I Recall The Time When I Lived On A Vast Vacant Level Green
Plain, An Earth Which To The Eye,
And to the mind which sees
with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the
house I was born
In was the oldest in the district - a century
old, it was said; where the people were the children's
children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and
colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of
national life. But the people who had possessed the land
before these emigrants - what of them? They, were but a
memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more
to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long
centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come,
a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of
migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their
hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.
Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly
cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught
sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the
cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery
made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one
side. On searching further a few more pieces were found. I
took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing a
novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for
though worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real
evidence I had come upon of that vanished people who had been
before us; and it was as if those bits of baked clay, with a
pattern incised on them by a man's finger-nail, had in them
some magical property which enabled me to realize the past,
and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead and
forgotten men.
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