CHAPTER XXIV

COASTING ON PONKAPOAG

Looking backward from these days of slothful ease in getting about
it seems as if the golden days of Ponkapoag were those of a
generation and more ago. Then it was an isolated hamlet. To be
sure, there was a railroad a mile and a half away and the
venturous traveller might go north or south on it twice a day,
though few Ponkapoag people were that sort of venturesome
travellers. The days of the stage coaches had passed and the place
was more thrown upon its own resources, especially for excitement,
than it had been since they had made it a stopping point on a main
thoroughfare. The railroad brought bustle to many hamlets, but it
took it away from Ponkapoag and left it a sleepy hollow. Even the
days of the Cherry Tavern and the Ponkapoag Inn were past and the
poet Aldrich and other people of latter-day renown had not
appeared to make it famous.

Now the trolley car buzzes up and down the long steep slopes of
Ponkapoag Hill and the automobiles honk in endless procession both
ways. The old houses stand, but a new generation occupies them and
the cosey, self-centered life of the old village has completely
passed. Even the people who knew its traditions of a half-century
ago are gone, too, and though the Christmas snow brought good
coasting I doubt if it brought many coasters to the old hill. Yet
Ponkapoag Hill was once famous in the region all about for its
coasting and the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the Ponkapoag
coasters. On days and nights in the old-fashioned winters, when
the sledding of big logs to the sawmill on Ponkapoag brook had
made the course down the hill one glare of adamantine snow between
deep rifts, the population of the village used to turn out; not
the big and little boys and girls only, but the grown-ups even to
the venerable gaffers of those days who could remember how they
used to coast there before the Civil War was thought of, when the
Cherry Tavern still fed scores of pleasure-seeking Bostonians on
big, luscious black-heart cherries each June, and in winter the
Ponkapoag Inn had its patrons from the big city not only for
coasting but for pickerel fishing on the pond.

Modern easy methods of transportation and communication have put
the typical New England village, with its manly, self-reliant,
self-centered life, out of existence, and with it have passed or
become decadent many of its community sports. I doubt if Ponkapoag
will ever again see such co