Produced by David Widger
LITERATURE AND LIFE—Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer
by William Dean Howells
Monday afternoon the storm which had been beating up against thesoutheasterly wind nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in thenorthwest. The gale increased, and blackened the harbor and whitened theopen sea beyond, where sail after sail appeared round the reef ofWhaleback Light, and ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorageswithin.
Since noon cautious coasters of all sorts had been dropping in with acasual air; the coal schooners and barges had rocked and nodded knowinglyto one another, with their taper and truncated masts, on the breast ofthe invisible swell; and the flock of little yachts and pleasure-boatswhich always fleck the bay huddled together in the safe waters. Thecraft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mackerel seinersfrom Gloucester. They were all of one graceful shape and one size; theycame with all sail set, taking the waning light like sunshine on theirflying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with their seinespiled in black heaps between the thwarts. As soon as they came insidetheir jibs weakened and fell, and the anchor-chains rattled from theirbows. Before the dark hid them we could have counted sixty or seventyships in the harbor, and as the night fell they improvised a littleVenice under the hill with their lights, which twinkled rhythmically,like the lamps in the basin of St. Mark, between the Maine and NewHampshire coasts.
There was a dash of rain, and we thought the storm had begun; but thatended it, as so many times this summer a dash of rain has ended a storm.The morning came veiled in a fog that kept the shipping at anchor throughthe day; but the next night the weather cleared. We woke to the cluckingof tackle, and saw the whole fleet standing dreamily out to sea. Whenthey were fairly gone, the summer, which had held aloof in dismay of thesudden cold, seemed to return and possess the land again; and thesuccession of silver days and crystal nights resumed the tranquil roundwhich we thought had ceased.
One says of every summer, when it is drawing near its end, "There neverwas such a summer"; but if the summer is one of those which slip from thefeeble hold of elderly hands, when the days of the years may be reckonedwith the scientific logic of the insurance tables and the sad convictionof the psalmist, one sees it go with a passionate prescience of neverseeing its like again such as the younger witness cannot know. Each newsummer of the few left must be shorter and swifter than the last: itsJunes will be thirty days long, and its Julys and Augusts thirty-one, incompliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so small a compassthat fourteen of them will rattle round in a week of the old size likeshrivelled peas in a pod.
To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas putto soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we firstspent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four hourslong. Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where thereis nothing to hurry them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and musebeside the sea and shore, which are so netted together at Kittery Pointthat they hardly know themselves apart. The days, whatever their length,are divided, not into hours, but into mails. They begin, without regardto the sun, at eight o'clock, when the first mail comes with a fewletters and papers which had forgotten themselves the night before. Atha