The younger generation of Birge’s Corners insisted that nothing exciting had happened since Abigail Clergy’s love affair in 1867, and the older generation retorted that Thurley Precore, who must have been born in Arcadia, was bound to create excitement.

The older generation were content to have time snail over their doorsteps. To their placid minds much had happened and was happening to content any one of normal makeup. Take the Hotel Button—what more did any one want than that two-story establishment with ramshackle outbuildings and a crazy wooden fence about the whole of it? Commercial travellers making the town annually never complained about Prince Hawkins’ hospitality or Mrs. Prince Hawkins’ cooking—never. And during one of those comical cold spells, when twenty below zero was registered on the thermometer, the younger generation were mighty glad to end a sleigh ride before the Hotel Button, and have one of Mrs. Prince Hawkins’ oyster suppers—she had been Lena Button, an only child, and her working like a slave now ...! Also, the upstairs parlor with its flowered carpet and tortured walnut furniture and the same square piano on which Lena Button had learned her “Battle of Prague”—the younger generation never thought of refusing the upstairs parlor in which to have a wind-up dance. None of them complained about the slowness of Birge’s Corners—until the next day!

As for stores: there was Oyster Jim’s confectionery store with a balcony overlooking Lake Birge, and here the younger generation gathered to eat ice cream and drink cream soda. Of course, Oyster Jim’s store was not like New York tea-rooms which some of the younger generation had visited and drawn unkind comparisons about, but the ice cream was homemade, and, if he did dilute the cream, the water from Lake Birge was about as good as there was in the state; a chemist had said so. Besides, Oyster Jim’s other specialty was canary birds, yellow-throated songsters in every corner of the balcony, and it took a pretty smart man to keep an ice cream store and raise canary birds, to say nothing of selling Ford supplies to distressed tourists! Then there was Submit Curler’s general store. She was always taking magazines to keep “up to snuff”—and as for patterns of ginghams and calicos, there were no prettier patterns to be had. When the younger generation said why did Miss Curler insist on selling horse whips and lanterns and year-old hard candies and marbles and soft soap and acorn picture frames and knitted things she made in between rings of the bell, and why didn’t she have decent silk waists and neckties and stop calling you by your first name long after your engagement had been announced, to say nothing of wrapping things in newspapers and expecting you to carry them through the streets—the older generation sniffed in answer that Submit Curler was one of God’s own, and, although Algebra might have been the capital of a foreign country as far as she knew, she had crooned countless teething babies to sleep to give their mothers a rest, and helped lay out the dead and then stayed “behind” to have a piping hot dinner ready when the mourners “came back.”

Of course the younger generation were not silenced by this. They began a complaint about the weekly paper, a ridiculous affair running three-year-old detective serials and month-old national happenings, telling whose veranda was to be painted and who had bought a pair of new earlaps! To which the older generation magnanimously remarked that, as long as “Ali Baba” and Betsey Pilrig had their health, there would be no need for an up-to-date daily newspaper. One did not have to wait until news was gathered, edited and printed. Ali Baba, Abby Clergy’s coachman, and Betsey Pilrig, who lived in the yellow house across from Thurley Precore’s box-car wagon, kept the village informed of every happening in such rapid-fire fashion that the need for a daily sheet was never experienced!

Granting this—where was there any society? To which the older generation answered, indignantly, that nowhere in the United States of America HAD there existed such society, elegance and grandeur as at the summer colony on Birge’s Lake, and, if those days were contemporary with Abigail Clergy’s great sorrow, what mattered it? The aroma of past grandeur lingers long, and even yet the stately mansions with endless turrets and towers stood about the shores of the lake causing one to respect their closed shutters.

To this the younger generation, although protesting that the society was entirely a memory, had no reply. For the older generation had spoken the truth. About the perfect little lake, an emerald in its coloring and flanked by pungent pine woods and an amphitheater of tiny hills, some half a century before, had been built the summer homes of the oldest of America’s aristocracy. In those days when Birge’s Corners was but a post office and a few stray dogs, the lake had been an oasis for the tired rich; here families came to grow tanned and rosy, while love affairs ripened and wedding bells were listened for and the elders sat back in pleased approval. The rich owned the lake, so the saying went—but Daniel Birge owned the Corners and the rich! Daniel Birge was steward to the rich. If they desired an improvement in the way of carriage sheds or certain grades of merchandise which were daily necessities, Daniel Birge, founder of Birge’s Corners, saw to it that it was accomplished. The lake had been named for his great-great-grandfather, who discovered it, and, when the richest of the rich suggested that “Birge’s Lake” was a trifle commonplace name for such a bit of paradise—“Fairy Lake” would be more appropriate—they met their Waterloo. This was the only thing Daniel Birge refused the rich—the re-naming of the little lake.

“Great-great-grandpap found it, and it’ll keep his name,” was all he said.

And because Dan Birge “had a way with him”—even as his grandson, the present Dan Birge, had a “way with him”—the summer colony never questioned the matter again. Birge’s Lake and Birge’s Corners were christened for eternity.

Meanwhile, middle class inhabitants came to live at the Corners, houses multiplied from season to season, the Hotel Button came into existence, as did rival blacksmiths’ shops and Submit Curler’s store. Even a travelling dentist took rooms at Betsey Pilrig’s for every Thursday, and the Methodist and Baptist churches ran a race as to the height of their steeples.

Time soon enough changed the ways and the likings of the rich. The old homes came to be rented out or closed for two and three years at a time. Some were put on the market, but no one ever bought them. Well-built mansions they were, with twenty and thirty rooms and grounds extending back for half an acre, stables with rooms for the coachman’s family, private boat landings, romantic rustic arbors where tea used to be served, and summer houses with lacey latticework where dÉbutantes gathered to read Tennyson and their own love letters.

Birge’s Corners built up so rapidly that the decline of Birge’s Lake was scarcely noticed. One by one the families stopped coming to the lake for the summer. There were newer, more luxurious or more isolated places—their younger generation complained of the lack of thrilling events. The “ghost village” it was truthfully called, house after house lying idle, save for stray sparrows or squirrels who burrowed snugly in the eaves.

“Ali Baba”—Joshua Maples in writing—was made general caretaker. One by one the families left him in charge of the ghost mansions. He knew just which room it was where the Confederate captain married the Boston belle, and how many roses had been used in the decorations. He could tell the exact spot in the Luddington house where young Luddington had shot himself—the night before his theft of bank funds should be made public.

A stranger could not point at any of the deserted mansions but what Ali Baba, taking off his tattered hat and scratching his white, curly head philosophically, would summon a word picture of the past, when the curly head had been black and the wrinkled face smooth and boyish.

“They say society has all gone to live at Newport in the summer,” Ali Baba would summarize. “Well, mebbe they has. All I know is this—that right here at Birge’s Lake from 1860 to 1890—for nigh thirty years, there wasn’t no place in the land that could boast of entertaining any finer. We’ve had three presidents come fishing—right there by that landing—and Patti sang ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in that big house over there—the one with the gables. I passed the punch afterwards—yes, sir, right up to time I was, in a new dress suit Major McAndrews bought me. I never heard nobody sing as she did—and the wimmen said her pink satin train was six feet long. Well, I’ll take that back—I have heard it sung as good and mebbe better by a girl right in this village—a nightingale girl named Thurley Precore.

“That Swiss cha-lay over there was built in 1878 by Hugo Fiske—he and his bride were going to come here summers—she died the day before the wedding, and he come on here, as soon as she was buried, and stayed all alone, his wedding bags and finery stacked in the hall and never unpacked. He kept trampin’, trampin’, trampin’ through the woods and around the lake, never speakin’ to a soul. By and by, when he had walked it all out, he come to the livery and asked to be taken to the train. I happened to be handy then, and so I drove him over. When I helped him out and toted his bags, he says to me, ‘Ali Baba, tell Abby Clergy I understand’—and he never come back again.”

Here the old man would become uncommunicative, and, when the stranger would idly ask, “Who was Abby Clergy?”—all the answer would be was:

“His neighbor.”

Then the stranger might suggest the danger of burglars. To which Ali Baba would answer:

“I guess you don’t know these parts—oh, we got a few burglars—robins and chipmunks and that kind.”

If the stranger asked “Why are you called Ali Baba?” looking with interest at his rosy old face, Ali Baba would bid him good-by without further ado and make his way homeward, past Birge’s Corners to Birge’s Lake to a certain red brick mansion, with every shuttered window fastened tight, save those at the back, and the gleam of lights showing from upper front windows. Ali Baba would find his way to the back of the house, tiptoeing meekly inside an immaculate summer kitchen to find his widowed sister, Hopeful Whittier, to whom he would say:

“Land sakes and Mrs. Davis, I got talkin’ again over to Oyster Jim’s—a fellow in one of those gosh-darn leather coats—seems to me he never would stop askin’ questions!”

Hopeful, stern and forbidding in her slate-colored calico, would answer, “Ali Baba, do you know Miss Abby has been waiting—it is PAST four o’clock?”

Without delay Ali Baba would rush to the barn and in magical order arrange a shining, old-style harness on an iron gray mare, hitch the same to an old-style, closed coupÉ padded with scarlet silk, shades of past glory! On the coupÉ door was a monogram—A. C., entwined with plumes and fleur-de-lis. Donning a black frock coat and silk hat, both slightly green when the sun met them unexpectedly, Ali Baba would mount the coach seat, and, with a grave “Come on, Melba,” to the mare, would cause her to stalk sedately out of the barn, down the gravel path to the side porch where the carved door would open and a peculiar little person, seemingly very old, would step outside. She would be dressed in a long out-of-date black coat and a round, felt hat fastened under her chin by an elastic. Her shoes would be rough and shabby, and her gray hair betray itself as fastened in an unbecoming “button” under her hat. As she would put one hand on the coupÉ door, it would show itself to be yellowed and feeble. She never wore gloves, but the most beautiful rings in the world sparkled innocently on the small fingers, pigeon blood rubies, white water diamonds, a black pearl, emeralds and sapphires, and on her thumb was a great cameo ring held in place by a jewelled guard.

Around this small person’s neck would be a thick, old-style braided watch chain, at the end of which dangled glassless, gold lorgnettes which she never used. As she lifted her face to Ali Baba’s respectfully inclining ear to say the same phrase she had said for thirty-five years—“An hour’s drive, Ali Baba, not too fast,”—one could see that she had dark, restless eyes and a thin, sharp face, a flexible mouth drawn into a melancholy expression and a bulging forehead bespeaking more brains than are usual.

The coupÉ door would close and down would come the faded scarlet curtains. Ali Baba, laying the whip a full eight inches above Melba’s iron-gray back, would then effect a triumphant exit out of the driveway.

So it was that Miss Clergy, sole occupant of the ghost village, drove at four each day of the year, rain or shine, save when the snow piled too high to let the old-fashioned sledge proceed. “An hour’s drive, Ali Baba, not too fast” had become a village slogan.

No one ever questioned Ali Baba concerning Miss Clergy, or commented on the appearance of the coupÉ with its white-haired driver and curtained occupant, until, in the year nineteen hundred and twelve, something else very thrilling happened in Birge’s Corners, something which made Abigail Clergy’s love tragedy seem remote, scarcely worth remembering.

The person concerned in the event had been told the real story of Abigail Clergy, and why Joshua Maples was called “Ali Baba,” and why Miss Clergy drove at four, always alone and with the curtains drawn, and why the children were afraid of her and called her witch, trying to make their mothers admit that the Clergy house was haunted. That person was Thurley Precore—born in Arcadia, the Corners admitted, although they did not call it by that name. They said, “Wherever Thurley Precore managed to get that smile and face and voice of hers and to sing more and more like an angel when every one knew—” and so forth and so on, the deduction arrived at being that God had let Himself realize His dream of beauty when He created Thurley Precore—Thurley with the most worthless, indifferent parents about whom the Corners had ever heard tell.

Thurley was twenty when the “thrilling event” happened. But her advent into the Corners ten years before is worth recording. To the older generation, in fact, it had been a happening of great interest, and, had it not taken place, the really thrilling event in 1912 could never have occurred. But younger generations never consider the law of cause and effect, so they shrugged their shoulders in impatience when their elders insisted on re-telling to out-of-town visitors how Thurley Precore first “sang for her supper.”