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 entirely6 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, apparently7, was what they desired, and why they came to Ponkapog. For after its black bass8 and wild duck and teal, solitude9 is the chief staple10 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 cedars11, it chances to be the most enchanting12 bit of unlaced dishevelled 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 seclusion13 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 unravels14 and disappears the moment you drive into it—has quite a large floating population. I do not allude15 to the perch16 and pickerel in Ponk-apog Pond. Along the Old Bay Road, a highway even in the colonial days, there are a number of attractive villas17 and cottages straggling off towards 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.
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 courteous18.
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; may be they were engaged in digging for specimens19 of those arrowheads and flint hatchets20 which are continually coming to the surface hereabouts. There is scarcely an acre in which the ploughshare has not turned up some primitive21 stone weapon or domestic utensil22, 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 pensioner23. 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 emulating24 Professor Schliemann at Mycenæ, the new-comers were evidently persons of refined musical taste: the lady had a contralto voice of remarkable25 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, conjecturally26 at some window upstairs, for the house was not visible from the turnpike. 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 odds27 whatever of the community in which they had settled themselves.
There was a queerness, a sort of mystery, about this couple which I admit piqued28 my curiosity, though as a rule I have no morbid29 interest in the affairs of my neighbors. They behaved like a pair of lovers who had run off and got married clandestinely30. I willingly acquitted31 them, however, of having done anything unlawful; for, to change a word in the lines of the poet,
“It is a joy to think 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 their groceries? I do not mean the money to pay for them—that is an enigma32 apart—but the groceries themselves. No express wagon33, 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 gratis34, 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 ménage to occupy more of my speculation35 than was creditable to me.
In several respects our neighbors reminded me of those inexplicable36 persons we sometimes come across in great cities, though seldom or never in suburban37 places, where the field may be supposed too restricted for their operations—persons who have no perceptible means of subsistence, and manage to live royally on nothing a year. They hold no government bonds, they possess no real estate (our neighbors did own their house), they toil38 not, neither do they spin; yet they reap all the numerous soft advantages that usually result from honest toil and skilful39 spinning. How do they do it? 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 meandering40!”
Though my wife had declined to risk a ceremonious call on our neighbors as a family, I saw no reason why I 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 penetration41 that my neighbor had the air of trying to avoid me. I 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 sawmill, I deliberately42 crossed over to address him. The brusque manner in which he 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 formulate43 uncharitable suppositions touching44 our neighbors, and would have been as well pleased if some of my choicest fruit trees had not overhung their wall. I determined45 to keep my eyes open later in the season, when the fruit should be ripe to pluck. In some folks, a sense of the delicate shades of difference between meum and tuum does not seem to be very strongly developed in the Moon of Cherries, to use the old Indian phrase.
I was sufficiently46 magnanimous not to impart any of these sinister47 impressions to the families with whom we were on visiting terms; for I despise a gossip. I would say nothing against the 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 the gentleman at intervals48, 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 scarlet49 at the throat, but I inferred that she did not go about the house singing in her light-hearted manner, as formerly50. What had happened? Had the honeymoon51 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 solitarily52 in the garden and seemed to have relinquished53 those long jaunts54 to the brow of Blue Hill, where there is a superb view of all Norfolk County combined with sundry55 venerable rattlesnakes with twelve rattles56.
As the days went by it became certain that the lady was confined to the house, perhaps seriously ill, possibly a confirmed invalid57. Whether she was attended by a physician from Canton or from Milton, I was unable to say; but neither the gig with the large white allopathic horse, nor the gig with the homoeopathic sorrel mare58, was ever seen hitched59 at the gate during the day. If a physician had charge of the case, he visited his patient only 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 repulse60 I had sustained still rankled61 in me. So I hesitated.
One morning my two boys burst into the library with their eyes sparkling.
“You know the old elm down the road?” cried one.
“Yes.”
“Yes, yes!”
“Well, we both just climbed up, and there’s three young ones in it!”
点击收听单词发音
1 tenants | |
n.房客( tenant的名词复数 );佃户;占用者;占有者 | |
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2 inmates | |
n.囚犯( inmate的名词复数 ) | |
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3 stylish | |
adj.流行的,时髦的;漂亮的,气派的 | |
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4 proprietor | |
n.所有人;业主;经营者 | |
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5 prospect | |
n.前景,前途;景色,视野 | |
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6 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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7 apparently | |
adv.显然地;表面上,似乎 | |
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8 bass | |
n.男低音(歌手);低音乐器;低音大提琴 | |
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9 solitude | |
n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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10 staple | |
n.主要产物,常用品,主要要素,原料,订书钉,钩环;adj.主要的,重要的;vt.分类 | |
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11 cedars | |
雪松,西洋杉( cedar的名词复数 ) | |
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12 enchanting | |
a.讨人喜欢的 | |
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13 seclusion | |
n.隐遁,隔离 | |
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14 unravels | |
解开,拆散,散开( unravel的第三人称单数 ); 阐明; 澄清; 弄清楚 | |
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15 allude | |
v.提及,暗指 | |
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16 perch | |
n.栖木,高位,杆;v.栖息,就位,位于 | |
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17 villas | |
别墅,公馆( villa的名词复数 ); (城郊)住宅 | |
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18 courteous | |
adj.彬彬有礼的,客气的 | |
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19 specimens | |
n.样品( specimen的名词复数 );范例;(化验的)抽样;某种类型的人 | |
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20 hatchets | |
n.短柄小斧( hatchet的名词复数 );恶毒攻击;诽谤;休战 | |
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21 primitive | |
adj.原始的;简单的;n.原(始)人,原始事物 | |
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22 utensil | |
n.器皿,用具 | |
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23 pensioner | |
n.领养老金的人 | |
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24 emulating | |
v.与…竞争( emulate的现在分词 );努力赶上;计算机程序等仿真;模仿 | |
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25 remarkable | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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26 conjecturally | |
adj.推测的,好推测的 | |
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27 odds | |
n.让步,机率,可能性,比率;胜败优劣之别 | |
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28 piqued | |
v.伤害…的自尊心( pique的过去式和过去分词 );激起(好奇心) | |
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29 morbid | |
adj.病的;致病的;病态的;可怕的 | |
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30 clandestinely | |
adv.秘密地,暗中地 | |
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31 acquitted | |
宣判…无罪( acquit的过去式和过去分词 ); 使(自己)作出某种表现 | |
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32 enigma | |
n.谜,谜一样的人或事 | |
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33 wagon | |
n.四轮马车,手推车,面包车;无盖运货列车 | |
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34 gratis | |
adj.免费的 | |
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35 speculation | |
n.思索,沉思;猜测;投机 | |
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36 inexplicable | |
adj.无法解释的,难理解的 | |
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37 suburban | |
adj.城郊的,在郊区的 | |
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38 toil | |
vi.辛劳工作,艰难地行动;n.苦工,难事 | |
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39 skilful | |
(=skillful)adj.灵巧的,熟练的 | |
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40 meandering | |
蜿蜒的河流,漫步,聊天 | |
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41 penetration | |
n.穿透,穿人,渗透 | |
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42 deliberately | |
adv.审慎地;蓄意地;故意地 | |
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43 formulate | |
v.用公式表示;规划;设计;系统地阐述 | |
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44 touching | |
adj.动人的,使人感伤的 | |
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45 determined | |
adj.坚定的;有决心的 | |
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46 sufficiently | |
adv.足够地,充分地 | |
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47 sinister | |
adj.不吉利的,凶恶的,左边的 | |
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48 intervals | |
n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 );间隔时间;[数学]区间;(戏剧、电影或音乐会的)幕间休息 | |
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49 scarlet | |
n.深红色,绯红色,红衣;adj.绯红色的 | |
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50 formerly | |
adv.从前,以前 | |
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51 honeymoon | |
n.蜜月(假期);vi.度蜜月 | |
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52 solitarily | |
adv.独自一人地,寂寞地 | |
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53 relinquished | |
交出,让给( relinquish的过去式和过去分词 ); 放弃 | |
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54 jaunts | |
n.游览( jaunt的名词复数 ) | |
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55 sundry | |
adj.各式各样的,种种的 | |
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56 rattles | |
(使)发出格格的响声, (使)作嘎嘎声( rattle的第三人称单数 ); 喋喋不休地说话; 迅速而嘎嘎作响地移动,堕下或走动; 使紧张,使恐惧 | |
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57 invalid | |
n.病人,伤残人;adj.有病的,伤残的;无效的 | |
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58 mare | |
n.母马,母驴 | |
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59 hitched | |
(免费)搭乘他人之车( hitch的过去式和过去分词 ); 搭便车; 攀上; 跃上 | |
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60 repulse | |
n.击退,拒绝;vt.逐退,击退,拒绝 | |
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61 rankled | |
v.(使)痛苦不已,(使)怨恨不已( rankle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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62 shrieked | |
v.尖叫( shriek的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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63 promising | |
adj.有希望的,有前途的 | |
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