereon. Just as the last one went by and we read the stately words, ‘It is not a theory but a condition that confronts us,’ the bearer with a loud hiccough and a feeble ‘ ’Ray for Hamilton!’ fell with a crash from his perch and went peacefully to sleep in the middle of the street. Could there have been an apter illustration?
Ah, well! It was all very small-town, and we might count it now dull, but somehow as I think back it seems to have had a savor that no longer abides with us. People were not forms flying by in motor cars, but persons with characters and peculiarities, almost as interesting and well known to us as our own. Their sorrows were ours, their joys ours, and we were knit together by a thousand ties of happiness and grief.
Would that I could see again one of those summer nights, the white dresses flitting under the drooping linden trees, the porches so gay with bright cushions, the moon outshining the few and feeble gas lamps, the simple enjoyment in the cool sweet air after the torrid day. Just a summer night in an old Maryland village — a compound of thousands of hundred-leaf roses and honeysuckle and the strange dusty fragrance from the wheat fields that so closely beleaguered the town.
In the nineties Progress raised his head over the Blue Ridge and lo! we were not the same. On the streets appeared a bobtailed little trolley car in which now and then there was a passenger. Before me lies the first transfer. At the bottom to the left, crudely printed, three pictured faces — a little girl with a pigtail, a matronly countenance, and a terrifying old lady with huge spectacles. Three male portraits in kind adorned the right-hand corner. It was the duty of the harassed conductor to scrutinize his passengers and punch the face according to age. Either Southern chivalry or prudence was the watchword, for the old lady was never known to be punched.
Little did we dream it, but the clanging bell of that trolley car sounded the death knell of the old town. Suddenly in a day it was no more and in its place stood an active, modern little city. The old residences had to make way for the new stores and apartments, and the paved streets killed the lindens and with them went the friendly shades of the past that in the dark of the moon seemed to pass beneath them.
Mr. Jonathan Hager’s house still stands, a very King Lear of a house. Neglected and surrounded by dismal shacks, it raises its still sturdy walls to gaze from its desolation, over railroad tracks, to the beautiful city park teeming with happy life, once Mr. Hager’s solitary pleasure ground.
More gayly the little guardian of the town’s destiny stands on top of the belfry of the Town Hall, our Little Heiskell. Long before the iron forges in the county made cannon balls for the Revolutionary armies, some worker in wrought iron fashioned the small figure in the brave costume of Cresap’s Rangers and named him for a Mr. Heiskell. And no mere toy soldier he, for during the Civil War he was drilled through and through by a well-aimed bullet, but, jesting at scars, never for an instant did he falter in his duty. And now after all these years he hourly faces now west, now east, now north, now south, to repel all attacks on his beloved town. Alas! Little Heiskell, there is one foe your dauntless musket is powerless against — the enemy of all old things, Time and Change.