Chippenhook was the home of Judge Theophilus Harrington, known for his trenchant reply to an irate slave-owner in a runaway slave ...case. Judge Harrington declared that the owner's claim to the slave was defective. The owner indignantly demanded to know what was lacking in his legally sound claim. The Judge exploded, 'A bill of sale, sir, from God Almighty!'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On our streets it is the sight of a totally unknown face or figure which arrests the attention, rather than, as in big cities, the... strangeness of occasionally seeing someone you know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]he Congregational minister in a neighboring town definitely stated that 'the same spirit which drove the herd of swine into the... sea drove the Baptists into the water, and that they were hurried along by the devil until the rite was performed.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We realize that we are laggards from the past century, still living in what Marx kindly calls 'the idiocy of rural life,' and we k...now that our rural life is like that of the past, not like that of much of the present.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In former years it was said that at three o'clock in the afternoon all sober persons were rounded up and herded off the grounds, a...s undesirable. The tradition of insobriety is still carefully preserved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No imperfection in budded mountain, Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,... daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble, green atoms shimmer in grassy mandalas, sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes, horses dance in the warm rain,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was ...wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert D'Or with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,... Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To a traveler from the Old World, Canada East may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me, coming... from New England and being a very green traveler withal,... it appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages. Even the names of humble Canadian villages affected me as if they had been those of the renowned cities of antiquity. To be told by a habitan, when I asked the name of a village in sight, that it is St. Féreol or St. Anne, the Guardian Angel or the Holy Joseph's; or of a mountain, that it was Bélange or St. Hyacinthe! As soon as you leave the States, these saintly names begin ... and thenceforward, the names of mountains, and streams, and villages reel, if I may so speak, with the intoxication of poetry,--Chambly, Longueuil, Pointe aux Trembles, Bartholomy, etc., etc.; as if it needed only a little foreign accent, a few more liquids and vowels perchance in the language, to make us locate our ideals at once. I began to dream of Provence and the Troubadours, and of places and things which have no existence on the earth. They veiled the Indian and the primitive forest, and the woods towards Hudson's Bay were only as the forests of Germany. I could not at once bring myself to believe that the inhabitants who pronounced daily those beautiful and, to me, significant names lead as prosaic lives as we of New England. In short, the Canada which I saw was not merely a place for railroads to terminate in and for criminals to run to.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »