Читать книгу The Personality of American Cities - Edward Hungerford - Страница 6

"To all whom it may concern:

This is to certify that my son, John Japson Jones, is hereby authorized and permitted to row, swim, dive or otherwise disport himself upon, above or under the waters of the Charles river, Massachusetts bay and waters adjacent to them until especially revoked. Given under my hand and seal at the city of Omaha in the state of Nebraska, on the ....th day of October, 19....

(Signed)

JAMES JONES."

Then James Jones awaited the consequences. It was not long after that the letter came from John Japson.

"—How could you do it, Dad?" he demanded. "You don't know these folks. They're not our sort. They don't know humor. They're afraid of it. The only man I dared to show that awful thing to was the janitor and he stuck up his nose. 'Guess your pop must have been a little full,' was his comment."

James Jones decided to come to Boston forthwith. He wanted to see for himself what sort of a community John Japson had strayed into. He did see Boston, Cambridge too, to his heart's content. Boston was his particular delight. Two of its citizens took the gentleman from Omaha well in hand. They showed him the Frog Pond—it was just before the season when they remove the Frog Pond for the season and put down the boardwalks in the Common—and they showed him the crookedest streets of any town upon the American continent. They filled him with beans and with codfish, tickled his palate with the finest Medford rum. He mingled and he browsed and before they were done with him his barbaric soul became enraptured.

"Boston is great," he admitted, frankly. Then, in an afterthought, he added:

"I think that I should like to call her the Omaha of the East."

*****

The owl still comes on cloudy, troubled nights and sits in a high tree-limb above the quiet graves in the graveyard of King's Chapel. When he comes he sees the tardiest of the Boston men, carrying the green bags, that their daddies and their granddaddies before them carried, as they go slipping down the School street hill. He is a very old owl and he loves the old town—loves each of its austere meeting-houses with their belfried towers, loves the meeting places behind the rows of chimney-pots, the open reaches of the Common and the adjoining Public Gardens, where children paddle in the swan-boats all summer long. He loves the tang and mist of the nearby sea, but best of all he likes the tree-limb in the old graveyard, the part of Boston that stands changeless through the years—that thrusts itself into the very face of modernity with the grimy stone church at its corner and seems to say:

"I am the Past. To the Past, Reverence."

And in Boston Modernity halts many times to make obeisance to the Past.