Theophilus North Read Online Free PDF

families from New York and Cambridge and Providence, who had discovered the beauties of Newport as a summer resort. (Few Bostonians visited it; they had their North Shore and South Shore resorts.) Henry James, the Swedenborgian philosopher, brought his family here, including the young philosopher and the young novelist. In his last, unfinished novel, Henry James, Jr., returns in memory and sets the scene of The Ivory Tower among the houses and lawns edged by the Cliff Walk. Here lived to a great age Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” There was a cluster of Harvard professors. The house of John Louis Rudolph Agassiz that I had just passed was converted into a hotel, and is still one in 1972. At a later visit I was able to engage the pentagonal room in a turret above the house; from that magical room I could see at night the beacons of six lighthouses and hear the booming or chiming of as many sea buoys.
    Then to make the S IXTH C ITY came the very rich, the empire-builders, many of them from their castles on the Hudson and their villas at Saratoga Springs, suddenly awakened to the realization that inland New York State is crushingly hot in summer. With them came fashion, competitive display, and the warming satisfaction of exclusion. This so-called “great age” was long over, but much remained.
    In a great city the vast army of servants merges into the population, but on a small island and a small part of that island, the servants constitute a S EVENTH C ITY. Those who never enter the front door of the house in which they live except to wash it become conscious of their indispensable role and develop a sort of underground solidarity.
    The E IGHTH C ITY (dependent like the Seventh on the Sixth) contains the population of camp-followers and parasites—prying journalists, detectives, fortune-hunters, “crashers,” half-cracked aspirants to social prominence, seers, healers, equivocal protégés and protégées—wonderful material for my Journal.
    Finally there was, and is, and long will be the N INTH C ITY, the American middle-class town, buying and selling, raising its children and burying its dead, with little attention to spare for the eight cities so close to it.
    I watched and recorded them: I came to think of myself as Gulliver on the island of Aquidneck.
    On the morning following my arrival I called for advice on a person with whom I dared to presume I had a remote connection—William Wentworth, superintendent at the Casino. Ten years before this my brother, while still an undergraduate at Yale, had played there in the New England Tennis Championship Tournament and had won high place. He had told me of Mr. Wentworth’s congeniality and ever-ready helpfulness. I first strolled through the entrance and surveyed the playing area and the arrangements for spectators. The building was designed—as were other edifices in Newport—by the brilliant and ill-fated Stanford White. As in every work from his hand it was marked by distinguished design and a free play of fancy. Although it was early in the spring the famous lawn courts were already a carpet of green.
    I knocked on the superintendent’s door and was bidden to enter by a hale man of fifty who put out his hand, saying, “Good morning, sir. Sit down. What can I do for you?”
    I told him of my brother’s past in the Tournament.
    â€œLet me see, now. Nineteen-sixteen. Here’s his picture. And here’s his name on the annual cup. I remember him well, a fine fellow and a top-ranking player. Where’s he now?”
    â€œHe’s in the ministry.”
    â€œFine!” he said.
    I told him of my military service at Fort Adams. I told him of my four years of uninterrupted teaching, of my need of a change, and of a less demanding teaching schedule. I showed him the sketch for an advertisement I planned to put in the newspaper and asked him if he’d be kind enough