Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1879 — OUR NEW NEIGHBORS AT FONKAPOG. [ARTICLE]

OUR NEW NEIGHBORS AT FONKAPOG.

When I saw the little housebuilding, an eighth of a mile beyond my own, on the Old Bay Road, I woudered 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 seo the passing, in town or country; but each has his own taste. The proprietor, who seemed to bo 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 sbmewhat older, but still in the first flush of manhood. It was understood in the village that they uame from Baltimore; but no one knew them personally, and they brought no letters of introduction. (For oovious reasons I refrain from mentioning names.) It was clear that, for the present at least, their own company wasentirely sufficient for them. They made.no advances toward the acquaintance of any of the families in the neighborhood, and consequently were left to themselves. That, apparently, was what they desired, ana why 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 ehances to be the most enchanting bit of genuine 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 raioirabltabier -ys— The village—it looks like a compact idllage at a distance, but unravels and disappears the moment you drive into it—has quite a large floating population. Ido not allude to the perch and pickerel. Along the Old Bay Road, a highway even in the Colonial days, there are a number of attractive cottages straggling oil' toward Milton, which are occupied for the summer by people from tho city. These birds of passage arc 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 notgoing to call on them P" Tasked 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.

She was right. She would not hare been received, and a 000 l “ not a 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 Fostoffice—where he was never to be met with by any chance —and I caught frequent glimpses of the two working 1 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 Penkypoags, . 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. 1 quote from the local historiographer! Whether They were developing a kitchen-garden, or emulating ftof. Sehliemannat Mycenin, the newcomers .were.evidently persons of refined musical taste; the lady had a voice of remarkable sweetness, although Of no great compass, and I used often to Unger of a morning by the high gate

I and listen to her executing an operatic I Air, eonjeeturallv at some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the public road. The husband, somewhere about the grounds, 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 eommunity in which they had settled themselves. There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, abont the oouple which I admit, Piqued my curiosity, though, as a rule, 1 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, tho one and the other, of having no legal right to do so; for, to change a word in the lines of the poet, “ It Is a Joy to Mini: the best We may of human kind.” Admitting the hypothesis of elopement, there was no mystery in their neither sending nor receiving letters. But where did they get theTr groceries P I do not mean tho money to pay for them—that is an enigma apart?—but the groceries themselves. Ho express wagon, no butcher's cart, no vehicle of any description was ever observed to stop at their domicile. Yet they did not order family stores at the sole establishment in the village—an inexhaustible little bottle of a shop which (I advertise it gratis) can turn out anything in the way of groceries, from a handsaw to a pocket-handkerchief. I confess that I allowed this unimportant detail of their housekeeping to occupy more of my speculation than was creditable to me. r. ———

In several respects Cur neighbors reminded me of thoso inexplicable peranna \V6 ill gTOftt cities, though seldom or never in suburban places, where the field may be supposed too restricted for their operations—persons who have no perceptible means of subsistence, ana manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold no Government bonds, they possess jro real estate (our neighbors did own their house), they toil not, neither do they spin; yet they reap many.of the numerous advantages that usually jresult from honest toil and skillful spinning. How do they do itP But this is a digression, and I am quite of the opinion of the old lady in “David Copperfield,” who says, “Let us have no meanderingP’ Though my wife declined to risk a ceremonious call on our neighbors as a family, I saw no reason why 1 should not speak to the husband as an individual, when I happened to encounter him by the wayside. I made several approaches to do so, when it occurred to my penetration that my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. A resolved to put the suspicion to the test, and one forenoon, when he was sauntering along on the opposite side of the road, in the vicinity of Fisher’s saw-mill, I deliberately crossed over to address him. The brusque manner in which ho hurried away was not to be misunderstood. Of course, I was not going to force myself upon him. It was at this time that I began to form uncharitable suppositions touching our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some of my choicest fruit trees had not overhung their wall. I determined to keep my eves open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe to pl«rtr. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference between meum et tuum does not seem to be very strongly developed in the moon of cherries, to use the old Indian phrase. I was sufficiently magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister impressions to tho families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I despise a gossip. I would say nothing against tlie persons up the road until I had something definite to say. My interest in them was—well, not exactly extinguished, but burning low. I met tho gentlemen at intervals, and passed him without recognition; at rarer intervals I saw the lady. After a while I not only missed my occasional glimpses of her pretty, slim figure, always draped in some soft, black stuff with a bit of scarlet at the throat, but I inferred that she (fid not go about the house singing in her lightliear ted manner, as formei'lv. What had happened ? Had the honeymoon suffered eclipse already? Was she ill? I fancied she was ill, and that I detected a certain anxiety in the husband, who spent the mornings digging solitarily in the garden, and seemed to have relinquished those long jaunts to the Blue Hill, where there is a superb view combined with sundry venerable rattlesnakes with twelve rattles.

As the days went by it became certain that the lady was confined to the house, seriously ill, possibly a confirmed invalid. Whether she was attended by a physician from Canton or from Milton, 1 am uuable to say; but neither the gig with the large white allopathic horse, nor the gig with the homeopathic sorrel mare, was ever seen hitched at the gate during the day. If aphysioian had charge of the case, he visited his patient onlyi at night. All this moved my sympathy, and i reproached myself with having had hard thoughts of our neighbors. Trouble had come to them early. I would have liked to offer them such small, friendly services as lay in my power; but the memory of the repulse I had sustained rankled in me. So Ihesitated. One morning my two boys burst into the library with their eyes sparkling. “You know the old elm down the roadP” cried one. ' “Yes,” “ The elm with the hang-bird's nestP” shrieked the other. “Well, we both just elimed tip, and there's three young ones in it!” Then I smiled to thinly that our new neighbors hadgot such a promising little family.— T.B. Aldrich, in Atlantic.