Voices in Time

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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 be an 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.

“Ting-a-ting-ting!” goes the bell, the curtain rises, and we behold—not, indeed, the Main-street—but the tract of leaf-strewn forestland over which its dusty pavement is hereafter to extend.

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. 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, 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 arrowheads shall be treasured up as memorials of a vanished race!

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