Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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My grandfather appeared there in the years before the Civil War at just the time that Horatio Alger's characters began to make their way. He was a Yankee who must have rubbed shoulders with Tom the bootblack and Jerry the street boy. He was a figure of the wicked days—one of the ogres who now darken the pages of liberal economic primers—but he was the one who kept Wickford Point from vanishing, and he was the one who enabled all its archaic complications to live into the present. I have sometimes wondered whether, if he could return to it, he might not repent having left a trust fund for the upkeep of the place. Curiously enough Mr. Caldicott, our trustee, whom I had always considered unimaginative, said the same thing once when I saw him in Boston.

"Well, Mr. Caldicott," I told him, "if he could come back, he wouldn't know the old place now."

Sometimes, however, I am not so sure that he did not come back, and that all the people who have ever lived at Wickford Point are not somewhere near it.