《瓦尔登湖·第十四章·旧居民、冬天的访客·Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors》第2节
Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot,—“Ye are all bones, bones!” I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once,—there where grow still the apple-trees which Brister planted and tended; large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”—Scipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—“a man of color,” as if he were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; which was but an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly,—large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since. Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family; whose orchard once covered all the slope of Brister’s Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed’s location, on the other side of the way, just on the edge of the wood; ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family,—New-England Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a tavern stood; the well the same, which tempered the traveller’s beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went their ways again.
注释摘要
梭罗在这一节做的工作，可以叫作瓦尔登湖区的田野考古。冬雪封住了他通往村镇的道路，也封住了与外界的日常往来，于是他把目光转向脚下土地的纵向时间，开始清点那些在他到来之前曾在这片林地里生活过的人。他所勾勒的，是一幅被森林反复吞没的人居地图——黑人、混血儿、爱尔兰移民、破产的白人拓荒者——这些名字从未进入康科德的正式历史，却被梭罗以近乎地方志的方式一一修复。 齐…