| Alfred Marshall Hitchcock (1868-1941) was born in Troy, NY on May 7, 1868. He earned his M.A. from Dartmouth in 1896 and then was an Instructor in English at the Hartford Public High School (Conn.). Hitchcock edited an edition of Washington Irving's The Alhambra (1904), then wrote A Practice-book in English Composition (1906), Words and Sentences, including a review of grammar (1908), Theme-book in English Composition (1910), Rhetoric and the Study of Literature (1913), New Practice-book in English Composition (1914), Composition and Rhetoric (1917), Over Japan Way (1917), Junior English Book (1920), High School English Book (1920), Study Plans for Novels Read in High Schools (1927), Bread Loaf Talks on Teaching Composition (1927), and A New England Boyhood (1934). He died in Augusta, GA on April 14, 1941. 1 |
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Over Japan Way
(1917):
"I am sitting in a comfortable chair just outside the sun parlor [at a hotel in Miyanoshita, 1377 feet above sea level and seven or eight miles from Lake Hakone, southeast of Mt. Fuji] watching an elderly couple promenading up and down the gravel walk, now stopping to pet a shaggy poodle who really does not appreciate their attentions, now to admire a row of dwarf trees, perhaps brought out from the hotel for an airing. A few of the trees are in pots but many of them simply cling to mossy stones, just as their loftier brothers cling to the hillside. Not a one is over two feet high, yet all may be twenty, fifty, a hundred years old –- odd little wizened pigmies grotesquely gnarled and twisted. I wonder if it was by design that they were so lined up as to silhouette against the mountain wall miles away. First, in a rectangular basin, a centenarian (I suspect) with wide-spreading branches horizontal or downward dipping, extreme height not over fifteen inches, with a huge crag at the base of its trunk that would easily slip into a two quart measure. Next a grove of five, no two stems in line, one towering a whole inch above its neighbors, and one leaning, [186] all clinging to a mountain crag twelve inches by twenty. Then a wilderness, thirty slender-stemmed evergreens growing miraculously out of a mossy stone. Behold the solitary maple, a trunk not four inches high, from which issues horizontally a single graceful branch. One more of the long line of Lilliputians will suffice, three evergreens rooted to a rocky promontory finely lichened. "What a land of topsy-turvy contrast: lofty cryptomerias, trees the height of a blade of grass; majestic Mt. Fuji, tiny soup plate gardens with microscopic pools, bridges, and shrines; great bronze Buddhas, images of gods carved from single grains of rice; fleet men-o'-war, lazy junks with quilted sails; bushido, chivalry, yet so much that is sadly unchivalric." 2 |
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1
Traub, Hamilton Paul The American Literary Yearbook (Henning, MINN; 1919), pg.
122 ;
Lowe, John Adams General Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Williams College, 1920, pg.
129 ;
Wallace, William Stewart Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950, pg.
213 .
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