The Plaint of a Decadent Town

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IN our village we have been reading The Regeneration of Rural New England, and we are very low in our minds. There is no doubt whatever but that we are a decadent town, — a coast, not a hill town, to be sure, but that makes no difference. Do not houses rent with us for fifty dollars a year, whenever they rent at all ? And did not one of our fellow citizens leave his ancestral home to the owls and bats, who could fly down through the hole in the top of it while he took out the chimney for the sake of the bricks ? After this we hardly need to confess that our minister, who gets six hundred a year according to the requirements of the Home Missionary Society, is under bonds to put one dollar of it back into the contributors’ box every Sunday, but perhaps it is as well to have the worst out at once. And the trouble is that, even after reading Mr. Hartt’s excellent articles, we have not the slightest idea what to do about it. “ Go ye forth,” he says to such as we, “ and persuade a social settlement to take up its residence amongst you, or get ye hence into the place of departed townships ; ” but we are Yankees and practical, and we cannot forget that while our soil is perfectly adapted to the cultivation of nothing but turnips (the poorer the soil the better the turnip), their price is but thirty-five cents a bushel, and the freight thereon fifteen cents to our nearest market. We fear that the settlement farm would not soon grow rich on that basis.

Perhaps the worst feature of our situation is that our hearts are still unregenerate and fail to respond to such efforts as have been made for our redemption. There was the real estate speculator, whose idea was to cut up our hills and shore into fifty-feet lots with a neat matched-board cottage in the centre of each one. It was undoubtedly a noble and progressive ideal, but such is our perversity that we could not help feeling glad when we found out that he had no money with which to realize it. Then there is our multi-millionaire. He was born in the next town, and his childhood’s friend lives in ours, so he takes an interest in us ; but at present he seems to feel that our one great need is piazzas, and he has bought up an extraordinary number of empty houses and clapped those appendages on them all. Probably they will bring us wealth and prosperity, but as we built our own house recently without a piazza, we, at least, cannot be expected to sympathize with his diagnosis of our case. Indeed, we have a good deal of fellow feeling with the mother of Aladdin, who, as you will remember, never took any solid satisfaction in her son’s genie, because she thought one never can be quite sure what such an all-powerful individual may do next. That is the way with a multi-millionaire in a small town. The day we went out and found that this piazza epidemic had broken out all over our peaceful village, we sympathized not only with Aladdin’s mother, but even more acutely with his unfortunate father-in-law, the Sultan of Cathay, who is said to have opened his chamber window one morning and found that a brand-new palace had sprung up during the night and was cutting off all his view On such occasions we wonder sadly why all the things that are good for us have to be so disagreeable, and we cry with the impassioned poet of our childhood, —

and keep all these admirable improvements for the benefit of the next generation.” But that, of course, only proves more clearly than ever that we are decadent.

There are our summer boarders, too. There could not possibly be a pleasanter set of summer boarders than we have. They talk to us with the greatest good fellowship all the summer through on gardening and preserving, the making of wines and jellies, and the qualities of our stock, and they even write to us during the winter on these subjects. But to go farther, even with the best of wills, does not seem to be as easy as the critic fondly fancies. One kind and genial visitor subscribed to Harper’s Magazine for us, and was very happy thinking how much we should enjoy it. But Harper’s that year did not cater to the sons of the soil; we thought it was all nonsense, and after the first we did not waste the time to cut the leaves. Another gave us Puck ; but we must confess that we did not see the point of the jokes. Still another gave us a sensational newspaper, and we liked that very much, but we had awful fears that it was not good for us. In our hearts we like books like Barabbas and In His Steps better than any others, and when our summer boarders tell us that this is not the highest class of literature, we do not in the least know what they mean. They tell us, too, that we ought each to get interested in some one topic, and study that, and they have worked hard to get us a little library whose catalogue is always greatly admired by our visitors. They call it “ an excellent assortment,” but for some reason or other when we have got interested in a subject we never find there exactly the books we need to pursue it. We seem to be all in the same case as the little girl whom one of our summer boarders interested in butterflies last year. She went to the library and tried to find a book about them, but there was none. The librarian gave her a charming volume on birds, which she thought would do as well; but, as the little girl aptly remarked, “ Butterflies ain’t birds.”

Every one says that visiting in the city is an excellent specific for the cure of decadence. One of our neighbors visited her son in Somerville last winter, and when she came home she began to do over her sitting-room. We waited in eager expectation until it was finished, and then we went to see it. She had a red plush “ set,” and a tapestry carpet in faded colors ; the woodwork was of that jaundiced color known as “ hard wood finish,” and a wealth of shellac atoned for the dearth of grain ; a brass lamp with pink paper roses on its shade decorated the table, and there was an easel in one corner with a picture mercifully veiled by a silkalene scarf. We had to confess that we were deeply disappointed, and we were glad to get out of that room and into Aunt Mercy’s little sitting-room across the road, where there is not a picture or a piece of furniture which is not at least fifty years old. We glanced at the dear old daguerreotypes on the walls, at the two blushing ladies in hoop skirts curtsying to us from the top of the old-fashioned mirror, and at Miss Mercy herself rocking peacefully in her big chair, with the feather cushions puffing comfortably up around her, and her patchwork on her knee, and we began to wonder whether, after all, we were doing so badly in keeping out of the world for a while, just until our class in it had progressed beyond the stage of shellac and silkalene scarfs.

All this does not mean that we do not want a social settlement. Certainly not; nothing would please us better. But we really do not see any opening for one just yet, and we are puzzled about what to do.