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| Unidentified Newspaper Clipping |
He goes again in Summer heat,
To birthplace, old home, home of his Fathers for three hundred years;
He resumes old habits, and drives to the ancient Pond for clams.
As he had gone with his father, and that father with his father, and that one with his own, back and back through the generations;
There on the shore of the Pond, at low tide, he digs in the mud for the clams, in the way the native Shinnecock Indians had taught his ancestors;
And while he tolls and fills his sack, lo, yonder away on the flats are three Shinnecocks at the same labor--
Indians in straight descent from those who showed the trick of such captures to his forefathers,
Their own forerunners, undisturbed by white newcomers, having been there before Columbus found the New World, and for untold ages before him;
The bivalves themselves are still more primeval, having their lineage of the same genus, in the same waters, before Man appeared upon our planet.
These Shinnecocks, having made their catch, shoulder their bags and lope off in their tireless way to their shacks or to the near-by markets in the town;
While the white man throws his sack into his car and speeds to his back lawn, where he follows teh method of roasting the clams that the Shinnecocks had taught his ancestors;
He sets up a circle of small stone on the grass, places the bivalves on the edge in the circle, that their juices may not be lost, takes old shingles from his wood-shed, shingles from a mill that after more than two centuries' use had been torn down, splits the shingles into pieces, lays them on top the clams, applies a match to paper, as Indians had struck sparks from flint to fall on dry, dead leaves;
On platters, his boys carry the roasted clams to the house, and a feast is on.
Now Shinnecocks and white man and clams have met again, on the shores of the same Pond, under the same Sun, at the same low tide, as three centuries ago.
Time, swift-racer, who plunges us all onward, ever onward, at speed, now and then checks his rapid feet and is still, and Past and Present for a while are one.
--Calvin Dill Wilson
The column's author, Calvin Dill Wilson, also wrote, among other books for young readers, a The Child's Don Quixote: Being the Adventures of Don Quixote Retold for Young People, T.Y. Crowell, New York, c1901, which was dedicated to his eight-year-old boy, Maurice Webster Wilson, who was born in 1892.
To birthplace, old home, home of his Fathers for three hundred years;
He resumes old habits, and drives to the ancient Pond for clams.
As he had gone with his father, and that father with his father, and that one with his own, back and back through the generations;
There on the shore of the Pond, at low tide, he digs in the mud for the clams, in the way the native Shinnecock Indians had taught his ancestors;
And while he tolls and fills his sack, lo, yonder away on the flats are three Shinnecocks at the same labor--
Indians in straight descent from those who showed the trick of such captures to his forefathers,
Their own forerunners, undisturbed by white newcomers, having been there before Columbus found the New World, and for untold ages before him;
The bivalves themselves are still more primeval, having their lineage of the same genus, in the same waters, before Man appeared upon our planet.
These Shinnecocks, having made their catch, shoulder their bags and lope off in their tireless way to their shacks or to the near-by markets in the town;
While the white man throws his sack into his car and speeds to his back lawn, where he follows teh method of roasting the clams that the Shinnecocks had taught his ancestors;
He sets up a circle of small stone on the grass, places the bivalves on the edge in the circle, that their juices may not be lost, takes old shingles from his wood-shed, shingles from a mill that after more than two centuries' use had been torn down, splits the shingles into pieces, lays them on top the clams, applies a match to paper, as Indians had struck sparks from flint to fall on dry, dead leaves;
On platters, his boys carry the roasted clams to the house, and a feast is on.
Now Shinnecocks and white man and clams have met again, on the shores of the same Pond, under the same Sun, at the same low tide, as three centuries ago.
Time, swift-racer, who plunges us all onward, ever onward, at speed, now and then checks his rapid feet and is still, and Past and Present for a while are one.
--Calvin Dill Wilson
The column's author, Calvin Dill Wilson, also wrote, among other books for young readers, a The Child's Don Quixote: Being the Adventures of Don Quixote Retold for Young People, T.Y. Crowell, New York, c1901, which was dedicated to his eight-year-old boy, Maurice Webster Wilson, who was born in 1892.
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