Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864
English
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Below is a summary of Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
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THE SNOW-IMAGE
AND
OTHER TWICE-TOLD TALES
MAIN STREET
By
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Respectable-looking individual makes his bow and addresses the public.
In my daily walks along the principal street of my native town, it has
often occurred to me, that, if its growth from infancy upward, and the
vicissitude of characteristic scenes that have passed along this
thoroughfare during the more than two centuries of its existence, could
be presented to the eye in a shifting panorama, it would bean exceedingly
effective method of illustrating the march of time. Acting on this idea,
I have contrived a certain pictorial exhibition, somewhat in the nature
of a puppet-show, by means of which I propose to call up the multiform
and many-colored Past before the spectator, and show him the ghosts of
his forefathers, amid a succession of historic incidents, with no greater
trouble than the turning of a crank. Be pleased, therefore, my indulgent
patrons, to walk into the show-room, and take your seats before yonder
mysterious curtain. The little wheels and springs of my machinery have
been well oiled; a multitude of puppets are dressed in character,
representing all varieties of fashion, from the Puritan cloak and jerkin
to the latest Oak Hall coat; the lamps are trimmed, and shall brighten
into noontide sunshine, or fade away in moonlight, or muffle their
brilliancy in a November cloud, as the nature of the scene may require;
and, in short, the exhibition is just ready to commence. Unless
something should go wrong,--as, for instance, the misplacing of a
picture, whereby the people and events of one century might be thrust
into the middle of another; or the breaking of a wire, which would bring
the course of time to a sudden period,--barring, I say, the casualties to
which such a complicated piece of mechanism is liable,--I flatter myself,
ladies and gentlemen,--that the performance will elicit your generous
approbation.
Ting-a-ting-ting! goes the bell; the curtain rises; and we behold-not,
indeed, the Main Street--but the track of leaf-strewn forest-land over
which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.
You perceive, at a glance, that this is the ancient and primitive wood,--
the ever-youthful and venerably old,--verdant with new twigs, yet hoary,
as it were, with the snowfall of innumerable years, that have accumulated
upon its intermingled branches. The white man's axe has never smitten a
single tree; his footstep has never crumpled a single one of the withered
leaves, which all the autumns since the flood have been harvesting
beneath. Yet, see! along through the vista of impending boughs, there is
already a faintly traced path, running nearly east and west, as if a
prophecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen into the heart of
the solemn old wood. Onward goes this hardly perceptible track, now
ascending over a natural swell of land, now subsiding gently into a
hollow; traversed here by a little streamlet, which glitters like a snake
through the gleam of sunshine, and quickly hides itself among the
underbrush, in its quest for the neighboring cove; and impeded there by
the massy corpse of a giant of the forest, which had lived out its
incalculable term of life, and been overthrown by mere old age, and lies
buried in the new vegetation that is born of its decay. What footsteps
can have worn this half-seen path? Hark! Do we not hear them now
rustling softly over the leaves? We discern an Indian woman,--a majestic
and queenly woman, or else her spectral image does not represent her
truly,--for this is the great Squaw Sachem, whose rule, with that of her
sons, extends from Mystic to Agawam. That red chief, who stalks by her
side, is Wappacowet, her second husband, the priest and magician, whose
incantations shall hereafter affright the pale-faced settlers with grisly
phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the woods, at midnight. But greater
would be the affright of the Indian necromancer, if, mirrored in the pool
of water at his feet, he could catch a prophetic glimpse of the noonday
marvels which the white man is destined to achieve; if he could see, as
in a dream, the stone front of the stately hall, which will cast its
shadow over this very spot; if he could be aware that the future edifice
will contain a noble Museum, where, among countless curiosities of earth
and sea, a few Indian arrow-heads shall be treasured up as memorials of a
vanished race!
No such forebodings disturb the Squaw Sachem and Wappacowet. They pass
on, beneath the tangled shade, holding high talk on matters of state and
religion, and imagine, doubtless, that their own system of affairs will
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