HILDEG 7 Old Seaport Towns of New England ^ :t$m Sfel^ "'' Old Seaport Towns of New England By Hildegarde Hawthorne Author of " The Lure of the Garden," Etc., with drawings by John Albert Seaford 1916 COPYRIGHT, 1916 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, IMC. TO MY SISTER IMOGEN PREFACE HIS informal and personal account of a trip through a group of towns with whose story the brave beginnings of our history are linked, seems to ask for a prefatory word because of this very informal- ity. The book is more in the nature of an after- noon tea chat than any serious presentment of fact; and I feel, therefore, like establishing at the threshold an easy and friendly note with such readers as may decide to drop in and share with me the impressions of a spring outing whose key- note was the spirit of vacation. Here, where the long Pacific roller breaks its majesty on the shores of California, I look back with a deep feeling of affection to that Atlantic coastline where my forefathers began their great American job. There is a masculine fibre to that rocky and winter-bitten coast lacking on this Western shore complemented, rather, by a softer a feminine, quality, that has its own charm. As for beauty, who shall say? Beauty is everywHere, with its thousand aspects. Oddly enough, history reaches Hack in Monterey or Santa Barbara, al- PREFACE most as far as in Plymouth or Newburyport; here, too, old houses shame the present with their more exquisite sense of fitness and artistic excellence, standing serene, lovely evidences of a finished story. Somewhere Kipling intimated that a happy state of existence would be his who might contrive to pursue spring on her flight around the earth, living everlastingly in that divine season. I feel sure, were that possible, that nowhere else would spring show herself more adorable than in her New England incarnation, following on a grim season of storm and biting cold, incredible, save for her actual presence, a shimmer of colour, a wonder of fragrance, a creature of unbelievable light and youth and grace, playing over the ancient rock and hardy vegetation of that north- ern land. If the record that follows serves to urge some one else to find the lilac charm of Maine or Massa- chusetts as it was found by my sister and myself in this past spring, I am sure of at least one heart- felt thank you for a book it has been a pleasure to write, whatever it may prove to read. HlLDEGARDE HAWTHORNE. BALBOA, CALIFORNIA, September, 1916. Vlll Contents CHAPTER I PORTLAND II PORTSMOUTH III NEWBURYPORT IV SALEM V BEVERLY AND THE ROCKY COAST VI GLOUCESTER VII MARBLEHEAD VIII PLYMOUTH AND NEW BEDFORD . IX PROVINCETOWN X NEWPORT XI NEW LONDON XII NEW HAVEN . PAGE 3 33 59 91 113 133 161 189 217 241 265 289 Illustrations CUSTOM HOUSE WHARF, PORTLAND Frontispiece FACING PAGE OLD STRAWBERRY BANK, PORTSMOUTH .... 36 OLD WAREHOUSE AND FERRY, PORTSMOUTH ... 50 CLAM SHACKS, NEWBURYPORT 70 CHESTNUT STREET, SALEM 98 BEVERLY BRIDGE, SALEM SIDE . . . . . .116 BEVERLY COVE 124 GLOUCESTER TOWERS FROM HARBOUR COVE . . .142 OLD MANSIONS AND ABBOTT HALL, MARBLEHEAD . 166 ORNE STREET, MARBLEHEAD 180 "THE WHALEMAN," NEW BEDFORD 200 OLD WHARVES AND COLONIAL TOWER, PROVINCETOWN 220 IN THE PORTUGUESE QUARTERS, PROVINCETOWN . 232 OLD TRINITY CHURCH, NEWPORT 250 A BIT OF THE WATER FRONT, NEW LONDON . . .272 THE WHITMAN GATE, YALE 300 Portland OLD SEAPORT TOWNS OF NEW ENGLAND CHAPTER I Portland HEN the two of us decided to see the seaport towns of New England, with as much of the circumjacent country and sea itself as possible, or that part of it which splashes and thunders on the rocky coast, we made each other one solitary promise. I suppose it is in the nature of human beings to bind themselves to the impossible, to declare with splendid confidence that they will, or will not, without the slightest deference to the tyranny of the flesh and the clutch of circumstance. We were like the rest, speaking from the proud, im- mortal spirit in us. " Yes," we declared. " We won't bind ourselves to any set scheme or schedule. When we feel like it we'll stay and when we don't we'll go. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS We won't have a rule or a pledge except this. We'll travel light." I was particularly firm about it. " There isn't a bit of use," I told Sister, " in loading ourselves down with a lot of truck. Two rattan suitcases that we can carry easily ourselves. Porters are few and far between once we get out of the Grand Central. And maybe we'll want to trolley from one place to another. If we need more than we take i we can buy it, and we can send things home by parcel post. Eliminate, that's the word." " Eliminate," echoed Sister. " Fine. No tram- mels for us, eh? " " Not a trammel," I agreed. Upon that thought we separated. We were to meet the following night, and take the train direct to Portland. From that farthest point north we were to idle our way down the coast according to our fancy. My suitcase was rather huge, but light; I found I could hold it out at arm's length suspended from my forefinger. That, of course, was before it was packed. It was a pity it was so big, but there were tapes and pockets to hold things firm, so they wouldn't rattle about and get crushed. I started eliminating at ten in the morning, and by twelve I had decided on the absolutely neces- OF NEW ENGLAND sary things that must be taken. They were rather bulky in appearance, to be sure, but after all there was room enough, and summer things were light and fluffy. . . . When I had finished putting everything into the suitcase that it could be induced to hold, there were still a pair of shoes, a book, and the things I wanted for the sleeping car to be somehow car- ried along. Luckily, I owned a small, neat bag that would just hold these leftovers. After all, it would be a good idea to check the suitcase straight through and keep the bag for the car. Grand! I would carry the suitcase right down now and have it out of the way. Grasping the handle, I started to pick the thing up and be off with it. It resisted. It resisted with such force that presently I gave up the at- tempt. It evidently preferred to stay where it was. A janitor, a taxi, and a porter got the thing to the checking-room for me. It was out of my way till we reached Portland, and I rejoiced. I de- termined not to say anything about it to Sister. Maybe, after all, it wasn't so heavy as I had imagined. She had no suitcase with her when we met, and explained that she had decided it was better to OLD SEAPORT TOWNS check it, especially as she had what she needed for the sleeper in the hand-bag she carried. " The thing's rather heavier than I meant it to be," she remarked, carelessly, as we bought the latest issues of the evening papers, feeling that we should know nothing about the war or the politi- cal situation until we got back to town again, and wanting to feel informed up to the last minute. " It's funny how much a few things do weigh, isn't it? " I thought of an answer, but didn't go any fur- ther than thought. And a few minutes afterward we pushed our way down the long green avenue of the sleeper to our section. We had taken a sec- tion so that we could sit comfortably together, reading and talking over our proposed plans, since the train left before nine. But the porter had a different idea, with the result that I climbed up while Sister stayed below. We might as well have been in different hemispheres for all the chance there was of a cosy little talk; and when I found my berth light wouldn't work, I decided that as we had to be up early, the thing to do now was to sleep. The business of sleeping in a sleeper always interests me. I sleep, certainly! But it is such a noisy, adventurous sleep, a sort of tumult and shouting, a series of heroic acts, the winning of OF NEW ENGLAND forlorn hopes. When it merges into the peace of waking, I lie awhile in astonishment, listening to the departing turmoil of the magnificent night before it quite escapes me. Sister and I entered the wash room together, and found it occupied by a small woman who gave us a baleful glance. We found that, though small, she had done her work well. A dressing case was spread open on the solitary chair. A large bag took up most of the floor space. From the hooks depended a variety of garments, and the shelf be- fore the mirror held an array of bottles and jars and brushes. Clearly we were not wanted. Never- theless, we stayed, for the train was flashing along through Ogunquit, Old Orchard, and other sum- mer haunts that warned us Portland was near by. " Nice morning, isn't it? " remarked my sister, with that lack of originality belonging to the early hours of day. The small woman's baleful look changed to a startled expression. Evidently we were trying to scrape an acquaintance, based on this forced upon her encounter. Flight was the better way. Sweeping up her belongings, she left. " It isn't done in New England," I said. " I see. You have but to speak to be alone. What an excellent rule." The vasty spaces of the restaurant in the Union OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Station at Portland showed only two or three spots of life, for we were well in advance of the season, still in the late days of May. The strange sorrow that seems to hang about all railway eat- ing places was here too. The depressed waitresses moved between the tables with measured tread, and one of them took our order with an expression that indicated her unflattering opinion of persons who, on the verge of eternity, as we all were, could order eggs, griddle cakes, and coffee. We ate them, and found them good. After which happy surprise, we went out to get our suit- cases. The baggage man swung them to the low coun- ter with a splendid nonchalance. Before taking them away, we asked if we could get a carriage to the Falmouth. " I don't know as there's one round just now. Why don't you take the car? It'll put you right down at the door." There is a straight, broad path leading from the station between stretches of lawn to the car- track. Rather a long path, I thought. But we thanked the man and started. " It's heavier than I thought," gasped Sister, as we reached the car track and allowed our grips to sink to the pavement beside us. And right there began our delightful experi- OF NEW ENGLAND ence of the courtesy of the New England car con- ductor. Our car arrived, the conductor jumped off, took both those terrible suitcases, placed them in the car, waited for us to adjust ourselves beside them, and we were off. A glorious morning, with great white clouds sailing over a sky that fairly quivered with radi- ance. And an air that smelt like that which must have blown across the vales of Arcady. Later we found that the whole of New England was en- gaged in producing the most gigantic lilac bushes we had ever seen, bushes that tossed their white and purple fronds as high as the second stories of the houses, bushes whose boughs were as thick as the trunk of a plum tree, and that all these lilacs were in full bloom. To spend spring anywhere but in New England, and New England by the sea, for the breath of the sea mingles in the most entrancing way with that lilac fragrance, is an inexcusable mistake. We breathed deep. It was difficult to keep from cheering. The car took us up Congress Street, right through the centre of the peninsula, three miles long and less than a mile across at its widest, on which Portland has stood these two hundred years and more. We passed green gar- dens, old houses, blooming fruit trees, florists' shops with the pavement in front crowded with OLD SEAPORT TOWNS boxes of the biggest and bluest forget-me-nots that had ever blessed our eyes. Then we reached the commercial section, passing a statue of Longfel- low, who was born in Portland. And then the car stopped before the Falmouth, the conductor hopped off, lifted down our suitcases, touched his cap with a smile, and we turned to find a bell hop ready to usher us into the hotel. The Falmouth is a comfortable, easy-going, rea- sonable place. Apparently space did not count for much when it was built, for its halls are wide, and if our rooms were a fair sample, huge is the proper word. The bathroom was larger than a whole three-room flat in New York. " If we ever get lost in these rooms we're done for," declared Sister, awe-stricken at all that spaciousness. If you do not know the history of a town then the town too remains unknown. A town is like a man or a woman. You must know something of its early life, its struggles, its triumphs, of what it has stood for in the past as well as what it stands for now. There is something unreal about a town that has no generations behind it. It is this curi- ous feeling of unreality that makes so many thriv- ing places in the West, small towns that have sprung mushroom growths in a year or a month, seem almost ghostlike. There they are, conjured OF NEW ENGLAND from nothing in a moment; and at a breath you feel they will vanish, leaving no wrack behind. Portland has plenty of history and stands four- square on the labours of many generations. The kind old faces of its ancient buildings look calmly forth at the modern life in its streets, its old churches hold a serenity of time as well as of beauty. The names of men that have merged into the great story of our country are familiar to it, for it watched them play under the shadows of its mighty elms when they were children. Port- land began with American history, and must surely go on to its end, if ending there is to be. I don't know but that "New England Afoot" would have been a better title for this book. For it was in long wanderings on our own feet that we became familiar with town after town. We rarely condescended to take a trolley, and never, except when compelled by those domineering suit- cases, a carriage. As for motor cars, we almost knew them not. I had toured New England be- fore in an automobile. This time I wanted to see New England. " Let's begin at the beginning," I proposed. " In 1632 the first settlers, George Cleeves and Richard Tucker, landed at the foot of Mountjoy Hill, on the shore of Casco Bay. They've got a OLD SEAPORT TOWNS monument somewhere there for them, and the view is one of the loveliest on earth. We'll walk the length of the Eastern Promenade and lie on the grass of Fort Allen Park and see the ships in the harbour." One morning in San Francisco I took the car out to the Cliff House for a swim in the cold waters of the Pacific. As we came in sight of the mighty cliffs, with their black, volcanic stone, in whose cracks the yellow poppies cling, and saw the sea beating in far below, breaking on the huge rocks that had been tossed far out by some tre- mendous action, a native son behind me, who was convoying two visitors, rose to his feet. " Look at that," he said. " Do you wonder that people come here to live? " It was wonderful. But I remembered days when I had seen the wild Atlantic rage against the grey or tawny granite coastline of Maine and Massachusetts, flinging its white masses an unbelievable height into the air, with a volume of sound that reached miles inward. I remem- bered days of unimagined blue and opal, with green islands lying far out in the unruffled waters and white-winged sloops and schooners floating idly on their reflections. I remembered the broad sandy beaches on which the waves lapped softly, and curved bays made picturesque with the OF NEW ENGLAND colourful life that crowded the old wharves. And I wondered why the East did not show some of the enthusiasm of the West; for surely it has as good a reason. The morning shone and sparkled around us. Portland is a particularly bright, clean city, and full of greenness. In the old days it was called the Forest City, because of the very many huge elms and maples that lined and double-lined its streets. But the fire that swept a large part of it in 1866 destroyed hundreds of them. Nevertheless we stopped half a dozen times in our walk to admire some fine old giant, flinging its great boughs high and wide. Lincoln Park is a pretty oblong right in the heart of the town, with many big trees. Children were playing here, and a flock of pigeons whirled and circled about a fountain in the centre. The Eastern Promenade skirts the edge of the cliff overhanging the waters of the bay. At the foot of this cliff the famous George and Richard had established their homes, and now the monu- ment to them, a simple shaft, crowns the slope above. At that time the place was known as Casco, later becoming Falmouth, and finally Port- land in 1785. But before that time it had been practically wiped out twice by Indians. In 1676 the first of these attacks occurred, every soul who OLD SEAPORT TOWNS wasn't killed having been carted off into captivity. Among the killed was a gentleman named Thomas Brackett, an ancestor of Thomas Brackett Reed, who was born in Portland, and whose statue is placed on the Western Promenade. Bracken's wife was taken captive and died a prisoner in Canada. Two grandchildren returned to Fal- mouth after the second massacre, in 1790. After that time the colony grew rapidly. Oddly enough, Reed had an interest in the Settlers' monument on the Eastern Promenade also, for he was a descend- ant of Cleeves. We sauntered along the walk, looking out at the bay, filled with islands, and with boats sailing or steaming back and forth. Several fine schooners lay at anchor, and gulls wheeled above them. Reaching Fort Allen Park, from which the finest view is to be had, we sat down under some trees. Quantities of birds were singing and flying around, red-starts, yellow warblers, and goldfinches, while robins stalked the creeping worms. Behind us the lines of the old earthworks thrown up as a defence against the British ships in the war of the Revolution made gracious grass-covered curves, and old cannon pointed threatening but harmless black fingers toward the sea. " This must be the very spot Whittier was OF NEW ENGLAND thinking of when he wrote * The Ranger,' " Sister said. " Remember? " " Say the lines," I begged, for Sister's memory is the admiration of the family. "Nowhere fairer, sweeter, rarer, Does the golden-locked fruit-bearer Through his painted woodlands stray, Than where hillside oaks and beeches Overlook the long blue reaches, Silver coves and pebbled beaches And green isles of Casco Bay; Nowhere day, for delay, With a tenderer look beseeches, 'Let me with my charmed earth stay!'" The cadenced lines translated the harmony be- fore us with delightful felicity. A sense of pro- found leisure blessed us. I could hardly believe that only yesterday I had been stepping lively in New York, with some millions of my fellows. The British bombardment in October, 1775, had burned and battered down over three hun- dred houses and public buildings in Falmouth. There were four ships, under the command of a Captain Mowatt, who demanded the surrender of some cannon and small arms from the town. An excited meeting at the tavern kept by Dame Alice Greele resulted in a refusal, and the firing began. To-day you are still shown a cannon ball that lodged in the First Parish Meeting House. The OLD SEAPORT TOWNS beautiful old church that occupies the same site has used this ball as the ornament from which to hang its central chandelier. As the church is in the very centre of the town the extent to which the town must have suffered is clear. Dame Alice's tavern, which was the best in the town, was used throughout the Revolution as a place of meeting for the Committee of Public Safety. The tavern stood at the corner of Hamp- shire and Congress streets, just beyond Lincoln Park, and during the shelling of the town was ex- posed to the worst fire. The rest of the neighbour- hood had fled, but not so the stout Dame. Every house in the immediate vicinity was destroyed, either by bursting bombs or by fire, but the lady worked all through the terrific day, pouring water on the flames that started on her premises. When a red-hot cannon ball fell in her back yard, set- ting fire to some rubbish that had been raked up, Dame Alice remarked to a neighbour who was hurrying by, as she tossed the ball into the street with the assistance of a frying pan into which she had gathered it: " The firing won't last much longer, for you see they are making new balls now, and can't even wait for them to cool." " Talk about votes for women," I remarked, as we tried to conjure back that day of destruction, OF NEW ENGLAND "it seems to me the town owes Alice a mark of approbation. They say that not a solitary man stuck it out as she did, but just let their houses burn till Mowatt had sailed away." After the deplorable fashion of so many Ameri- can towns, the lovely shore line is given up to rail- way tracks, which, though mostly hidden under the slope, have ruined the beach. The house where Longfellow was born, a plain square struc- ture, is now surrounded by tenements and har- assed by the smoke and clatter of the cars. But in his day the beach spread unsullied before it, and the neighbourhood was charming, with old trees and pretty homes. The Longfellows stayed here only a year or two, moving later into the Wadsworth house, in the centre of town. This house now has an outlook simply on the street and opposing houses, while in Henry's childhood you looked, from the upper windows, clear out to sea, saw the Light on Portland Head, the shore of Cape Elizabeth, the ships that came and went. Cape Elizabeth, by the way, was named after the well-known Virgin Queen by Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, who happened to sail into Casco Bay on one of his expeditions. We hated to leave the promenade, so we de- cided to walk back to the northern end, with its outlook over the Back Cove and the country - 17-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS beyond. At one spot we turned inward a bit to get a downward glimpse of the little city, so close packed on its small peninsula, yet without any sense of being overcrowded. The view is from another small park, Fort Sumner. Portland loves these green spots as it loves trees. As for water, you never lose sight of it, be it harbour, cove, bay, or river, or the shining little lake in Deer- ing Oaks. Together with a number of gleeful automobiles that struck the excellent roadway with a relief that the country roads of Maine make poignant, we took Washington Avenue back to the region of restaurants, for to speak of your appetite merely as being good in that sea-city is to equal in inor- dinate restraint that lady who, looking upon the Grand Canon, turned away remarking that it was " cute." We came plump on the ancient Eastern Ceme- tery as we struck Congress Street, but the wolfish rage within us swept us on to a place where we had previously seen a sign promising seafood. It must have taken the catch of a large able-bodied man to provide that noonday meal of ours, be- ginning with a wonderful clam chowder whose creamy whiteness proclaimed it far from Man- hattan, continuing blithely with broiled fish that hardly knew death had struck it, so fresh it was, +18"*- OF NEW ENGLAND and rounding off with cold boiled lobster and mayonnaise. " This may mean our mortal end." I put it to Sister. " I think we can handle it," she responded, with a beautiful faith, amply rewarded. A sense of benign well-being followed that luncheon. In the peaceful Afternoon, over which the clouds, drifting more slowly, flung their purple shadows, we returned to the Eastern Cemetery. A kindly spot, of grassy hillocks, old trees, wan- dering paths, and worn stones. Somewhere in it, unmarked, are the graves of the victims of the Indian massacres of 1690. Poor folk, they had been left unburied for two years, and their bones were bleached and bare before Sir William Phips, on his way to build a fort at Pemaquid, stopped and set his men to burying them, man, woman, and child, near the ruined homes where they had lived. Two graves, close together, cover the bodies of two captains, one English, one American, who died in the same fight in 1813. You can read about it in Longfellow's " My Lost Youth " : "I remember the sea-fight far away, Ho>5 . r- A ' OF NEW ENGLAND I added a nickel to the agreed upon price, and the boy walked soberly off to the corner, when I perceived him to spring suddenly upward into the air and make off with astonishing speed, emitting new and shriller whistles as he faded out of sight. The Rockingham is a fatal mistake as far as appearances go, an alien and ugly splotch on the fair beauty of the town, but it is comfortable and well run, with a good table of the typical Ameri- can plan sort. Also, from its upper windows you get a wonderful outlook all over the town, with its pale buff and grey and cream-coloured houses bowered in great trees; you see pretty Langdon Park and the South Mill Pond, in front, with the flashing Piscataqua River, on which the town lies, to the left, and North Mill Pond behind. It is a goodly view, and an inviting. "Let's unpack our demon suitcases, and get out," Sister urged, as we turned away from the window. Upon which I discovered that I had left my key behind in Portland. I could see it plainly, in my mind's eye, where it lay, right on the cor- ner of one of the several bureaus in that enormous room, a tiny thing in the immensity. The suitcase leered at me. " Give me your hair-curler," I said. And when OLD SEAPORT TOWNS it was over, the curler was a hopeless, mangled thing, and the case gaped a bit in the middle, but it was open. I had reached the point where I had to assert myself, and a locksmith would not have satis- fied me. Then, free and happy, we went out into the sunshine and the lilac-scented air of the old town. There is one writer who is especially connected with Portsmouth, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. And, because we had had the good fortune to know him in his charming old age, that was so full of youth, we wanted to see the place where so much of his early life was spent. Aldrich loved Portsmouth, loved the great river on which it lay, and of which he wrote in longing: "But I within a city, I, So full of vague unrest, Would almost give my life to lie An hour upon your breast!" Court Street holds the Aldrich house, which is known as the Bailey House, and if ever a street was fit for a poet's birth it is this curving, wandering street, with a high white wooden fence topped with white railings at one side, and old houses, gardens, greenery, on the other. Its broad stone OF NEW ENGLAND flagging is good to walk upon, and over the high wall bend lilac, apple, and wistaria, purple and pink and mauve and very sweet. The pretty grey house is kept up by the Historical Society, but it was not open to the visitor as yet. However, we did not care. We leaned over the gate, looking into the enchanting garden, and then idled on down the street, as so often the young Thomas must have idled, moving to the wharves he loved so much. Over here is the older part of the old town, the old Strawberry Bank where the first settlers built their homes, and where the wild strawberries made a red and luscious carpet in Junes long gone. Now the silent old streets and empty wharves, with the tumbledown warehouses that speak of a crowded and busy existence in Portsmouth's heyday, back in 1812, when the town beat Boston and New York as a port of entry and departure for West Indian trading, sleep away in the sun, lulled by the laughter of the young- sters who ride their bicycles and play their games where merchant and whaler used to fore- gather. It is hard to get away from the wharves. No such busy life as that of Portland disturbs them. Out at the end of one of them you can look along the whole line, jutting out into the river, which is here so broad and calm that it is more like a -+39*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS lake than a river, and the salt sea seems farther away by many a mile than it is. Each long wharf appeared to be the peculiar property of a single old man, who sat or stood at its extremity, pa- tiently fishing; we saw no sign of a caught fish, but hope and faith were there, with the wonder- ful patience of age and the fishing instinct. It reminded me of rivers in France, lined with the same type of humanity, peaceful souls, intent, un- successful, happy. I remembered one old fellow, who was a sojourner with us in a quaint hostelry at Grez-sur-Loing. Morning after morning he went to his spot on the river bank, evening after evening returned, content and serene, with never a fish to show. One day I was rowing past his stand when he called to me; he seemed disturbed, uneasy. I drew near, and he held up two small and shining victims. " Voyez, Madame!" he cried. And there was trouble in his eyes. I felicitated him, I burst out into terms of admiration at this unlooked for suc- cess. But he shook his head. " Pauvres petits," he murmured. " C'est un peu triste, n'est-ce pas? " So far as we could see, however, no such sad incident marred the fishing from the old wharves at Strawberry Bank. In the slips were several OF NEW ENGLAND of the long, slatted lobster floats that had been so crammed with lively crustaceans in Portland. There were lobsters for the taking, out there in the blue, too, but the town caught only what it needed for home consumption. N'York was not served from here, and no one worked, packing or scooping, for the palaces along Broad- way. Opposite, across the water, the Navy Yard, modern and efficient, and looking at the moment to be thronged with battleships, was accessible by ferry. There was work enough in progress here! One huge man-of-war was being painted from stem to stern, and presented a vermilion glare to the dazzled eyes. We sat at the end of our wharf, beside the particular old man who was fishing there, and looked, but felt no urge to go. Navy yards exist in other places, with their guns and their Jackies and their ships in process of being overhauled. Some other day, we decided, we would take the ferry; but just now to leave Ports- mouth for even so short a trip would be the height of foolishness. And we never did get to the Navy Yard. In fact, we became shameless about it. The peace- ful town had us in its friendly grip ; when we wan- dered, it was along the shores or under the pines that surround it, or across to Kittery Point, a fas- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS cinating walk, and not among cannon and the en- gines of war. The business section of Portsmouth is concen- trated on Market and Congress streets and Mar- ket Square, which used to be known as the Pa- rade. Cobble-paved and with brick sidewalks, these streets are hedged by one old building after another, among them the Atheneum, of red brick with white stone facings, an exquisite fagade of pure Colonial type. Almost opposite is the old North Church, the most beautiful in the town, with its slender white spire, and a sweet-toned bell. Sunday morning is alert with swinging bells in Portsmouth. They come from every side, crossing each other, a tangle of clanging melody, with the deep note of the bell on St. John's upon Church Hill, which was built in 1808, dom- inating the rest. This plain old church, a fine structure, was built on the site of Queen's Chapel, destroyed by fire in 1806, on Christmas Eve, and dating from 1732. The bell is said to be the same that rang from Queen's, and which was saved from destruction. It has the mellowness of time in its old throat. Other relics from the chapel still used in the church are two doors of solid mahogany, given by Queen Caroline, in whose honour the chapel was named, and a font of porphyry, which OF NEW ENGLAND was a gift to the Episcopal Society from Colonel John Tufton Mason, who had captured it from the French in 1758. You cannot walk three paces in Portsmouth without stumbling on a historical fact or seeing an ancient doorway through which have passed great personages of our country's life. Washing- ton of course slept in the town as frequently as elsewhere in New England, where the sea air makes sleeping both a charm and a necessity. It was at what he called " Colonel Brewster's Tav- ern " that .he was entertained in Portsmouth, a house of great memories, but swept away by fire in 1813, like so many wooden buildings of New England. There was one house we wanted to see, both for its romantic associations and because it was situate, to use the old phrase, on Little Harbour, a lovely walk from the heart of town past the South Cemetery and through pine woods. On a golden morning we set out, undisturbed by the agitated hotel clerk, who told us it " was more than two miles walk out there." The Benning-Wentworth House has for its heroine the Martha Hilton of Longfellow's " Tales of a Wayside Inn." Martha was maid at the first of the Earl of Halifax inns, in Queen, now State OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Street, and was chidden by Dame Stavers for the baring of her brown shoulders and the scantiness of her skirts. "I shall ride in my chariot yet," the girl as- serted, laughing and entirely unabashed. And presently she was servant to Governor Wentworth, who lived in ' . . . a Great House, looking out to sea, A goodly place, where it 'was good to be . . ." and there she remained for seven years, until, on his birthday, the Governor took her to wife. So Martha went on living there, a grand lady, and took many a drive past the inn, that Dame Stavers might have the pleasure of looking upon her more fitly clothed than when she roused the disapproba- tion of her former mistress. The sea-wind was making music in the pines as we walked under them, and presently under their glancing sun and shade we saw a charming little chapel, now closed and silent, though it was Sun- day morning. Probably when the summer is in full swing its doors are opened, and people enter, together with the breath of the pines, which grow close to door and windows, and the song of the birds, that were flitting all about. It is of the simplest construction, of stucco and wood, merg- OF NEW ENGLAND ing with the nature about it in the most harmoni- ous manner. Chapel of the New Jerusalem it is called, and a stone bears this inscription: This Chapel is dedicated to the teaching of Christ and to His Universal Church of Faithful Souls Who have chosen the Freedom of His King- dom rather than the bondage of Self and of the World. All are Welcome. It would be difficult to think of a better inscrip- tion for a place of worship in such surroundings. The mere reading of it made a sermon, and we walked on over the brown pine needles that gave so soft a treading with a feeling of peace and well-being. A little while more, and we reached the old house we were looking for, which was completed in 1750. In it Parkman, the historian, often stayed, writing several of his books there. It was indeed a " goodly place to be." The building is the fulfilment of a man's fancy, a quaint structure, oddly shaped, with high gables and unexpected wings and extensions, some of it two stories, the rest but one. It is singularly attractive, and lying H-45+- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS as it does in one of the most bewitching of old- time gardens, it becomes adorable. Never had we seen such lilacs! They must have been as old as the house, so immensely thick were their trunks, so high they grew. They bowered the house, and stretched down to the water in clump after clump of vig- orous growth, a wealth of fragrance and colour. Butterflies floated above them in a dance of drunken joy. Here indeed was a heaven for them. A fence surrounded this garden, whose posts were surmounted by carved frogs, turtles, hares, and doves. Daffodils bloomed thick in the grass, which sloped down to the harbour. We knew that this house had some splendid rooms, for there is a fine description in Thomas Bailey Aldrich's little book, " An Old Town by the Sea." But we did not disturb the dwellers therein, who might or might not have been willing to allow us en- trance. We walked past the lilacs to the shore, where a large boathouse and wharf were built. At one side of the boathouse lay a fine old sloop painted a sea green, and with a stout mast, but no other rigging. The tide was low and rocks showed brown heads, shaggy with seaweed, above the placid water. On one of the largest of these a queer old shack of wood, with a tower, looking like an amateur and ruined lighthouse, but ap- -46*- OF NEW ENGLAND patently still habitable, faced the weather. A man was rowing about idly, under the protection of a huge straw hat. " I'm sure I'd rather be a servant girl here than a leader of society in New York," said Sister, as we sat down on the astoundingly green grass and looked at Little Harbour, and tried to get as much of the mingled smell of sea and pine and lilac into our lungs as they could possibly contain. " Yes, I distinctly envy Martha, either as maid or mis- tress." There is another Wentworth house in Ports- mouth, also the seat of a Governor, for there were three Governors of that name in Portsmouth, each with a fine house, though we saw only two. The third has perhaps vanished, by fire or progress, for occasionally even here a new house takes the place of an old one. The second house is on Pleas- ant Street, where most of the finest of the old houses still stand, shaded by the great horse-chest- nuts and elms that grace so many of the streets. It was built in 1769 and is one of the handsomest in the city, spacious, full of dignity as of years. A walk along this same Pleasant Street will make you to subscribe to its name with the utmost heartiness. Near the Wentworth house is the Gov- ernor Langdon House, of which Washington wrote in his diary: " There are many good houses, OLD SEAPORT TOWNS among which Colonel Langdon's may be esteemed the first" It may still so be esteemed. Standing back from the street in a spacious gar- den, solid, calm, of perfect proportion, and tinted that particular tone of pale yellow that we call Colonial, with its flat-topped roof, decked and railed for a promenade, like so many seacoast houses, there is a sense of the imposing to the house. The pillared entrance, a curved portico, the handsome pilasters at each corner, the tessel- lated marble pavement that leads from the gate to the front steps, all contribute their part. Here Louis Philippe, afterward on the throne of France, came with his two brothers, the Dukes of Montpensier and Beaujolais, and here too the Marquis of Chastellux was entertained. The Mar- quis speaks of his host, Governor Wentworth, as a " handsome man, of noble carriage," and his house as " elegant and well-furnished." Surely it is so still, for it has never been suffered to fall into despair or feel neglect. One might spend days in hunting down the old houses of Portsmouth, and happy days. But I will speak of only three more, each too interest- ing to leave unmentioned. One of these is the old Warner House, the first brick house to be built in the town, dating from 1718. It was built by a Scotch merchant, who was also the projector of OF NEW ENGLAND one of the earliest ironworks to be set up in America. The bricks were imported from Hol- land, the walls being eighteen inches thick. Pale yellow, shaded by fine trees, three stories high, with a gambrel roof and beautiful luthern windows, the house is one of the best extant. It was closed when we saw it, and seemed to be un- lived in, though possibly this is not the case, and later in the season it may open its doors. The house gets its name from the son-in-law of the builder, Jonathan Warner, who was said to be the last wearer of a cocked hat in Portsmouth. There is a most delightful description of this house in Al- drich's book, for he was thoroughly familiar with it. He tells how, thirty or forty years before his writing, a series of long-hidden paintings on the walls of the lower hall were unexpectedly brought to light when it became necessary to remove the papering. " At one place, where two or three coats had peeled off cleanly, a horse's hoof was observed by a little girl of the family. The work- man then began to remove the paper carefully . . . and the astonished paper-hanger presently stood before a life-size representation of Governor Phipps on his charger. . . . The remaining portions of the wall were speedily stripped, laying bare four or five hundred square feet covered with sketches in colour, landscapes, views of unknown -j-49-e- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS cities, Biblical scenes, and modern figure-pieces, among which was a lady at a spinning-wheel . . . clearly, the work of a practised hand." There is another item well worth remarking to this old house. The lightning rod, still in place, was placed there under the personal supervision of Benjamin Franklin, in 1762. Close to the water's edge, on Gardner Street, stands the Wentworth-Gardner House, one of the chain of Colonial houses bought and put into com- plete order, furnishings and all, by Mr. Wallace Nutting. There are four of these houses, each a notable example of its type, one at Lynn, one at Haverhill, and one at Newburyport, besides this at Portsmouth. The work of furnishing and re- storing has been accomplished with the keenest pleasure and no end of trouble, and a visit to any one of these houses is a complete education in Colonial home expression. A huge and beautiful linden tree stands beside the house, said to be the largest in the state. We paid our quarter for the privilege of walking through the fine old rooms. The hall is a thing of pure joy, the stairs wide and with a low tread, the carving of cornices and mantels and panelling throughout the house the work of a master. Why is it that America has lost the art of making these perfect homes? There they stand, throughout Hi>il of '',, . ! iTft **, 'mS "- : ; V- 'T ja?s s^5*h-m;vWf j : n-SS^^as^l-fW y : ^&*T- ^S=p ^ ; ;i 1 .:i;t: i! 8BH^' ivfj i\ ! -gpWlJ'Vj <^ V ' OF NEW ENGLAND New England, the peace of their beautiful pro- portions satisfying the spirit of you, their colour a harmony, every detail an artistic accomplish- ment, simple, adequate. And slowly, one by one, they give way before the commonplace and the crude. Men like Mr. Nutting and others who are at work saving these places will get a vote of thanks from posterity, if nothing more tangible. In the western room of this particular house Sister and I found an artist at work painting the walls with a sea scene. At one side the wharves and piers of old Strawberry Bank, the sunset be- hind them, jutted out into the river, with a forest of slender masts and a sail or two, one of these a splendid red. Further along the Bon Homme Richard, which put out from this port, was sailing the high seas with all sails set. Other famous frig- ates cleft the wave, and the whole was a fas- cinating mingling of blue and green and purple shot with gold. The artist, a small and smiling man, was enjoying himself greatly. " There's something about those frigates," he said. " No other ship ever touched them for beauty. I paint here all day long, and I'll be sorry when it's done." We too were sorry when we had to leave. The little room, with its walls of sea and sky and flying ships and sunset calm, was of a magic quality. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS What a place to tell old sea tales before the flick- ering woodfire of winter nights, and to dream of far adventure! There was one more house we wanted to see, the oldest left in the town, known as the Jackson House, built in 1664. To get to it we walked along picturesque Water Street and Bow and Market, and crossed into Vaughan Street to take a look at the unpretentious little place where Daniel Webster brought his bride. A shop is being con- structed in the lower story of this house, called the Meserve House, and evidently no attempt is being made to keep this interesting relic of past history uninjured. From there we crossed the bridge that leads over the North Mill Pond. It was a singing, shin- ing day, with bobolinks doing the most of the former, and the country road was enticing. Everywhere out of Portsmouth the fields and woods beckon and invite. It takes only a short while to find yourself far from the little town, but it is good to know that it lies there back of you, waiting your return. " It's marvellous to a New Yorker," I told Sis- ter, " this realisation that things aren't going to be different when you get back. Those old streets, those quiet houses, those strong and tall trees, the little shops ... all there! Year in and year + 52-*- OF NEW ENGLAND out. When I get back to my place in New York I shall find a whole row of houses, that were there when I left, gone and where there was nothing but a hole in the ground there will be a great crossing and towering of iron girders . . . r The Jackson house seems to have sunk into the ground with advancing years till at one side, where the road runs, the roof rests right on it. A long slope of silver-grey shingles, this high- peaked roof. There is a lean-to, but even so the house is small, and tucked cornerwise into a pretty garden full of lilacs and chickens. The house it- self is empty, however, the windows broken, and a battered look is coming over it. Some artist ought to come along and rescue it, for its outlook is charming and its possibilities fine. It was one of the many places where we felt that we wanted to stay. The New England sea- coast is dotted with such places. In the Public Library, that occupies an old house with one of the finest doorways I ever saw, on Islington Street, we saw what we found nowhere else : a shelf with the sign over it " Ship's Books." In it were the histories of famous ships, sea stories, technical works, tales of cruises and whaling voyages, well-worn volumes. " I suppose many a seafaring man has turned these pages," Sister remarked. And she declared OLD SEAPORT TOWNS the book she held had a salty fragrance. It was a dissertation on fore and aft rigging, with fascinat- ing diagrams. Kittery Point is almost part of Portsmouth, con- nected to it by a long bridge and a delightful pine- shadowed road. We liked that walk about as much as anything can be liked. Pine and sea smell go well together, and make a wonderful music out of such vagrant air currents as sail past. Out that way, too, is Newcastle, where a white and everlast- ingly large hotel makes a sort of fairy palace ef- fect on what is almost an island. Hither hurry the rich and the idle of summer to spend long days of enchantment. Near here the poet Sted- man used to have his summer home, and Howells too has stayed here. Sarah Orne Jewett's name is linked to Kittery, and often she must have walked those three bridges to old Newcastle town that step from island to island, and have, as Aldrich claimed, the loveliest scenery of New Hampshire on either side. The first American baronet, Sir William Pep- perill, lived at Kittery Point, and now lies buried there. His was known as a " goodly mansion," and can yet be seen, though far smaller and less imposing than once it was, for portions have been pulled down by ensuing generations. The cruel but exquisite Isles of Shoals lie out OF NEW ENGLAND this way, connected to Portsmouth by steamer a nine-mile trip out. What names they have, these isles! Smutty-Nose, Star, White, Appledore are some of them. It was on Appledore that Celia Thaxter had her home, and there is a hotel there too. White has a lighthouse, and Star a pic- turesque and tiny town called Gosport, with a white church and heaven-pointing steeple. Happy isles they seem these summer days, but when the fierce storms sweep from the eastern horizon they snarl and roar like hungry lions and many a brave ship have they ground to pieces. As the time drew on and we realised that if we were to see any more of the seaport towns we must take ourselves and our suitcases away from the red stone comfortableness of the Rockingham, we remembered that we had decided that we should stay in each place that particularly appealed to us " as long as we wanted to." "Idiots! " exclaimed Sister, as we leaned on the bridge rail and looked out at beauty and breathed delight. " One could string summer to summer endlessly here, and still not want to go. Winter too how splendid it must be here in the season of storm, and when the snow buries all those trees in white magic! Let's come back." Did any one ever leave Portsmouth without that determination, I wonder? Newburyport CHAPTER III Newburyport |INCE we had to go, we wanted to draw away gradually, and we knew that the ride to Newburyport by trolley was through charming country and much of it close to the sea. " There will be moments of superhuman strug- gle," I argued, looking at the packed suitcases mine now bulged leeringly where once the lock had held it " but shall we be conquered by these lendings? " "Think of what our ancestors along this very shore surmounted," Sister contributed. " I wish there was a good strong ancestor with us this min- ute," she added, hefting her bag deliberately. " But come on, we'll do it." And we did. Or at least, we might have car- ried those things from one car to another on that trip had it been taken under the guidance of the ordinary car conductor. But it wasn't. Once again the New Englander proved himself gallant as he was strong, and carted our baggage for us + 59-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS wherever a portage occurred all except one, and of that more later. Part of the way the car follows the highroad, at others it goes an independent course straight through the woods or close beside the beaches. And such beaches, so broad and clean and white, with the long white breakers shouting up and sighing back, and the grey fog, for foggy it was, mysteriously moving above the grey waters. "Hark, where Poseidon's White racing horses Trample with tumult The shelving seaboard! Older than Saturn, Older than Rhea, That mournful music, Falling and surging . . . ." Sister's voice murmured the lovely lines, as the trolley, an open car, waited, in its own mysteri- ous way, for something to us unknown. The fog began to roll away, the sea to turn a deep blue, while we waited, glad to be where we were. The car was empty except for two farmers, who sat on the front seat and talked with their heads close together, perhaps of great matters, for they too maintained an effect of mystery. " I often feel immensely sorry for people," Sis- --6o-*- OF NEW ENGLAND ter went on. " Think, for instance, of all the peo- ple who have never sat here and seen that sea and this beach and smelled the mingling of sea and pine, and who have never read Bliss Carman's ' Songs of Sappho,' and who, if they had, would never be able to quote from them so appropri- ately!" " Yet doubtless life seems good even to them," I ventured. " Think," went on Sister, rising to her theme, " think of never having seen those cream-coloured streets of Portsmouth with the lilacs leaning over them; and the old graveyard beside St. John's Church, where so many old Governors sleep under that carpet of dandelions, with that deep- sweet bell ringing its slow notes year after year think of knowing only Broadway, in fact, while all this is and has been going on and on. ... I wonder what the car is waiting for? " Many a fine old house stands between Ports- mouth and Newburyport, surrounded by its meadows and elm trees. The fields are better cared for than those in Maine; tillers of the soil as well as fishers of the sea have found the country good. At one spot, however, near a new house, we saw a big, fat man with a long cigar between his lips standing before a square plot of ground that had been carefully cultivated but was en- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS tirely devoid of the slightest indication of growth of any sort. He stood looking at the bareness with a composed courage, slowly smoking. At last he shook his head, slightly shrugged, and in a huge, proud way turned his back on the offending ex- panse. It was as though he said: "It matters not! Man is stronger than Fate. If anything finally grows there, well. If not, I shall remain what I am, a man." So we left him, between his small empty house and small empty garden. It was when we reached Salisbury, where the beach has sprouted a large number of the wooden hotels and lunch places and flimsy shows and sweatered youths and giggling girls and wet bath- ing suits that a beach accessible to a town is sub- ject to, that we were left to handle our own bag- gage. We had to lug those bags from one car to another, open cars with the highest steps I ever encountered. We tried one or two methods un- successfully, such as stepping up with the burden firmly grasped, or heaving the thing ahead of us. Finally we solved the difficulty by Sister's climb- ing and getting a grip on one of them, while I hoisted from below. First hers and then mine, and as we sank to the seat, a cheer burst from a group of youthful man-and-womanhood that had been looking on. -2-62-*- OF NEW ENGLAND " Flannelled fools and blankety oafs," I mut- tered, exceeding bitter. " We deserved three rousing cheers," Sister as- serted, " so why rage? " " I hate being mistaken for the powerful Ka- trinka," I confessed. " You couldn't be ..." " Car ahead for Newburyport! " cried the conductor. We looked at each other. And then, improb- ably splendid as it seems, we laughed. Later on we discovered that it was a habit in Massachusetts to get you settled in one car, only to watch you change. Especially in the trains; the simple device of hanging a sign on the car tell- ing what station it goes to has never occurred to the Massachusetts mind. And apparently every train bursts apart soon after leaving its starting point, scattering car by car. You ask, in Boston's North Station, for the train to Marblehead. It is pointed out to you, you get in together with an im- mense commuting crowd, find a seat with diffi- culty, place your bags and bundles to the best ad- vantage, the train starts, and presently the brake- man goes shouting through that the car ahead or the car behind or the car in the middle, any but the car you are in, is the sole one that will reach Marblehead. So you struggle and shove your way OLD SEAPORT TOWNS to that particular car, contending against other passengers who are endeavouring to get out of the Marblehead car and find one to Lynn or some other place. One wonders ! Somehow we got those suitcases shifted, and were on our way again. Luckily a flying machine, landing on the beach, had drawn our gallery away, and we performed the operation in comparative seclusion. Any one who stops anywhere but in the Wolfe Tavern at Newburyport is making a vast mistake. Moreover, he or she is probably doing an impos- sible thing, for that delightful and ancient place appears to be the only hostelry in the town. It is amply sufficient. There seems always to have been a Wolfe Tavern at Newburyport, but the first one, opened in 1762 by William Davenport, who had served under Wolfe in the campaign of Quebec, and loved him as a hero, was swept away by fire when a conflagration in 1811 burned up the larger part of the business section of the town. This trial by fire was common to the wooden-built towns of New England, with scarcely any protection worth the name, and many a fine old house and inn and church is lost to us because of it. Salem, only a few years ago, showed what headway flames can OF NEW ENGLAND get even to-day, and back in the early part of the nineteenth century there wasn't much to do but look on, once the flames had started. In the old days Washington and State streets, on the corner of which the present tavern, rebuilt in 1814, stands, were known as Threadneedle and Fish. One can but wish that the patriotism of our forefathers had not so often prompted them to rename their streets and squares; the result be- ing that wherever you go in New England you are apparently always walking on the same street or two, and that you can safely depend on finding yourself lodged on Washington, State, or Congress Street whatever town you stop in. There are no elevators in the Wolfe, and if there were they could hardly be used, for the place is as low and rambling as some old inn in France or England. We walked up a crooked stair that took an unexpected twist and left you in a long, narrow passage. This went on happily, musing to itself and not particularly marking its direc- tion, stumbling up or down a few steps once in awhile, until it ended in two enchanting rooms with a bath between, low-ceilinged, charmingly old-fashioned and cosy, with an outlook on the tree-bordered street and across to the spire of a church, airy, white, lofty, the loveliest wooden spire we had ever seen. We discovered later that -1-65-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS it belonged to the Unitarian Church, and that the entire fagade, with beautiful pilasters and a per- fectly proportioned entrance, was as fine an ex- ample of Colonial church architecture as can be found. Back in 1765 the first Wolfe Tavern was notable for its punches and toddies, as well as for the worthies who drank and paid for them. There is still an old bill in the possession of a lineal descendant of William Davenport in which a notable series of double bowls of punch, of mug flips, of egg punches and what not, ending with a " breakfast of coffee for the Sd Company," total the imposing sum of 59 iys. 3d. But when Sister and I went down to supper there were no taproom boys running back and forth with mugs of ale or bowls of punch, for Newburyport is a local option dry place. We found the supper none the worse for that, getting some excellent steamed clams and a steak that Lord Timothy Dexter himself might have been glad to sit down to, in the days when he was sitting down to meat in the old town. And who is Lord Timothy Dexter? You will see the old gentleman on postcards in the drug stores, and on High Street is his house, though now it is shorn of the amazing row of statues that OF NEW ENGLAND used to mark it. A remarkable old person, of whom more hereafter. There is something especially attractive in mak- ing your first acquaintance with a town after sun- set. The shops look so gay, the passersby have a holiday air, they gather in groups, especially the young men of the place, and laugh and chatter. In the home streets people sit out on their stoops, and the few lights are reflected wonderfully from arched boughs and fluttering leaves, while long dark reaches tempt you with mystery and prom- ise. Girls in white dresses flit by, a mother sings to her baby from an upper chamber, and some- where a bell rings slowly. So we wandered idly in the scented spring dusk. The young people who work in Newburyport's factories are a cheerful type, to judge by those we saw in Market Square and Brown's Square, where huge elms in double rows and a breadth of grass make a parklet on which several of the oldest houses and three or four churches face, lending their dignity to the gracious welcome of the noble trees. Facing on this square we found another hotel, the Brown, looking comfortable and sleepy. We sat down on a bench and watched the chil- dren playing in and out about the statue of William Lloyd Garrison, by D. C. French, an OLD SEAPORT TOWNS uninspired work, but looking its best in the shadow. Garrison was born in this town. By devious ways we sauntered on, taking an up- ward direction, and presently found ourselves on the Mall, with a pond in the centre of a green depression, the most delightful surprise. A ring of fine elms circles this pond, that shone softly in the light of a very few electric lamps, not too close to it. The ring of trees was reflected twig for twig, and stars found a mirror in the unruffled water. On the farther side rises a hill, Old Burial Hill, and along the roadway that edges the slope are strung the courthouse, two schools, and the jail in somewhat singular proximity. The latter looks like a pretty stone bungalow with a high white- washed wall against which the green of tree and grass take added charm. The whole place was of a peacefulness that touched you like a spell. Frogs croaked and in- sects chirped, making a fairy ringing in the air. Couples sauntered slowly by the margin of the water or sat under the trees on the grass. Two youths with a pocket flashlight and butterfly net were hunting moths along the strip of shore, giv- ing little exclamations of triumph and excitement. Newburyport is long and narrow, stretched out on the bank of the Merrimac River, about three miles from where it joins the sea. You can walk OF NEW ENGLAND from Water to High Street in a leisurely fifteen minutes, and between the two lies the town proper. But take it lengthwise and you'll get all the tramping you want. We know because we did it. The river is a fine one, growing swift and strong as it narrows, rushing down from New Hampshire hills, crystal-clear all the way. Like all the old seaport towns, the water edge is the place of its birth, the ground of old activities and vanished wealth, now sleepy, picturesque, and crumbling. Once Newburyport sent out the fastest clipper ships that sailed blue water, and through both our wars with England she did a great work in privateering. She was fiercely, passionately patriotic, and her sons were great sea fighters. Most of these fast ships of hers were built in open yards, as the ruins show to-day. Some of her wharves are busy now, but the ways where once the strong, slender hulls flashed down to the water are choked with seaweed and falling to pieces, and the skeletons of a few ghostly ships that were left to die unfinished shame our present- day neglect. I suppose there is a way to begin at the begin- ning in telling of a town, but I have not been able to find it. I have always dreaded a guide, and Sister swears I would rather walk ten miles in the wrong direction than ask a question. But, OLD SEAPORT TOWNS as I was able to convince her, there is no wrong way in a New England town, and every inch of any ten miles is worth the taking. We had heard of a certain old stone house, called the " Garrison House," and wanted to see it. First we got a map of the town, thinking it might be marked, or the lane that was said to lead to it, but they weren't. Sister began to play a game. It consisted of stopping any likely-looking person we chanced to meet and asking for information, and of going into every druggist or news shop with the same pur- pose. We drew blank after blank all down State Street to fascinating Market Square, where we loved to linger, looking at the old houses which formed its irregular ellipse, the Custom House among them, and feeling ourselves rather in some quaint part of London than at home in New England. At last, in Elbow Lane, we found a grey-haired druggist who " guessed he knew " what we were after. " It used to be called the Spencer-Pierce house, and they say as they stored gunpowder there in the Indian days," he told us. " You can go to it from High Street, but since you are right here the best way is to go along till you get to the Old South Church, follow the car track to the river, \ 4n^^^^^&-C V ^& :..#**, , T^T , 1 ^f^ : -^"' : . : ,' V' ; ^.- ^ ^a '. A' * i * reVi 'i^^V MV .-, :.. : J^.l . /:*... I. . : J,. . .' >t i Co' O':'^. |^^';^WV.f. ,, i\^&i;,::.*?:"* '. '.< &>.'< * i " ^VBS^3*%iW^w J"s Ix'V-v.iL -*f\ ^V^> - ^^^^^^^^^"^^^^f^u?''-^^,. ' '',*V s-v'^ ^^| f f^^^^|^it|sfc feiB&^!fiai%*% ^2SS^K? ^55a^^^S^r*^ OF NEW ENGLAND and down along till you pass the last of the clam shacks. You'll see a path across the fields with a lot of barns showing up, and it's a step beyond them." It sounded fairly plain, and we wanted to see the church too, and knew that Garrison's birth- place was close to it. We were finding everything at once! I felt a great admiration for Sister well- ing in me. The Old South, called nowadays the First Pres- byterian, is a large, rather shabby structure with a good spire rising high and slender. A little crowded graveyard is tucked in close to one side. But it is not here that Whitefield lies. You must enter into the high and bare church, with its fine pulpit, reached by a double flight of curved stairs with mahogany railings, to find his tomb. On this pulpit is the following inscription: Under this Pulpit are Deposited the Remains of the Rev. Geo. White- field and the Rev. Jona- than Parsons. Of all the preachers of his particular day White- field was among the most remarkable. He was a follower of Wesley, of a most burning and tireless eloquence. He preached on an average from forty to fifty hours a week for years on end, and trav- -1-71 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS elled widely, coming to America seven times. Six years before his death, which occurred on Sep- tember 30, 1770, Wesley spoke of him as " an old man, fairly worn out in his Master's service." Yet, when friends begged him to take some slight rest, he replied, " I would rather wear out than rust out." He arrived at Newburyport, tired and ill, but the people thronged the house where he was stop- ping, two doors from the church, and he came out, candle in hand, and talked to them till it had burned down in its socket. He was an old favourite in the town, where he had often preached before. He must have been a thrilling sight, worn and thin, glowing with enthusiasm, the candle flickering in the wind, talking to the silent crowd. It was his last sermon, for he died during the night. Now he shares his tomb with the famous Revo- lutionary preacher to whose fiery words was due the organisation of the first volunteer company of the Continental Army, the young men standing up in their pews and pledging themselves to the work. The Old South has seen great days. Now it is quiet enough there, and the preachers no longer speak, as did Whitefield, of their congregations as "sleeping on the edge of eternity and stepping light-heartedly over the crust of hell." OF NEW ENGLAND Almost adjoining the church is the William Lloyd Garrison house, a plain, small structure with a garden. Here the great Emancipationist was born in 1805 and grew to manhood. He first worked as a typesetter on the " Herald," and then set up his own paper, " The Free Press," with the motto: Our Country, Our Whole Country, Noth- ing but Our Country. Garrison has another claim to remembrance here in his birth-town, for it was he who dis- covered Whittier, living not far away at Haver- hill. The boy was already writing poems, and his sister sent one of these to the " Free Press." It was published, and she sent another. Garrison recog- nised that there was something real here, and went out to find the poet. It happened that Whittier was scrambling under the barn looking for eggs, and he was routed out in a dusty and most excited state to meet the editor. Years afterward, when all the bitterness of war and the days that had preceded war was passed, the town welcomed Lloyd Garrison back with a great celebration in the City Hall, and Whittier wrote for that occasion his " Emancipation Ode." We wandered along, following the car track to the river, up which a wind was brushing, blowing it into dark wavelets. It looked more like a bay -+73*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS than a river, it was so broad here, with the huge mass of Half-Tide Rock lying a thousand feet offshore, and far beyond the edge of Salisbury. This part of town used to be known as Joppa, and here we found the uneven row of funny little grey clam shacks, bent with age and weather, so small that it seemed not more than one old man could possibly find room in any one of them. Yet there were unmistakable children playing about them, pursuing a diligent life in that earnest and mysterious world of childhood which closes for us after the early teens. It was a good place for play. Boats lay cosily at the roadside between the shacks, boats of old, faded greens and blues, stained and patched, and there were lobster pots, cordage, nets, broken baskets, and long-handled instruments fit for vague uses. The water came up to the back doors, and down there in the mud the clams must be waiting. The shacks looked hospitable to small muddy feet, their doors swung open to the littlest hands. Two or three old men, as grey as their homes, pottered about, pipes between their teeth. It was evidently a place given over to the chil- dren at both ends of life, and, shabby as it was, had a delightful air of gaiety and content. We walked on and on, the water on one hand, the broad fields on the other. And the shacks grew ever more intermittent, till they ceased, as OF NEW ENGLAND though too weary to go on further with us. We felt a good deal the same way, and sat down among the dandelions to consider. For there was no sign of a path, however faint, no distant barns, nothing. Three little girls playing near proceeded to con- sider us. "I'm going to ask them," said Sister, and did so. Two of the little things instantly looked aside, feigning as it were that they saw us not. But the oldest spoke up breathlessly: " Yes'm. You keep right on to a big high fence and there's an avenoo acrost the fields and it takes you to the old house." It did. And glad we were to have perse- vered. This old house was built some time during the 1640'$ there are no exact records. It is entirely unlike any other house in New England. Built of granite and brick in the form of a cross, originally a Greek cross, but later the eastern end was lengthened, and now the form is Roman. One arm of the cross makes the exquisite porch with a high narrow niche over the arched door, and arched windows, the bricks of which it is made being bevelled, while the flooring is of square tiles. All these were brought from England. Bowered in mighty elms and hung with vines, OLD SEAPORT TOWNS the house has a most gracious and homelike aspect. Part of it is wooden, the gable and the upper story of the east end, and this more modern por- tion is known to be over a hundred years old. The Dutch door swings in two parts on hinges two feet long and hand-wrought. The walls are from three to four feet thick, and the powder used to be kept under the eaves. Everything is solid, kindly, built to endure. A house to with- stand attack, whether of Indian or time or tempest. A young girl with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, whom we had disturbed lying in a hammock swung between two of the great elms, showed us about, smiling. " It's a consumptives' home, you know," she said, and we saw that she was come to the ancient place to get back her young strength and health. "Isn't it beautiful?" ' It is. And it holds a high peace, there on its rise, overlooking the fair meadows and orchards and the flashing river. Health ought to breathe from that racy air and float in at the big, small- paned windows with the song of the meadow larks and okalees that flute around it. The girl showed us the lane that would take us back to High Street, a charming green way be- tween blossoming apple trees, overarched with -*- 76 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND elms and flowering chestnuts. We reached its end all too soon, and turned back toward the town. High Street extends for some six miles, starting from the town line between Newburyport and old Newbury. Just a little distance from the lane are two other old houses, the Toppan and the Ilsey, splendid examples of the farm type and (dating from 1670. As we went on we came to a boulder commemorating the recruiting of the men for the expedition against the Province of Quebec under Benedict Arnold, and called the Benedict Arnold Stone. Once again we were on the Mall of High Street, with the pond below us, surrounded by its slop- ing green terraces. It is said that all the able- bodied men of the town set out one day and made and sodded this pretty slope. From the Court House we caught a glimpse, down Green Street, of the shining blue water. " These towns simply can't be content unless they have an eye on the water every minute," said Sister. " Churches, graveyards, and the sea, those were the three necessities." There is a fine statue of Washington by J. Q. A. Ward at the head of the Mall. It has both grace and dignity. But we wanted to take a look at the famous house where Dexter lived, and found it, just beyond the viaduct over the railway. A fine OLD SEAPORT TOWNS large house, with a square cupola atop, standing in grounds that are beautifully laid out, well screened from the street with trees and shrubs. There is nothing about it now except its great size and fine proportions to mark it from other ex- cellent examples of its type. But when Lord Timothy owned it the garden was crowded with large statues on poles fifteen feet high, made by a young ship carver, and supposed to represent the great ones of the earth of all times. There were forty or more of these statues, and also a great Roman Arch with representations of Washing- ton, Jefferson, and Adams surmounting it. In 1815, nine years after Dexter's death, these were all, or most of them, blown down in a great Sep- tember gale, and were sold as old junk for a few dollars. He had spent some fifteen thousand in their construction. His own figure was conspicu- ous among them, bearing the legend: " I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest Philosopher of the Known World." This man, born in 1743, who began as a leather dresser in Maiden, led a calm and hard-working life until lucky speculations in securities issued during the Revolution made him suddenly wealthy. After that he appears to have gone par- tially mad. He had two children, a half-imbecile + 78-*- OF NEW ENGLAND son, and a daughter who became a drunkard and finally insane. He himself, tired of forty years of sober industry, took to wild excesses, so that his wife left him, frightened away by his drinking bouts and extravagance, which included firing off an old musket at any one who irritated him. His aim was poor, and no catastrophe resulted. He became best known for his book, " Pickle for the Knowing Ones," a farrago of non- sense, bad spelling, and entire absence of punctua- tion. In a second edition he met criticism on that score by adding a couple of solid pages of punc- tuation marks at the end and inviting his readers to " peper and solt " as they chose. High Street from end to end is remarkable for charm and dignity, even among these old towns so given to fine streets. One splendid house, built by the sturdy sea-captains and traders of New- buryport's heyday, follows another, with old churches dominating them, great trees sheltering them. On the hill to the western end the sentry used to march back and forth of old, keeping watch lest the Indians rush out to attack from the forests beyond. Now you can go on, past Atkin- son Park with its spirited statue of the " Boy of 61 r by Mrs. Kitson, and along the boulevard to the Old Chain Bridge across the Merrimac, a good three-mile walk. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS But we left that for another day, and idled among the ancient stones of the Burying Hill, as it is called. The grass grew tall, with paths tramped haphazard through it, and the trees were thick and old. We found a whole group of French names, from Guadeloupe and San Domingo, dating from 1772. Monsieur this and Monsieur that, names half obliterated. It seemed a sad, neglected cor- ner where these foreigners lay, and we wondered what had brought them there to die so soon, for all those whose dates we could decipher were young. There were many baby graves, most of them with the winged cherub that looks so like a flying skull. It was difficult for a Puritan hand to lend even a cherub joy and beauty. Bells tolled while we were wandering here, and we found that evening was falling softly. We came down the hill toward our tavern, well con- tent with the quiet old city. It held enchantment wherever you turned. To be sure, Newburyport to-day seems to care precious little about its past. Nobody knows any- thing. You ask, and there are no replies. The city is busy in a quiet effective way with its manu- factories, and has no time to waste over what its forebears did. There seems to be no little guide- OF NEW ENGLAND book to tell you anything, the map is of the barest. You run across things unexpectedly. There is one thing you do hear about, it is even marked on the cars. The Old Chain Bridge. But when you get to it, as we did, one lovely morning, it is not old nor chain, it's just a modern bridge, like thousands of bridges all over the country. " I don't believe they know yet that the old chain bridge has vanished," I remarked, as we watched a lady get off the car that had brought us. She had asked the conductor to let her off when she reached the old bridge. " Here you are, lady," he said, and we all got off. The lady looked appraisingly at the steel and concrete structure with entire satisfaction, got into another car which was returning to the city, and disappeared. The bridge is in two sections, separated by Deer Island, on which is Harriet Prescott Spofford's home, hidden from the road by groves of mag- nificent pines. We were bewitched by the rush- ing river, charging past grey rocks and green sedges, with the pines crowding to its very edge and the cliffs hanging over it. The Spofford house is an old one, and when Mr. Spofford bought it he turned it part way round, so that now it faces across the river, overlooking a wide expanse of wood and granite cliff and running water. It is OLD SEAPORT TOWNS bowered deep in green and set solidly down upon its headland: "Set like an eagle's nest Among the island's immemorial pines, Crowning the crag on which the sunset breaks Its last red arrow . . . ." " It looks like the fulfilment of a dream," said Sister, as, standing under the murmuring pines, the soft brown carpet sweet to our feet, we looked upon it. " It is the way you want a house to be, and where it must be. It's one of those houses that makes you feel as if it were the only one on earth." It was a difficult place to get away from. We crossed to the mainland, and clambered up the banks, stopping to paddle a while in the clear water, that came so cold and fresh straight from New Hampshire's hills. We meant to find the cave called the Devil's Den, but failed, and never did see it, nor, so far as we could discover, has' any one living in the town. But it would take months, not days, to exhaust Newburyport, and months we did not have. Going back we stopped to look at the old ship- yards. It was the Embargo Act that ruined New- buryport's shipbuilding, and Madison was a hated name there for years. Close by the Wolfe Tavern is the Public Li- OF NEW ENGLAND brary, once the Tracy House, built in 1771 by Patrick Tracy for his son Nathaniel. Here, in the great wood-panelled rooms, both Washington and Lafayette were entertained. There is an in- teresting Marine Library in the building and much historical material. We managed to get a glimpse into the Unitarian Church, whose spire we admired afresh every time we saw it, pointing up among the trees. Here Thomas Wentworth Higginson preached a short time in 1847, but his ideas were too new and dis- turbing for the respectable folk of the town, and he was asked to leave. The pulpit is reached by a double stairway, and is so high that when the min- ister sat down he disappeared from all but the sight of God. The church was built in 1801, and belongs to the Wren type. The leisurely spirit of the place gets into you, and Sister and I lost whatever of New York hurry had been left in us during the first days of our stay. Suddenly we realised that we must be far- ing on, for other towns were beckoning. " But we've got to go to Old Town first, and see the Settlers' Stone and Parker River Bridge," I announced. " You have a singular passion for rocks," Sis- ter said. " A rock with a tablet or inscription is like a red flag to you." OLD SEAPORT TOWNS We decided to walk it, as it was less than five miles, and by this time we sniffed at such a dis- tance. Much of it was along High Street, always a joy, and then we went on, past orchards and fine farms, with red-cheeked ploughboys, like those you meet in English lanes, whistling over their work. They were young and they were jolly, and we enjoyed stopping and asking them how much farther it was. "Why, it's all along of four miles . . . you ain't a-goin' to walk it? " " When is the car due? " " These cars don't run more'n about twice a day, far's I ever seen. Maybe this is the time, but I couldn't say." " Have you seen the Settlers' Stone? " "What's that?" But we never told. At the crossroads and common of old Newbury there is a shaft with a bronze ship atop, sailing merrily. This shaft is dedicated to the first settlers. Close to it an old house abuts on the road. A sign announces that it was built in 1778, and kept, by Samuel Seddon, to be used for the refresh- ment of man and beast going to Parker River. It was shut now, however, to our regret, for we could have done nicely with some refresh- ment. OF NEW ENGLAND A road to the left brought us somewhat sandily to the Stone we were in seach of. Here it was that the first settlers, a hardy band under the leadership of the Rev. Thomas Parker, from Newbury, Eng- land, landed in 1635. Extremes have met here, for now the place is covered with a mushroom growth of very new and small bungalows, still empty, but destined for sum- mer transients. We returned to the bronze ship and waited be- side it, seated on the soft grass, for the seldom run- ning car. " Perhaps that is a model of the famous Dread- naught," I said. We had found the clipper ship portrayed on a postcard, with the inscription run- ning in this wise: " She scudded in celebrity in 1859 by making three thousand miles from Sandy Hook to Rock Light, Liverpool, in 13 days, 8 hours. Made a voyage never equalled in swiftness to Eng- land." The ship was indeed famous on all the seas, wherever a sailor met a mate, or an anchor was dropped or weighed to the sound of a seaman's chantey. They had nicknames for her, such as "The Flying Dutchman" and "The Wild Boat of the Atlantic." Wherever she went she could be instantly identified by the large red cross OLD SEAPORT TOWNS painted on her foretopsail. She had been bought in New York for the Liverpool trade: " A saucy, wild packet, a packet of fame, She belongs to New York, and the Dread- naught's her name. ..." So they sang of her. " I think it's just as well we leave to-morrow morning," declared Sister, " for I'm getting so at- tached to this place that if I stayed on much longer I wouldn't know how to get away. Just think of no more dreamy evenings up on the Mall, or lingering round Market Square with those parti- coloured old buildings staring comfortably at us. Think of not being able to see the spire among the trees, of not getting lost in the intricate ways of the Wolfe Tavern. Think of the clam shacks and the river knowing us no more. . . . ' " Stop it, or I'll be weeping aloud," I inter- rupted. " I remember that Oliver Wendell Holmes, in ' Elsie Venner,' speaks of Portland, Portsmouth, and Newburyport as ' incomparably the most interesting places of their size in any of the three northernmost New England States.' It's a calm, unemotional statement, and doesn't sat- isfy me." :< Wait till you see the rest," Sister optimistically announced. " Where do we go next? " OF NEW ENGLAND " Salem. But we ought to have second-sight really to see Salem." As we rode back in the car, with the city show- ing between its trees, Sister told me I ought to hunt out something Whittier had written about Newburyport. We got him in the library, and here are the stanzas: " Its windows flashing to the sky, Beneath a thousand roofs of brown, Far down the vale, my friend and I Beheld the old and quiet town; The ghostly sails that out at sea Flapped their white wings of mystery; The beaches glimmering in the sun, And the low wooded capes that run Into the sea-mist north and south; The sand-bluffs at the river's mouth; The swinging chain-bridge, and, afar, The foam-line on the harbour-bar." Salem CHAPTER IV Salem N spite of all the hustle and noise that greet you as you get out at the stone station, open at both ends, through which all trains to and from Salem run, and make your way to the square where Essex and Washington streets cross, arriving at Salem is al- ways to me like moving into a dream. In spite of its insistent present there is so much of the past remaining. Here it is an old house full of memories, there a sudden glimpse of bygone fashions and personalities still real and vital. For instance, as Sister and I strolled down some little side street, where the houses must have stood these hundred years, we saw a little old lady, with a Paisley shawl over her shoulders and a bonnet on her head, unlatch a gate that opened on a tessellated brick walk, and go trotting up to the pilastered front door. She pulled the bell, and another old lady, who could be seen sewing in the front room close to the window, dropped her work, perked her head, on which was a cap, nodded at her caller, and got to her feet to admit her. -+91 -*-. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS It was the merest trifle, yet it was eloquent of other days, and put you in the mood of another century, which is what Salem always does, for me at least. Salem was not new to either of us, but it was the first time we had ever come there with the avowed purpose of sightseeing. We were not alone. In the other towns where we had been there had been no sign of any other spectators. The people were all going about their daily affairs amid surround- ings perfectly familiar to them. But here not only was the tourist observable, but also the native with his eye out for him. Several breathless small boys, seeing that we were bent on landmarks, rushed up, pattering words hastily: " Show you Hawthorne's birthplace and House- of-Seven-Gables?" We discouraged them, and they drew away smil- ing at each other as much as to say, " The joke hasn't come off this time." But they or others hung about in the offing, occasionally shooting out a sputter of would-be information. We walked down Union Street to number 27, the house where Hawthorne was born, though there is no mark or tablet upon it to show the vis- itor that this is the place. We saw an elderly man sternly regarding another house, in fact, with that OF NEW ENGLAND look of having run his prey to earth which so often marks the face of the sightseer, busy checking off his sights. The northwest chamber on the second story in this shabby, hip-roofed house is the one where the event occurred that made the house famous. We made no attempt to enter, though we had been told that the owner, " seeing who we were," would probably permit us to do so. Hawthorne lived in this house until he was four, when the family moved to the house on Herbert Street, whose rear joins the birthplace. It is that house which is really connected with the author's youthful dreams and plans. The room in the southwest corner from which there is an outlook over the birth house was Hawthorne's, and it is here that he speaks of having wasted so many hours of his lonely youth. It was here that he began writing here, he tells us, that FAME was won. So there we stood, looking at the two old houses, now little more than tenements and 'never fairy palaces. The old lady in the Paisley shawl had brought Hawthorne far closer to us than did these houses where he had lived. Such are the vagaries of the human temperament! The house at the foot of Turner Street, called the House of the Seven Gables, probably because it seems just as well to have a house of that name OLD SEAPORT TOWNS in Salem, for the house of the romance is an inven- tion of the author, this house, more living and close to the water as it is, has not shouldered Haw- thorne's memory away as have the neglected and decaying places that really were home to him. The place, in Hawthorne's day, belonged ;to relatives of ours, the Ingersolls, and he spent many hours here. The quaint, six-gabled structure is de- lightfully situated. The green garden, full of shade from the big trees, runs down to the tide, and the sea fragrance breathes over it. White cur- tains float at the windows, and time halts here pleasantly, finding things pretty much as they were almost a hundred years ago. The house abuts side- ways on the street, where the door now leads into a little tea and curio shop, called Hepzibah's Shop. Once again we did not enter. If you crowd memo- ries and impressions too closely they are apt to flee you forever. We thought it as well to go from this house to the one where Hawthorne lived during his work at the Custom House, and where he wrote " The Scarlet Letter." The big three-story building with the trees before it also stands end-on to the street, Mall Street, and is said to be practically as it was when the Hawthornes left it in 1850 to go to Lenox. The street is a pleasant one, old and quiet, OF NEW ENGLAND and the upstair study where the book was written had a gentle and attractive outlook. Another house with which the name is identified is the one on Charter Street adjoining Burying Point, the oldest graveyard in Salem, where the Peabodys lived. Here Hawthorne met and loved his future wife. Square, three-storied, built of wood, with a small enclosed porch, the place is un- changed to this day. It has a look of mystery and withdrawal, its long association with the neigh- bouring graves having, possibly, given it a cer- tain contempt for life. We wandered long in the green old burying- ground, shaded by fine trees, studying the head- stones. The oldest are nearest the Peabody house, and here I found the one so curiously inscribed: Mr. Nathanael Mather Deed. October Ye 17 1688 An Aged Person that Had been but Nineteen Winters in this World. At the top was a carving that looked far more like a flying skull than a winged cherub. There are very old stones in this ancient spot, the oldest being that over whatever may be left of one Doraty, wife to Philip Cromwell, dating OLD SEAPORT TOWNS from 1673. Here an ancestor of ours, the famous or infamous " Witch Judge," Col. John Haw- thorne, left what was earthly of him. Governor Bradstreet's tomb is here, on the higher ground, but not a letter of the inscription remains. The place is, indeed, crowded with names that have meant much in the history of Massachusetts, and here is the solitary gravestone witnessing to the last sleep of a passenger in the Mayflower that time has spared. The name of this isolated being is Captain Richard Moore, but we sought the stone in vain. A bronze tablet has been placed by the city on the iron fence, with a satisfactory inscription. It is one of the few places in Salem where a tablet has been put on something remaining. Mostly they are mere indications of what has been. This we found particularly so in Town House Square, the heart of Salem's business life, where once the Town Pump stood. Up to now we had always passed through the Square intent on getting somewhere else, but now we paused to look up whatever was worthy of the effort. The printed guide told us that on the church at one corner of the Square was a tablet telling a lot of history, and we proposed to study it. The trouble however was that, so far as we could see, there was no church anywhere on the Square. OF NEW ENGLAND " Come now," said Sister, " we ought to be able to recognize a church, even if it hasn't got a Wren spire. Let nothing escape you on this side, and I'll study the opposite one." No use. We could not see that church. The Square is a small affair, nothing more than the intersection of two streets. It seemed impossible that a church could play hide and seek in so cir- cumscribed a spot. Yet, since the guide said there was a church, we rather hated to go up to any one of the busy passers and ask to have him point it out to us. Somehow you feel as though there were something to be ashamed of in not knowing a church when you see it. Finally we gave up, and Sister went into the drug store that occupied one corner to get the proper information. " Ask if it's the church," I begged. It wasn't, but it might just as well have been, for the so-called church proved to be nothing more than a red brick and very ugly business building with shops and offices. On it we found the bronze tablets promised. Perhaps somewhere in that commercial structure there is a church, but it gives at least no outward sign of the fact. The Square is entirely commonplace and unin- teresting now, nothing of its old grandeur or +97" 1 - OLD SEAPORT TOWNS beauty remaining. The famous Town Hall, where so much history was written by the acts of men, has vanished, followed, or perhaps preceded, by the fine old houses once built by planter and mer- chant and preacher. Roger Williams had lived in one of these long-gone houses, as had the Rev. Francis Higginson, ancestor to the famous family. But looking at bronze tablets that say that at such and such a date something that isn't here now once was here is an occupation that speedily and decidedly palls. After making out the circular stone with an H in the centre that marks the site of the old pump, we left the Square to its modern ugliness, and walked away to the real centre of old Salem, so far as present appearances go, the streets leading into the Common, or Washington Square, where one fine old house after another dominates its pretty garden, and shows the world an exquisite doorway or pillared porch, a stately fagade and serene proportions. This Square used to be a mixture of marsh and hill, and has always been common property. In old days the cows belonging to the various mem- bers of the community who kept cows used to be driven here nightly from their pasturage on the Neck, to be each one claimed and led away to the milking. In the mornings the owners brought . rM^^-.v^lF^ /F^P ^?js&$$.&i!5Li; H -my/M^ ^^> A ' - ; ;^S: II ! OF NEW ENGLAND them back and the cowherds led them out again to their rocky fields. Now it is a broad, grassy plain, surrounded by hundred-year-old elms. On the north side of the Square at the point where Winter Street touches it is a huge granite boulder, brought from the Neck to commemorate the heroism of the 23d Regiment of Volunteers in the Civil War. It is an impressive and handsome rock, appropriately inscribed, and a vast advance over the usual badly carved figure of a galvanised-looking young man holding a rifle. A few doors back on Winter, W. W. Story was born, in the house built by his father, Judge Joseph Story. It is a charming house, fit place for an artist to begin his work of observing beauty. La- fayette, who seems to have had a very social time of it in New England, was entertained here by the Judge. You can easily spend a couple of days looking up the houses where famous men were born in this solid old city. They seem to have had an extraor- dinary hankering for the place. Not but what Salem must have been a particularly beautiful town in the days when these notable births were most common. It is now, in many spots, though it has lost much of its looks with advancing age. -i- 99-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS For, oddly enough, as it gets older it becomes younger, and the youth is not an improvement. Salem, more perhaps than any other New Eng- land town, is a series of pasts. She was settled only a few years after Plymouth, beginning as Naumkeag, a farm settlement. Before long she developed into the grimmest of Puritan strong- holds, overlooking no excess of zeal in the matter of making life miserable on this earth, at any rate, whatever it might be in the next. Then came her witch era, and though she has been maligned in the accusation that she burned anybody, she managed to hang nineteen poor souls whose chief fault appears to have been a lack of geniality and personal charm. At the last of the executions, when a group of eight were hanged, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes, a Salem preacher, looking with sorrow upon the swinging bodies, remarked : " What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of Hell hanging there." Perhaps. It was even sadder to be hanging there. It was after the Revolution that Salem began her next past, the great period of her far-flung trading line, when her ships found ports known to no other vessels from America, and when, in crowded Eastern harbours, where the temple bells -*- ioo-*- OF NEW ENGLAND of anything but a Puritan faith chimed across the waters, it was Salem, not New York, nor Boston, nor Philadelphia, that was supposed to be the great city of the West. Down along Derby Street, and the short streets that reach from it to the water, where the old docks are still to be found, and the wooden buildings of seafaring men still stand, you get a faint echo of this past, but it is very faint. All the spicy wealth of the East, rich cargoes. . . . " Do you remember," I asked Sister, " that Car- goes thing of John Masefield? It must have fitted here once." " Bits of it. Those lines that tell about sandal- wood, cedar wood, and sweet white wine no, this is the stanza: " Wit h a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts. Topazes and cinnamon and gold moidores . . ." or maybe this : "Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, With a cargo of Tyne coal, Road-rails, pig lead, Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays/' " Sort of an epitome of yesterday and to-day, isn't it? " was my contribution, as we watched some -- 101 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS flatboats from Boston, perhaps, unloading some- thing dingy on the half-deserted dock. One day the ship America, homing from Ben- gal, brought a strange and monstrous beast into Salem town. Since the ice buried the mastodon on this continent, its like had never been seen on American shores. It was an elephant. It must have created a sensation even bigger than itself as it strolled up Derby Street, the Derby Street of 1796, crowded with carts and carriages, with rich merchants in fine coats and swarthy sailors with- out so much as a shirt. Probably Derby Street looked a good deal like home to the Oriental beast, for in the taverns and on the pavement were men to whom the East was as familiar as the West, while the goods that were piled high in warehouse and on the labouring drays were such as elephants of an urban sort had grown up beside. The same year in which the elephant came an- other Salem skipper brought the first cargo of pepper that had ever come here to America. A shrewd man, this Skipper Carnes. Sailing along the shores of Sumatra, stopping for supplies, he had discovered that pepper grew wild there, and returned to trade brandy, gin, and tobacco for as much as his ship could hold. The cargo roused much interest, not entirely of a disinterested kind, H- 102 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND but several years passed before the secret source was discovered. It was difficult to see, behind the dingy old street we were traversing, where the coal-dust from the wharves stirred in the wind, the splendid pageant of energy and adventure that had once made it known the round world over. Once again we looked at the ruin induced by the Embargo Act, and here, since none of the charmed beauty of Portsmouth or Newburyport remained, it assumed the aspect of a wanton murder. Its result had been as final and as fatal. We left Derby Street by way of old Front Street, passed the market, and so through Norman into Chestnut, where there are many of the finest old houses in the city, and a double row of magnificent elms and chestnuts. Here the beautiful brick houses with their exquisite doorways fulfil every requirement of dignity and beauty as applied to home architecture. Salem is remarkably rich in these three-story, square or oblong examples of Colonial building, with gambrel roofs more fre- quently than not, crowned with the " deck " and railing so pleasant to a seafaring man, and so use- ful as a lookout point from which to spy the in- coming ships as they took the harbour water. It is rarely fortunate that the fire of 1913 was checked -1-103-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS before this noble portion of the city was touched by the flames. We made little attempt to see the many among these Colonial houses that were noted for past resi- dence of Judge or Governor or visiting celebrity. It is easy to overdo that sort of thing, particularly in a city as large and loaded with historic happen- ings as Salem. But we walked out to North Bridge, where, in the Revolution, the first armed re- sistance was offered the British, under Leslie. The Englishman saw the point, and returned to Marble- head, from whence he had come to get hold of some cannon rumoured to be hidden near North Street. Instead of the cannon he found the bridge draw up and a body of determined men on the further side, as well as a clergyman, Thomas Barnard, who had adjourned his congregation and hastened to the bridge to see what words might do in averting bloodshed. A parley ensued which lasted several hours, dur- ing which careful men removed the guns to a se- cure hiding place. At last the British commander offered to withdraw, if, to save his face, the draw were lowered and he and his men permitted to march part way across. This was done and the in- cident closed. A tablet on one of the granite up- rights of the bridge summarises the story. But it is Beverly Bridge that is worth seeing -*- 104 '+- for its own lovely sake, and the walk along Bridge Street with the sweet sea-wind blowing down it is delightful. Many an old house, not so rich as those on Chestnut Street and Washing- ton Square, holds its ancient timbers serene against the passage of time, and a dive down any one of the streets that lead away from the water reveals more of them. On St. Peter's Street there is a very old house, with the overhanging second story that used to be common in Salem, but is now rare, thanks to modern progress, which has razed most of the homes so built. Hawthorne wrote of Beverly Bridge when he described the Toll Gatherer and his seat beside the draw, and loved to come here to chat with the sailorfolk who congregated at the salty place, where the tides sucked in and out. The old seat has disappeared with the toll-gatherer. But be- low in the clear water you can still at low tide find all sorts and varieties of little sea creatures, left in holes of the rock while the busy sea goes about its great business. The houses snuggle down close on the bank, with trees and bushes and grass, picturesquely weather-beaten. It is the kind of bridge about and on which any normal human being will love to linger, fishing or just plain idling, while the clouds sail by overhead and the water whispers and moves below. -*- 105 -*-. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS A different spot this from the barren rock called Gallows Hill, where the irons that supported the gibbet during the murders of the witch madness still rust. It takes both to make Salem. The hill- top is left in its isolation, though a few houses climb the slope. From this grim old hill you can look back over the town, largely lost in the green- ery of its tall elms, and also out across the flowery country, to where a pond lies shining. Sister and I spent a morning in the Essex Insti- tute and Peabody Museum, the Custom House and the Public Library. The Museum is full of things brought home from every part of the world. Whenever a sailor saw something particularly strange and outlandish, he got it and brought it to show the folks at home. Eventually these found their way into the museum, together with models of the ships that carried them, or portraits of these ships, sailing along on mounting seas with white sails drawing and a bone in their teeth. These portraits are fascinating, a labour of love, reminding you, in the meticulous care with which each detail is completed, of those prints of racing horses hanging in old English inns, clearly the work of hands that would have scorned any other type of art. The whaling exhibit is amazingly perfect, all here but the live whale and the whaler, and a - 106 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND trifle of imagination ought to conjure the latter up, to snatch again the tools he used so well, the slender harpoon with which he so composedly set out to conquer leviathan. Beside the weapon the bones of the victim display their impotent huge- ness. The museum is beautifully arranged; a vast amount of intelligence and carefulness have gone to the work. Take it for all, it epitomises the life of a ship with all her activities, the perils she meets, the cargoes she carries, the prey she hunts, the strange things she sees. There are other things here too, collections of all sorts, but the peculiar quality that makes Peabody different from other museums is the ship quality. The Essex Institute is devoted more closely to Salem itself, and to that period of our history of which old Salem was so thoroughgoing a product. We wandered about as we chose, no one else hav- ing penetrated the building on that morning, which looked determined to rain, and yet didn't. Here we found the cradle that rocked the infant Story, and an old shirt of Napoleon. Here was Governor Endecott's sundial, and sampler fash- ioned by his wife. Here was the desk from the Custom House on which Hawthorne did his work, and a handful of tea saved from the Boston Tea Party. A place of shreds and patches iridescent + 107-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS with romance or eloquent of history, human odds and ends that touch you strongly. Hours slip along as you lean over the cases, feeling the dim pres- ences to which these lendings once belonged. The Custom House is not, or was not when we ventured in, a busy place. It has its tasks, but they are rather those of a placid old gentleman than of a brawny and alert man, such as Salem's heyday must have commanded. The building stands at the head of Derby Wharf, the biggest and once the busiest in the town. A quiet and pleasant place, it appears to be waiting for a new era of ships and trading, if not of adventure. Back on Essex Street, we stopped in at the drug store that violates the ancient perfection of what is known as the Old Witch House, for the purpose of buying postcards. It was the druggist, or an assistant of his, that told us how Salem had yet another past, since the fire. "We were a great manufacturing place before that, but the factories were all burned down, and they've gone now, and won't come back," he said. " It's been a bad thing for Salem." Salem is too strong, and has weathered too many storms and disappointments, to be really in peril because of a disastrous fire. How disastrous a glance over the burned area is enough to show; H- 108-*- OF NEW ENGLAND it looks like San Francisco a year after her fire on a small scale, a desolate stretch of many, many blocks with a few chimneys sticking up, dead trees still standing, heaps of stone and brick, and here and again a new building in process of construc- tion. Somewhere in this part of town, the recon- struction plans include a park or place, to be named after Hawthorne. In this square there is to be a statue of more than life size, by Belah Pratt, showing the novelist in a seated attitude full of alert spirit, yet with a fine effect of meditative calm, a beautiful and inspired work. We left Salem at sunset, over the Beverly Bridge, vaguely disturbed by the conflicting im- pressions of her noisy, commercial present, that will not let you be, and by the obstinate power of her past, equally insistent. 109 Beverly and the Rocky Coast *~ ** 5*3r *" CHAPTER V Beverly and the Rocky Coast HAD always known of Beverly as the home of Lucy Larcom, whose delightful book, " A New England Girlhood," was one of the joys of my youthful days of leisure. Many a happy hour I had spent poring over its pages, so simple and so telling, with their clear and tenderly remembered pictures of a life whose type has now passed out of our experience. Only then I did not realise that it was passed away, and expected some time to see the old town, with its crooked, wandering Main Street, said to have been laid out by the wandering cows as the first settlers drove them to pasture at Wenham. To walk in its narrow lanes, real lanes, too narrow for a wagon, green with grass and bowered with trees, and only occasionally encumbered by a house. The Old South should ring its chimes, and the town clock mark the hours for me, as they had for my heroine, and I too would pick out names on the mossy slate headstones on Burial Ground. Well, Burial Ground and the Old South and The Misery Islands out in the Bay remain, but -+ 113-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS precious little besides of the Beverly, or the Farms, that Lucy used to know and love. It is a place of summer homes now, with beautiful wide streets where motors hasten smoothly, the beginning of that string of fashion and of wealth that stretches magnificently along the rocky coast clear up to Rockport. And by the way, any one who has owned a car, and who has not taken that wonderful run along what used to be called Cape Ann Side, or that other, very different but equally beautiful, El Camino Real of California, has missed the two immense reasons for owning an automo- bile in America, and something should be done about it. It was as far back as 1668 that Beverly, which had been part of Salem, was made a separate town. Across the pretty Danvers River it lay, a mere hamlet, and every man in it was a sailor. There was no worse insult in the experience of a Beverly male than to be called a landlubber. And it was hard to keep the boys in school, they had such a habit of slipping aboard some likely vessel bound for Madagascar or Calcutta or Hongkong or the Mediterranean, all of which supposedly distant spots seemed far closer and more familiar to Bev- erly than any hill town back inland. A town closely wedded to the sea, knowing all the joy and -*- 114-*- OF NEW ENGLAND adventure, all the pathos and tragedy, of that marriage. The further our pilgrimage extended, the more Sister and I marvelled at the individuality of the old towns we came to see. They were all born at approximately the same time; not so many years lay between the eldest and the youngest of the group. They were settled by much the same type of men and women, pioneer and pilgrim. Each was devoted to seafaring, yet each was strongly itself, as full of its own peculiar character as any one of the old sea captains who built its first houses and sailed its first ships. Beverly is mostly young nowadays, for when it was old it was very small, and that little has left slight traces. There is the fine old Colonial man- sion where the Historic Society is housed, to be sure, and several churches built when New Eng- land could build churches. The First Parish, Uni- tarian, is particularly attractive, with good col- umns and a low but graceful spire. Sister and I walked first to Independence Park, which used, before the city bought it for its pres- ent purpose, to be known as the Queen's Hotel Lot. Here, in Revolutionary days, was the Army Post, the only one established by General Washington in the Province of Massachusetts outside the envi- rons of Boston. The regiment was the i4th of the .-* 115-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Continental Army, commanded by Colonel John Glover of Marblehead, who had moved to Beverly with his fish business some time earlier. He was a patriotic gentleman, immediately offering his ships to the work of helping where and how they could. Others were not so prompt. The old parade ground faced the sea, and be- hind were the barracks. Here, on July 17, 1776, the Declaration was read. Many a rich prize had been brought into the harbour before then, and lay along the piers, unloaded of its valuable cargo. Now you see more pleasure boats than any other craft, white winged, white hulled, showing a line of green as they keel to the breeze. And not only sails, but many a power boat which would have looked like plain witchcraft to the sturdy men of the deepsea days. Lying under trees and looking at the sea is about as delightful a way to spend a morning as man, for all his cunning, has discovered. We thought so, at least. All Beverly's streets seem, finally, to lead you to water. Now the quiet reaches of the Danvers River, with Salem beyond, somewhat smoky and sending up many a tower and spire to break the skyline above its rounded trees; again to the Bay, with the islands, Greater and Lesser Misery as some call them, or Great and Little Misery, according to others. The Misery remains, p^Jf^S^t. '^fe^v^V"^^ 5*oi*^ jf*&*ZZjL* ' - : i r -- i-i^C^^ 5 ^ 1 ^ OF NEW ENGLAND in any case, and why it is difficult to guess, for they look inviting in the new summer, and are no rockier than the rest of this stern coast. We heard faint hints of shipwrecks long ago, but there seems to be no sharp and poignant tale to tell of them. An idle author might do worse than think up a story to fit the name. If the story be good enough it is certain, in a century or more, to be mistaken for the truth, and all will be well. There are plenty of trees in Beverly, even in the very modern business blocks and those streets edged with the regulation suburban house that has been wished on so much of America. But one street, Hale, was particularly leafy. In places the trees fairly arched over it, making a green tunnel delectable to tread under. In other places along this street the rocky ledges clamber straight up, with fascinating summer cottages peering above them, through a perfect veil of tree-boughs and vines. Hunger assailed us as we wandered back into the town centre, and we found a place that adver- tised seafood and there lunched on a magnificent tureenful of steamed clams. " There are places in this world where you can not get steamed clams," I told Sister, " and yet peo- ple live in them." "Exist!" '- 117-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS We finished our clams in happy silence, and then, following directions, walked to West Beach. Black Ledge, on this beach, is as rugged a cape- let as you can find, jutting out into the sea in broken masses of sharp rock, dark as the dark pines upon it that crowd as close to the water as they dare. In the tropics I have seen the cocoa palms stepping right down into the breakers, bending gracefully over, like slender maidens, to look at themselves in the shining wave. Here the gnarled pines get almost as near, but they march with back-flung heads and in close array, like soldiers on a forlorn hope. Whenever there was a house there were lilacs and tulips. Beverly is devoted to the joyous flare of red and yellow tulips; as for the lilacs, New England plants them on hill slope or along shady lanes, in back gardens, by white fences, in clumps and hedges. Chicago has probably more lilacs than any other city in the world, miles of them along to the Lake Shore, but the whole of New England is sweet with them in late May and early June. And how well the somewhat sad harmony of mauve and green suits the rocky land, with its grey sea beating on those glacial ledges, filling the land with the murmur of eternity. The fog came stealing in as we climbed the rocks and sauntered on the wide stretches of West Beach. OF NEW ENGLAND First far away on the horizon, a brownish streak, then nearer over the blue water, robbing it of colour, stepping closer, finally wrapping itself about us, bringing with it a saltier smell. The pines caught it in their branches and clung to it, the rocks grew slipperier with it. The little steamers that ply about in the Bay gave out harsh cries and hoots, but everything else grew silent, even the birds. We walked back thrill- ing to that sense of mystery which fog evokes. It al- ways seems to me something strangely prehistoric, associated with the beginning of things. Beverly is now chiefly occupied, aside from its summer population, much of which is at the Farms and Prides Crossing, parts of the city nearer the sea, in making shoes, and the machinery for mak- ing shoes. But here, back in 1788, the first cotton mill ever successfully operated in the country was set up. And even to-day its shipping is not entirely neglected. There is a line that runs all the way to Texas, after oil. A busy, thriving city where the landlubber has come to his own. We sought for Lucy Larcom's birthplace in vain. It has probably been swept away in the ad- vance of business, for she says that it was right in the centre of Beverly. The old homestead was at the Farms with its outlook on the sea, and has also gone. Wilson Flagg was born in this town, a -*- 119-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS writer of gentle charm who never tired of describ- ing the fields and woods and birds and seasons of his home land, nor ever tired any one fortunate enough to read his pages. This was the country of the Puritans, as Cape Cod is of the Pilgrims, and certainly in many ways the Puritans had the best of it. The islands that lie out beyond Beverly, the Miseries being accom- panied by House, Rams, and Chubb, break the rough vigour of the Atlantic, and the land here is more fruitful and smiling. Doubtless the Puri- tans were not consciously guilty of choosing an easier job than their forerunners, and probably they made up for it in other ways. But a good land it is, and Beverly now grows most of the vege- tables for Boston's splendid markets, sheltering them under acres of glass from the uncertain spring. Now, with summer on the edge of entry, these glass protections were shoved aside, and the vivid green of young growth lay spread to the sun. Men in blue overalls moved about among them, lifting off the frames, thinning out or transplanting the plants, shading here, watering there. We had accepted the kindly automobile owned by a friend, for there was no use walking the smooth drives that rolled their well-kept miles through Montserrat, the Manchesters, and Mag- nolia. Through the woods or by the shore the OF NEW ENGLAND roads are wonderful. We sat back as the great machine ambled along, well within speed limit. Rules are strictly enforced here, as an alert figure on a motor cycle lurking behind a bend in the road or hidden near a hedge gave witness. " They'll get you in a minute," confessed our host. " I've tried it once or twice, but not again." You see few houses along the way, because the grounds are flung so magnificently about them that they fairly disappear in acres of land- scape gardening. Beautiful lawns, wild gardens, rock gardens, lakes and streams and splendid trees, and the dark grey road winding before you, mile on mile. We decided that President Taft had done as well as could be expected when he chose Mont- serrat for his summer home. There is a pomp to these beautiful places of course; you can not spend huge sums of money in building a cottage and laying out the grounds around it without bor- rowing a touch of the palace. But it is a pleasant pomp, concealing itself very successfully in Co- lonial architecture, in white walls and green shut- ters, in broad verandas hung with blooming creepers, that appear more the work of nature than of man. " Pride's and Beverly Farms and the Man- chesters are millionaires' row," said our host, " and :-- 121 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS we are getting more of them every year. If you have a little cottage here that you don't care to occupy through July and August some frantic searcher for a home will willingly pay you ten thousand dollars for the privilege of doing so." We stopped on Manchester's Singing Beach, where the sand makes music if crushed by a wheel, and sped onward to Magnolia. There is a charm- ing colonnade of shops in the village, with signs showing that summer was stirring in their show- windows. Tucked in unexpected places you came across a notice that there was a studio to let. The artists were beginning to mingle with the mil- lionaires. This whole North Shore is the epitome of vaca- tion, and as Sister and I sat in the car we watched it unroll its myriad fascinations. Now we slipped under the arching green of great trees, or beside silver willows. Suddenly we were running close to the racing sea, that tossed white arms above the tawny rock ledges, or fell and sank on a sandy beach. Then the road curved into a stretch of wild, sweet-smelling woodland, and next we caught a glimpse of a white-walled, red-tiled villa in the midst of stately gardens, that might have been brought by the genie of Aladdin's lamp straight from the Mediterranean. Presently we skirted a charming stretch where golfers struggled -*- 122 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND or triumphed, and left that behind to come out on the edge of a lovely cove where yachts bobbed at anchor and grey cottages watched them from the shore. "The ultimate of Puritanism," murmured Sis- ter. " Time must have a sense of humour." We bade goodbye to the motor car at Magnolia, after one of those luncheons served on the Ameri- can plan by a hotel that had evidently determined to beat every other of the species in variety and number of choices. Gargantua might have eaten straight down the list in his lusty youth, but he would have died of the feat. We all had those fine appetites one picks up so easily and frequently on the New England coast, but couldn't make more than a mere dent in the menu. Magnolia is called what it is because of a swamp near the station where the Magnolia Glaucus is found in considerable quantities, this being its most northern point. A lovely evergreen shrub that grows twice as high as your head, with thick leaves that have a bluish tinge on top, and are silvery below. We hunted in vain for one of the globu- lar, creamy, fragrant flowers that are so thick in July; there were not even any buds, so far as we could discover. All about Magnolia the woods are particularly beautiful, and full of little paths that run about OLD SEAPORT TOWNS haphazardly, leading, most of them, in the direc- tion of the coast, though some appear to strike away toward the interior with an air of lovely promise. Some day we are going back another place that insists on a return engagement to take one of those sea-departing ways. But this time it was to the beach we went, for there were Rafe's Chasm and Norman's Woe to see, and the great rocks, cut and piled by busy glaciers several years back, to climb over. Colonel Higginson wrote a page or two of praise about these woodways near old Gloucester, an- swering Hawthorne's complaint that America knew no stiles and footpaths by telling of the miles of them that grew on Cape Ann. Hawthorne was right in general, for most of our walking has to be done on roads, a proof of how few real walkers there are among us ; but here, so close to his own Salem, you can walk all day and hardly need to so much as cross a road. At one place we found a gang of men spraying the forest against the inroads of the browntail moth. Massachusetts is in battle array against these pests, and co-operation is having its effect. But Sister and I had been bothered ever since we struck Salem by the irritation of the invisible little hairs that float in the air, poisoning the skin -- 124-*- / i'< c ' * : M 3BS!s^:^m^,|.!w / ' 1 7^ ' i^^^^M '^m f * ^"'^'* -' : ^' : I " : " '' ^^^"^jmi^ if^if'^ -V-ffl;f ;V%^/' V^ rfi' ttA^Sry *&,, a^ 1 ' OF NEW ENGLAND where they touch it like the bite of some insect, and we knew that Massachusetts had not entirely won her fight. It was one of those clear blue days with an east- erly wind that seem too good to be true. Every shade of colour is intensified, every breath of fra- grance more pronounced, and there is a freshness in the atmosphere that makes exercise a delectable necessity. We followed the narrow windings of the path with light feet, running down small hills with shouts. And long before we reached the sea we heard it shouting too. Summer homes crowd down to the beach be- tween Magnolia and Gloucester, but they leave you scrambling room on the shattered, tawny rocks, that are so different in colour from the grey Maine boulders. It was slow going, for you had to watch your step as closely as though you were in the New York subway, so precariously was one ledge piled on another. Narrow rifts where the river ran in, wide pools left by the outgoing tide, sections that were regular moraines, loose stones that threat- ened to start you and themselves sliding into the surf, were all mixed up in splendid confusion. The beach rose higher and higher, till it became a beetling cliff, at whose foot the waves swept, looking for some crack of entry. Finding many long slits down which we peered, wondering r- 125 H- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS whether this or that was Rafe's particular property. There was no mistaking it when we reached it, however a great ragged chasm in the rock more than sixty feet deep and about six across. We lay flat, looking down at the rushing water that tossed its way in and fumbled and roared to get out again, like something living and wild that was struck with terror at the dark trap in which it found itself. There was hypnotic power in the sight and sound, and we could not get away for a long while, waiting for the next wave to do what all were clamouring to do and could not accomplish, for all their white rage. Years ago a young woman was swept into this chasm by the wind and dashed to pieces in the battle below. An iron cross was driven into the rock to mark the tragedy. " It wants another of us," Sister said, " and maybe we'd better go on, or it might get what it wants." For the fury below, that drew our gaze and our imagination, seemed to tug at our bodies also. Beyond the chasm we climbed higher up the cliff, and got a great view. Close to us lay the long black reef of Norman's Woe with a white edge where the waves broke. A bell buoy, whose mourn- ful tolling we had heard some time, rocks before -* 136 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND it. Beyond, Eastern Point, with its lighthouse, between these two the mouth of Gloucester Har- bour. Sailing boats and steamers were setting in and out, and the long line of the opposite shore was charmingly green and distinct in the afternoon light. We walked on along the cliff's top, getting a con- stantly increasing view of the harbour, and of the Inner Harbour at its foot, crowded with shipping. Many a time Longfellow must have taken this same walk, and it is no wonder that he chose the scene for his stirring ballad of shipwreck and death. There, just beyond, the home lights of Gloucester town, and here the treacherous rock snarling at the sea, where so many ships have found destruction. To be sure, many people have united in prov- ing that the schooner Hesperus was not one of these ships, and for all I know that none of the skip- pers who died there had a daughter, but the death at the harbour's mouth remains, and men and women and children have paid their toll to it. The rock gets its name from a tradition that a ship commanded by William Norman, which sailed out of Gloucester Harbour in 1682 and never returned, was wrecked there. Floating in the swell of the waves, not far from the face of the cliff, we saw countless lobster pots, -*- 127-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS and perched on a projecting bastion of rock, some way down the face of the cliff, a solitary fisherman sat rod in hand. A basket lay beside him, but whether full or empty we could not tell, as wa stared down at him. Unconscious of observation he puffed his pipe, presenting the picture of an ab- solutely contented man. And now we decided to strike back into the woods and try to intercept the motor bus we had been told plied between Gloucester and Magnolia. The bus proved a very natty concern when it came along, with no one aboard but the driver, a slim young New Englander who nodded affably as we got in. " Been walking far? " he inquired, as we started along once more. , We told him we'd been hanging over Rafe's Chasm, among other deeds of the day. " You'd oughter see that in a winter storm," he said. " It ain't nothing now but when one of them big blows gets the sea going you can hear the roar of the waves that shoots up it a long way. I've been along there when a man couldn't hardly stand up against the wind, and the way the sea pounds in on them rocks is tremenjous. Seeing this coast in summer you never get to know what it is." H- 128 -K OF NEW ENGLAND It was easy to believe that winter must be mag- nificent, and as lonely as magnificent " You don't meet many people strolling that way in a winter storm, do you? " The young man shook his head. " They don't see any fun in that sort of walk, I guess. But if you want to know the North Shore you got to see it in winter." He was firm about it. And we decided that he was right, adorable as it is in summer. 129 Gloucester CHAPTER VI Gloucester HE bus drew up at a drug store opposite the Gloucester Post Office, also the Cus- tom House, a fine building that is not at all Gloucesterish, but looks most mod- ern and Governmental. The rest of the street is entirely unlike the Post Office, wandering in crooked curves that remind you of the track a child leaves as he runs along a beach following the wash of the surf. Main Street, in fact, like all the rest of Gloucester, is governed by the sea. Its ancient buildings talk sea talk, informing you in signs that have swung to the wind these many years that the Marine Society meets here, that this is a place sail- ors will find attractive, that ship's stores are to be procured here, and sails over there. The short streets leading down from Main run quickly into the water, and in places the water comes up itself, lugging boats and nets and fish almost to the side- walk. You could be put down anywhere in Gloucester blindfold, and even if you had been haled from -+I33"*-" OLD SEAPORT TOWNS some remote Montana peak, you would reply, on being questioned: " I guess this must be Gloucester, U. S. A., the greatest fish town in the country." For there is a mixture of sea smell and fish smell, of drying " flakes " and of tarry cordage that speaks right out for itself. It is a good smell, too, though there are places, close in among the docks, where it isn't, or where, at least, you have to get acclimated to it. In time, so they say, even the rich- est and oldest of these dock odours becomes a joy to your nostrils. But at first, when you scramble about the edge of Inner Harbour, among the glue factories and other useful buildings that jostle the schooners and steamers, you feel what the English call fed up on smells. " I think one could live a week easily on this rich fragrance and never miss not eating," Sister remarked. " Take this stratum here; there's surely solid sustenance in it." But Gloucester, if it is somewhat haunted by the ghosts of its myriad victims, is as clean and neat as a ship's deck. The little streets that turn so quickly into docks, the big buildings that work so steadily with the product brought in by the fishing boats, the slips, the harbour, the shacks where shining fish are being pitchforked about and cut into pieces, all are miracles of cleanli- OF NEW ENGLAND ness. Seafolk are clean folk, and Gloucester is im- maculate. From the docks and Main Street the town mounts upward steeply, giving the residential part of the old city a fine outlook to the harbour and beyond. On the roofs of these houses, some of which are very old, anxious women have stared out to sea, looking for a sail that never returned. They did so generations ago they do so to-day. For the toll the ocean claims in return for what it gives is heavy, and the brides of Glouces- ter are too often widows before the year is out. There is a special Memorial Day in Gloucester. It comes in midsummer, and it is marked by pro- cessions of children, who go down to the sea and cast flowers upon the water " for those it has taken." After the seaport towns we had been visiting, whose seagoing days were now but an old man's tale, it was thrilling to be in the centre of this beau- tiful old city, whose whole life was bound up with the fisheries, and in which every man you met had been or was a fisher, to whom the Banks were as familiar as his own Main Street, and the lean of a water-washed deck easier walking than the broad highway. Nobody knows exactly when Gloucester really OLD SEAPORT TOWNS started. The Dorchester Company of Merchant Adventurers sent out a company of fishermen from England in 1623. But matters went badly, and after two years of struggle some of these men went back to England, and the rest to Naumkeag, later Salem, with Roger Conant. Some writers say that a few remained to carry along the colony, others deny it. At least there was a permanent settlement there some time before 1639, and in 1642 the place was incorporated as a township. These early settlers tried to make their living by farming, but so many cod kept crowding into the harbour that finally they gave up the somewhat desperate job of growing their sustenance out of the Cape Ann granite, and began to gather it out of the sea. To be sure, a few of the inhabitants still turn their attention to the granite; but it is to quarry it, not to make farms of it. The stone is of fine quality, and particularly dark. We decided first to see the upper part of town. All the streets are twisted, and go climbing up and down and roundabout as though busy on errands of their own. House after house is the typical square or oblong hip-roofed building, usually three stories in height, and with decked and balus- traded top. On Middle Street there is an old house called the Revolutionary House, with two OF NEW ENGLAND immense brick chimneys, one of them dangerously tiptilted, and a garden surrounded by a beautiful panelled brick wall. A faith of its own, known as the Independent Universalist, started in Gloucester, under the lead- ership of the Rev. John Murray. The society had a stormy time of it for several years, but gradually established itself, and built, in 1807, the church that is one of the ornaments of the town. Standing in a parklike square behind great elms, with a beautiful fagade, tall pillars, and a fine steeple of the favourite Wren type, this church is exquisite, and one can but thank the stalwart Inde- pendents for insisting on their right to be and to build. Many another slender spire lifts itself above the roofs of Gloucester, and the skyline of the town, seen from across the harbour, as we presently did see it, is strangely foreign. Perhaps because Gloucester is so intensely New England it ends by impressing you as being thoroughly foreign. Take it apart, with its wooden or brick deck-roofed houses, its Wren-spired churches, its hither and yon streets, its trolley line, it is as American as its Yankee skippers. Taken together its aspect is so quaint and olden and individual that you can not believe it was made in the U. S. A. We had meant to wander about most of the + 137-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS morning in the elm-shaded streets of the living part of the town, but since the whole slope of Gloucester is toward the harbour and it seems to be continually directing you there, we soon found ourselves back on the water's edge, and handily in reach of a little double-decked boat that ferries across the harbour to East Gloucester. We got on the upper deck to see all we could of the crowded shipping that kept the water dancing and slapping. Little power boats sneaked in and out among the big fellows like boys in a crowd, and gave shrill little whistles and toolings equally boylike. The harbour is very long and narrow, having not an inch to spare, and yet has to give over a good deal of space to an island almost in the very middle of its being, an island called by the fascinating name of Five Pound. Out in the greater harbour is another island twice the size of Five Pound, and any one can guess its name, after the lead that's been given. But I'd like to know the apt and original ghost who, in the body of some long gone Gloucesterman, settled on those ridiculously ap- propriate names. In the town records, back in the early part of its existence, there are these words: "Granted to William Vinson ' an island that lyes in the coave before his house, called ffivepound Island." And these, noting a vote taken in 1644: "Ten Pound + 138-*- OF NEW ENGLAND Island shall be reserved for Rams onlie; and who- ever shall put on anie but great Ramms shall for- feit as. 6d. per head." There seems to be a particular grimness in that second " m," reserved as it is for the repetition of the word ram. But why, one wonders, were the ewe and the lamb considered unfit to browse the pastures of Ten Pound Island? It didn't take more than ten minutes to wind our way to the opposite side of the " coave." We passed two fine white yachts trimmed with shining brass that looked out of place among the rugged working ships, and an enormous schooner with five masts that was more like a procession than a boat. When the war is not keeping its fighters at home, many Sicilian barques put into Gloucester harbour, with salt for curing the fish. But we saw none of these, though there were several for- eign ships with their flags painted on the wooden sides together with the name and nationality in large letters. A solid line of wharfs encircles Inner Harbour and every one of them has its shipping, its sheds where work is in progress, its wagons loading and its boats unloading. From upper windows huge brown seines are being thrown down to men wait- ing below. Fish flung on the end of a dock are pitchforked into the covered sheds, where the OLD SEAPORT TOWNS workers snatch them up, split them and clean them and throw them into tubs. The tang of the salt, drying flakes is strong in the air. We left our boat at one of the fish docks, and watched the dexterous work for some time. The young men who were doing it laughed and talked to each other while the keen knives flashed with- out ceasing and the shining fish came and went under their hands. Beyond the dock were the dry- ing flats or " flakes," where the fish, spread on wooden frames and sparkling with salt, dry in the sun. Shelters of snowy canvas are spread above them, the direct rays evidently being too strong. It is a charming sight, and has that same effect of perfect cleanliness that helps in making the entire town so attractive. We lingered on the wharves, enchanted by the view of Gloucester opposite, a view that can not be beaten for utter picturesqueness and variety. Right about us the busy wharves, beyond the swinging water full of reflections and colour, crowded with every type of fishing boat and coast- wise trader, with foreign vessels and pleasure craft. Then the opposite wharves, backed by warehouses and factories for gluemaking, these again by the climbing houses and bowering trees, and above all spire on spire and towers among them. All shades of grey and tawny and red mingled in the OF NEW ENGLAND city, and in the sky a few fleecy clouds accentuated the blue. An old man was walking the outer edge of one wharf leading a rowboat by a rope, much as a farmer might lead a cow or a dog. I expected him to whistle to it. He engineered his way carefully until he reached the place where we sat. " Shall we get up? " we wanted to know. But he shook his head, and manipulated rope and boat and himself without trouble past us. " Do you suppose he's exercising it? " Sister asked me. " Maybe he's training it so it can go alone." We never knew. Another old man, who had been watching the fish cleaning for a long while, left that and walked near us. He had a delightfully rolling gait and the appearance of being packed full of the remi- niscences of countless adventures on the seven seas, and when he sat down and began to stuff tobacco into a bent, black pipe we hoped that he might be- come epic for our benefit. But though he regarded us steadily, he remained silent. " Try to look like a wedding guest and this an- cient mariner may confide in you," I begged Sister. But she couldn't or wouldn't, and so the three of -* 141 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS us sat and looked at Gloucester, and smelt the salt fish and the salt sea, and said never a word. The old man wore a pair of sea-blue trousers and a shirt that looked like weather-worn canvas. His feet were bare and on his head was a battered fisher- man's hat. His hands and one forearm were blue with tattooing, while his eyes, blue too, had that deep and inward look that you see in the eyes of sailors and of plainsmen. " If he had earrings," Sister said, as we walked away, "he would have been a creation of Steven- son. Maybe, as it is, he was only a figment of our imagination, or a ghost that could not speak till it was spoken to." We looked back. Sure enough, the old man had disappeared. Gloucester bells were ringing the noon hour, and perhaps he had hurried off to dinner; but it seemed quite as likely that he had merely returned to the past from which he had come, and so vanished from our percep- tion. One could never tire of that harbour view! The hills that curve down at the left to Half Moon Beach. The houses and sheds that huddle close to the water, the infinite shipping, spick and span or weatherbeaten and battered, carrying every type of rigging, moving by sail or steam or gasoline (boats run by gasoline were introduced here in -*- 142 -i- h^Kfsssr si Gloucester Towers from Harbour Cove OF NEW ENGLAND 1900). The brick walls of the Town Hall, the mounting spire of the Universalist Church top- ping all the others, the fine Colonial houses show- ing through the trees, and all about the stir and energy of the industrious water edge. " One doesn't wonder that Gloucester speaks of the man who has never seen the sea as some one who c never saw nothinV " I remarked. Gloucester is the city of the schooner as New- buryport was of the clipper ship. Captain Andrew Robinson was the name of the designer and builder of the first schooner ever launched, in 1713. He had been more or less jeered at as a visionary by those who watched the vessel's construction, but when she slid into the water a delighted bystander cried out, " Oh, how she scoons! " " A scooner let her be," replied Robinson, and so named her, breaking a bottle of rum on her bows. She proved a great success, and before long most of Gloucester's shipbuilding was confined to schooners, a type of vessel that excellently met the requirements of the cod and halibut fishers. The clipper and the frigate have gone, but the schooner still sails on every sea. Eastern Point is the part of Gloucester that at- tracts the summer colony, and on this long, crooked, rocky peninsula many artists and writers have settled. It stretches south from East OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Gloucester, the road hugging the harbour. A mile or so along a causeway connects the Point with Rocky Neck, and here too are wharves and ships, houses and studios. Sister and I spent a day tramping over and around Eastern Point, taking our lunch along, and camping with it on the stony beach where the surf broke opposite Webber's Rock, close to where Mother Ann sits watching her ocean view. The old stone lady is remarkably distinct, a grim but kindly chatelaine carved by chance in the brown rocks. This furthest end of the Point is an expanse of flat, bare rock alternating with thickets of odorous plants and berry bushes. Bobolinks sang here, song-sparrows topped every little tree that strug- gled higher than its fellows. The air is so satu- rated with the sea and with bayberry and sweetfern that it seems impossible to get enough of it into your lungs. You want to hold it, to take it home with you, to breathe nothing else ever! Half- effaced tracks lead through the thickets, and in the centre of the rounded end of the Point a pond lies as blue as any sapphire, a pond said to be full of pickerel. The road out from town is beautifully shaded by elms and there are charming houses. The place is simple, however, nothing of the expensive splen- OF NEW ENGLAND dour of the great country seats of Manchester and Prides Crossing having come to burden the stern aspect of nature, where rock below and wind above have their way everywhere except for the tree- planted strip along the harbour. One of the most enchanting of these summer homes is that of Cecilia Beaux, close to the har- bour and entirely hidden behind a thick growth of tupelo trees, a small, strong tree that grows all over this section of country in exposed spots where a less stout, tenacious plant would be beaten to shreds. The branches of this curious little tree interlace above to make a continuous canopy, and it is by erratic paths under this green roof that you reach the cottage, shell-coloured, of brick and roughcast, a charming thing of cloisters and arches and harmonious relation to its situation and surroundings. Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward is of course intimately associated with Gloucester, where she wrote so many of her books, and where she drew much of her inspiration. She too lived on the Point. Many young writers and many young painters find temporary studios here, and many camp out in the summer months in cottages or under tents. The Hawthorne Inn, with its view of Glouces- ter across the harbour, its verandas hanging over OLD SEAPORT TOWNS the sea, its delightful, rambling construction, and its excellent table, is as good a place as you can find to spend the summer, if you are deter- mined to spend it in a hotel. We took our little ferryboat back to the town as the sun was setting, making as splendid a com- motion in the sky as though it were the last time it meant to set, and so could afford to spend itself. The harbour was full of lights, the sky of colour. Out on the breakwater the lighthouses began to do their night's work, and gradually, as it grew duskier above, the stars set about theirs. A young moon hung high in the west. "What are we going to do about it?" asked Sister. "Just sit here quietly as though we de- served it? " And sit we did, while the little boat made sev- eral trips and the harbour settled down for the night Main Street in the evening is a jolly place, with the little shops busy and summer people in white linens jostling the native Gloucesterites on the nar- row pavements. Gloucester breeds stout and ac- tive young men, and preserves its old ones hale and serene. There were pretty, dark, foreign-looking girls there too, arm in arm with the young men, laughing as they strolled for the pure joy of laughter. Though perhaps the young June night -*- 146-*- OF NEW ENGLAND and young blood had something to do with their gay spirits. Grog-shops overlap each other with somewhat dismaying frequency, but no one gets drunk, or if any one does he must be battened down out of sight. The town is as orderly as it is neat, going cheerfully and soberly about its play as it goes cheerfully and industriously about its work. Busy as the little city is, and everywhere you get the feeling that it is thoroughly occupied, there is no bang or hurry or worry. It does its work, but it has its leisure too. From the wide, unhast- ing sea, by which it lives in a double sense, it has learnt that there is time enough in each hour, and hours enough in every life. Why should you rush and scurry through to-day, when to-morrow may bring you to the business of eternity? Cape Ann extends some four or five miles be- yond Gloucester to Lands End and Rockport. Al- most opposite Lands End is Thatcher's Island, with its twin-lights. These lights are the last you see from shipboard when on your way to Europe. The island was given its name under tragic cir- cumstances, as far back as 1635. In that year was an awful tempest, " the like was never in this place known in the memory of man, before or since," says Hubbard, the historian. It left scars on land that were visible for years, great OLD SEAPORT TOWNS trees snapped off close to the ground, houses turned over and blown away, and out at sea ship after ship met disaster. On one of these ships, on his way to Marblehead, was Anthony Thatcher, with his wife and four children, also his cousin, Par- son Avery, with his wife and eight children. The letter written by Thatcher to his brother Peter in England has been preserved and is a most curi- ous and touching revelation of a personality. He begins in these words : " I must turn my drowned pen and shaking hand to indite this story of such sad news as never before this happened in New England. " There was a league of perpetual friendship be- tween my cousin Avery and myself, never to for- sake each other to the death, but to be partakers of each other's misery or welfare, as also of habi- tation, in the same place." He goes on to relate how Avery was asked to take charge of the pastorate at Marblehead, and how at first he refused, and they all went to " New- berry," because the men in Marblehead, " The most being fishermen, were something loose and remiss in their behaviour." But finally it was de- cided to accept the invitation, and " having com- mended ourselves to God, with cheerful hearts we hoisted sail." The great storm burst upon them, and the ship '-*- 148-*- OF NEW ENGLAND was flung up on a rock. " The waves came furi- ously and violently over us, and against us ; but by reason of the rock's proportions could not lift us off, but beat her all to pieces. Now look with me upon our distress, and consider my misery, who beheld the ship broken, the water in her and vio- lently overwhelming us, my goods and provisions swimming in the sea, my friends almost drowned, and mine own poor children so untimely (if I may term it so without offence) before mine eyes drowned." Drowned they were, every soul of them except Thatcher's wife and he himself. The ship went to pieces and in the morning, wet, cold, almost naked, the bereft man hunted for his dead, but found nothing, save, later, his cousin's dead daughter. " Now came to my remembrance the time and manner how and when I last saw and left my chil- dren and friends. One was severed from me sit- ting on the rock at my feet, the other three in the pinnace; my little babe (ah, poor Peter) sitting in his sister Edith's arms, who to the uttermost of her powers sheltered him from the waters; my poor William standing close unto them, all three of them looking ruefully on me on the rock, their very countenances calling unto me to help them; whom I could not go unto, neither could they OLD SEAPORT TOWNS come at me, neither would the merciless waves al- low me space or time to use any means at all, either to help them or to help myself. Oh, I yet see their cheeks, poor silent lambs, pleading pity and help at my hands. Then, on the other hand, to consider the loss of my dear friends, with the spoil- ing and loss of all our goods and provisions, my- self cast upon an unknown land, in a wilder- ness. . . . ' In that wilderness husband and wife remained "until the Monday following; when about three o'clock in the afternoon, in a boat that came that way, we went off that desolate island, which I named, after my name, Thatcher's Woe, and the rock, Avery his Fall, to the end that their fall and loss, and mine own, might be had in perpetual re- membrance. In the isle lieth buried the body of my cousin's eldest daughter, whom I found dead on the shore." Whittier wrote a poem, " Swan Song of Parson Avery," on the tragedy, but it does not approach, either in graphic or literary interest, the letter written by the survivor. Some ancient graves are still to be found on the western end of Thatcher's Island, a high cliff that appears to be crumbling away with the pass- ing years, under the terrific onslaughts of the wind and waves. The two lighthouses are built of gran- -H- 150-*- OF NEW ENGLAND ite and are a hundred and fifty feet in height, with lenses of great size and power, for the station is one of the most important on the whole coast of the United States. There is a great deal more to Cape Ann, and trolleys take you to most of it. Sister and I went to Rockport one soft summer morning and idled about its sleepy streets. Rockport is calmly and stolidly occupied with taking chunks out of the cape, beautiful dark-grey cubes that go to the building of many city halls and post offices. They do some fishing too, for cod and halibut insist on spending a good deal of their time nosing pretty close to Ann. The extraordinary vividness of the wild flowers, and the joyous profusion of those that grow in white-fenced gardens stirred us to new enthusiasm. Perhaps there is something peculiarly nourishing in granite, for there seems little else to riot on at this extreme tip of our country, and riot these plants and flowers do. Such intense colouring I have found on the desert in Arizona, where sun and sand and the night dew had somehow con- trived to get transformed into a small and radiant blossom. And here, on this stiff rock, wet with sea wind, we found a brilliance as amazing. The town has no Old South Church, in which it is probably unique among old New England towns, -*- 151 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS but it has an Old White Church, particularly no- ticeable where so much of the town is built out of the granite it quarries. The Wren tower is beautiful, as are the pilasters that decorate the front, and the church has its bit of history in addi- tion. It was fired on by the British in 1814, and you can see the cannon that did the deed before the Town Hall. People who can't walk oughtn't to be allowed on Cape Ann, for it is so wonderful a place to tramp over. You feel more active for every hour you stay on it, and Sister and I had long since acquired complete command over our legs. They went wherever our spirits led, which was far, and came back as stout and hale as at the start. Now we found a lovely lane, grassy as a fair green, roofed and sided by those interwoven tupelo trees, and full of birds and butterflies. Again we found our- selves marching with the sea on the wild coast, that was as deserted as when the two sons, of whom they tell in Pigeon Cove, fled thither with their old mother to escape the witchcraft delusion in Salem, and built the old house that still stands, and is called to this day the Witch House. There is one remarkable spot that can be reached only on foot, and that after considerable search and diffi- culty, a place practically no one visits. It is called Dogtown and is unique. But say walk to the aver- -j- 152 - OF NEW ENGLAND age American, and add six miles, and he or she, in that soothing, nervously smiling way that is popularly supposed to work best with maniacs, will gently edge away, and leave you. Sister and I made up our minds that we would get to Dogtown, and that we would not take a guide. For though Sister didn't mind asking the way to anywhere, as I did, she objected quite as much to being shown it. In the centre of the promontory there is a high plateau, and here, back in Revolutionary days, a number of non-combatants went to live, partly to get safely from the coast, with its shooting Brit- ishers, partly because they were able to do a little farming and a good deal of berry picking. M6st of these dwellers in Dogtown were grass or real widows, and each of these women had a dog for companionship and protection. Hence the name of this little settlement. Many of these women lived on here, after the end of the war, getting older and queerer, until the town came to be looked on by young people especially as almost haunted. And after the last of the old creatures had died or wandered away, no one came to the village, which gradually fell to pieces. After some false turns we got to the curious old place, nothing now but cellars, traces of old OLD SEAPORT TOWNS walls, tumbled-in wells and tumbled-down chim- neys. It is all crumbling, silent, weed-grown, in- tensely deserted. " I should be scared to death here after sun- down," Sister said, as we moved softly through this desertion. Even in the light of day, we jumped when a stone rattled behind us. Where, a short distance back in the woods, the loneliness was a delight, and friendly Nature all the friendlier be- cause she was so undisturbed, here, where human beings had once gone about their daily affairs, the fact that they were no longer there had something appalling in it. " Remember the story of the sunken City of Ys, whose bells were said to ring beneath the water? " I asked, as we stood and looked about us in the empty place in the hush of the afternoon. " I wonder if here, at night, the dogs howl?" Sister shivered and laughed. " Remember how Bliss Carman describes that city? " she asked. And I told her to go ahead. " Once of old there stood a fabled city By the Breton Sea Towered and belled and flagged and wreathed and pennoned For the pomp of Yuletide revelry; All its folk, adventurous, sea-daring, Gay as gay could be." OF NEW ENGLAND " The folk here were probably not gay," I re- marked, " though sea-daring they or theirs cer- tainly were. What a very different description a poet would have to give this place, however." For not only curious old Dogtown, but the whole plateau, is uncanny and weird. Here once a glacier had its bed, and we found traces of the old moraines, bouldery streams down which the ice went marching to the sea. All over the plateau are huge, fantastic rocks, worn by frost and gnawed by the centuries into strange shapes that resemble the animals of prehistoric days, lurking monsters that sometimes look half human. One of these formations has been named the Whale's Jaws, and this you can buy on postcards, but it looks more impressive as you pass it on your way to Dogtown, a great, gaping, craggy brute that reaches up out of the earth for something to close on. We were not sure enough of our path to linger too long, and we didn't want to run the risk of getting confused in that place of ghosts and mon- sters. So we presently started back again through the sweet-smelling woods. " You know, if they had that place out West," I told Sister, " there would be reams of advertis- ing about it, every rock would have a name tagged to it, automobiles would run out regularly, and OLD SEAPORT TOWNS guides would spout at so much an hour. I like this way best." " So do I. So far, I've never met any one who has been here, though Colonel Higginson and others have written about it. The New England reticence has points that are distinctly admirable. I think anything worth seeing ought to be hard to come by, otherwise it is desecrated. Look at the mountains up which cars are run! Gone is their awful splendour. They are like a lion in a cage with a man sitting on his head, and even though you may admire the man, you despise the lion." Evening was coming on slowly as we reached Gloucester again. Behind us lay those strange stone monsters, seeming to be waiting for a whisper that would stir them into life. We felt as though we had been trespassing in another world. " Come in here and I'll treat you to an ice-cream soda," Sister said munificently. " We've had enough of spooks." Next day we were to leave the old town and reach Marblehead, taking in Boston en route, which made it considerably roundabout. But we had to get to Boston, even though it was Sunday. Now, Sunday in New England is not like other days even yet. There's not a hint of the Continen' tal to it, though it has struggled quite a distance from the Puritan. The trains are still deeply im- OF NEW ENGLAND bued with the old idea of not doing any work on the seventh day, and to use them in getting from one town to another on Sunday is a hazardous and lengthy business. We knew that we should spend as much of the day getting to Boston and back to Marblehead as though we were going to Chicago, even though we managed to save the night. So we ate a leisurely supper and went early to bed. We leaned out of the window for a last, en- chanting view of the city and its harbour, lighted by the moon. I was about to say, " I do certainly hate to leave this darling town," when Sister turned to me. " I do certainly hate to leave this darling town," she said. It is little things like that over which long dis- putes arise as to whether or not mind reading and thought transference can exist. " You can call it coincidence if you like," de- clares the pro, " but let me tell you . . . ' " Perfect nonsense," protests the con, waving the suggestion aside. " Given something about which every one must be agreed, what more natural. . . . ' But Sister and I, being sleepy, only nodded and turned in. 157 Marblehead CHAPTER VII Marblehead ARBLEHEAD never bothered over- much with the Puritan conception of the proper way to live. When Salem was as good as good could be, beating the dan- gerous Quakers from out her spotless territory, and making new rules and living up to them every day of the week, when Ipswich earned a holy penny by fining the dames who wore silk bonnets, and the other towns about made things as uncomfort- able in this world as their ingenuity could com- pass, in order to make sure of front seats in the world to come, why, Marblehead welcomed dark pirates openly, gave them grog to drink and pig- tail tobacco to smoke, and sat in taverns talking over ways and means for smuggling in another cargo of forbidden merchandise. The Puritan code insisted that only church members should dispense the law, and since Mar- blehead had no such folk, it very contentedly set- tled the matter by dispensing with the law itself. The boys who were not out with the men in the fishing boats or other craft that had a more thrill- -*- 161 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS ing pursuit, spent their leisure, which was consid- erable, in stoning any unwary stranger who drove over from the preserves of the saintly to take a look at this devil's corner. No wonder that Parson Avery hesitated to accept the adventure of preach- ing to these fishermen, " somewhat loose and remiss in their behaviour." The wreck at Thatcher's Woe settled the matter for him; as for Marble- head, it continued wholeheartedly to be remiss and loose for I don't know how much longer. A rough village of huts clamped down to the rocks and hugging its fine harbour, such was Mar- blehead for many years. The huts grew bigger and finer, the narrow footways broadened a trifle, but kept the devious turns and abrupt ups and downs with which they began so abrupt that even to-day many a Marblehead lane has to resort to steps to get itself and its traveller where it would go. And now the town is frankly given over to the vacation spirit. It plays with sea to the same extent that Gloucester works with it, which is pretty continuously. Its harbour is crowded with beautiful yachts, with every manner of boat that sails or steams or gasolines for pleasure. Here the Eastern and Corinthian Yacht Clubs have built their splendid homes, and here the summer is marked by one famous yacht race after another. Here too is one of the biggest aeroplane plants in -- 162 *-' OF NEW ENGLAND America, and the Marbleheader does not turn that head of his when the whirr of a flyer's engine sings by over him; he's too used to the pesky thing! People who live in Marblehead become passion- ately attached to it. I met one of these fortunate persons, a charming woman with a faint trace of the peculiar Marblehead dialect in her speech. Many years have passed over her head, though she appears scarcely to have left middle-age behind. " I never went out of Marblehead but for a two days' trip to Boston when I was married," she said. " Never for even a day, till last winter, when I had to go to Boston again for an operation, and we spent the winter there. Glad I was to get back here again." She spoke of a man, an old friend, who had married against her will. " I wanted him to marry one of the sweetest, fin- est girls in Marblehead," she asserted. " Well, I've had my revenge. He has to live away from the town, poor fellow." There is nothing quainter to be found in our country than this grey sea-town with its incredibly tangled streets. Never does the stranger know where he will end when he sets forth to follow one of them. Sister and I found ourselves walk- ing briskly away from the place we wanted to go -M63-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS to oftener than not. Luckily the water exists, for when you strike it you have a chance to take new bearings, and in time we got so that we could lay a course by the tower of Abbott Hall, which dom- inates the entire village. We would climb up to it to get a fresh start, and usually found that we were approaching it from another direction than the one we imagined. It was a sort of Alice in Wonder- land progress, the thing being to go where you knew you shouldn't in order to get where you wanted to be. Abbott Hall possesses a fine tower whose out- line accentuates and points the whole sharp up- ward slope of the town, but it is unfortunately an ugly red structure built at the worst time for American architecture, when the pretentious pe- riod came to supersede the noble simplicity of Co- lonial days and those immediately following, when so many excellent houses and churches adequately incarnated the ideas of home and worship. The town offices and a public library, where there is an interesting collection of ancient volumes of historical value, are housed here, and there is also the original canvas of the " Spirit of '76." " You don't mean to say there really is such a painting? " demanded Sister. " After all the chromos and lithographs and the groups marching in patriotic processions that I've looked upon, to OF NEW ENGLAND find, stowed away on this hill-top and in this dark- red, decorated structure, the actual thing itself! " There it was, a large canvas with the three well- known figures stepping eternally forward. The colour is bad it was long before the days of the plein-air movement but the thing has a wonder- ful go and life to it. There is a spiritual exalta- tion in the three faces, a resistless forward swing to the march of the three bodies the title is jus- tified. Marblehead is just the opposite of Beverly. There the new has overlaid the old, crowded it out of existence. Here the old remains toughly in position. Almost all the old houses still stick to their rocks, and the streets are the same; were the dead in Burial Hill to clamber out of the rocky niches where they sleep within sound of the sea they loved, they would have little trouble finding their old homes. This hill is a good place to go to for an outlook over the town, especially the part still called Barnegat, the special haunt of the old-time pirates. Adjoining the graveyard is the house of old John Dimond, the wizard, whose granddaughter, Moll Pitcher, the famous fortune teller of Lynn, was born there. The house, called the Old Brig, is a fine specimen of the simple gambrel-roofed home of the well-to-do but not aristocratic fisher- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS man. It stands firmly on its green slope, looking out over the roofs of the houses opposite, so varied are Marblehead contours, at the shallow waters of Barnegat Cove, and is as snowy white and neat as any of the yachts that dip to the wave. Old Dimond was known to be a wizard for vari- ous reasons, but particularly for his habit of " beat- ing about " among the graves of Burial Hill dur- ing a storm, especially at night, when thunder crashed and lightning blazed, and the wind howled like a fiend. Possibly, thought the fisher- folk of the town, it was truly a fiend and not mere wind that did the howling. Above the sounds, whether of the elements or not, the voice of John Dimond rose in hoarse com- mands. Far away on the tempest-tossed sea sailors from Marblehead were struggling to bring their ships to port. And there, among the graves, Wiz- ard Dimond shouted commands to them, directing the invisible helmsman, ordering the men to make or shorten sail, bringing the vessels safe to port as no pilot aboard the rocking decks could do. But Moll's fame dimmed that of her grand- father completely, and it is as her birthplace the Brig is known. This remarkable woman, who died in 1813, at the age of seventy-five, was visited for over fifty years by literally thousands, rich, poor, ignorant, and wise, who consulted her on &> -IT V^i- fsBaSS 1 * 5*5 t ,"- ;: ' ^ ' V? ^ > f-'-saaft-rt^KSTW rip^mngjAJr Mfijp^ ^-j^B^ : Wt--^^: ^^B^pl&rs^^Mlf ^afc-vv'JIfe^KE? ^\S ^Wfej ':&" ^^; -.-/ 5 T"" ^j OF NEW ENGLAND " On the other hand, we don't have to fear be- coming a Shrieking Woman because pirates have held up a liner," comforted Sister. " And look at that steam yacht, manoeuvring to get into position between all those floating boats. Isn't it as fine a sight as a galleon under full sail could ever have been?" It was a lovely sight. The yacht so trig and slender, her black hull, her white decks, the glitter of her brass, moving so surely and steadily, like a creature with life of its own. " You can't beat the water," I agreed, happily. " It keeps its beauty, and it changes into beauty, sooner or later, everything with which it comes into contact. Brig or steamer, bridge or wharf, clam shack or lighthouse, dory or gasoline launch, I want to see them all the time." And then we went into the Nanepashemet Hotel for luncheon, because of its gorgeous name and view. Not but what you would find it a difficult matter to get anywhere on the Neck where there wasn't a gorgeous view. If you have gone tramping and found yourself a trifle reluctant to return toward the end over the same course you trod so eagerly and stoutly at the beginning of the day, think how pleasant it was to find that the ferry left at just the identical spot where we began to feel the same way. -1-181-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS A sweet little lane as green as spring led between delicious gardens to the small dock where the boat waited. At least, that's what we thought it was doing, but it wasn't it was leaving, and it left, just as we made the head of the steps. " I'm glad," said Sister. " Let us sit here and stare at the beautiful old town of Marblehead. Looking at something you like is one of the most sensible things any one can do, and I like Marble- head." In fact, those who live on the Neck have per- haps an even better thing of it than those who live in the town itself, for the view of it in its entirety as you see it from the harbour side is like an en- chantment. The harbour was so calm that shim- mering reflections, broken by passing boats, doubled the quaint place in the water to which it so intimately belongs. We were sorry when the little ferry came to take us away. There is a monument standing in the old Burial Hill that is but one more witness to the perilous life led by the men of these seaport towns a genera- tion or so ago and on back to the beginning. Now the sea is not so dangerous, though it still kills often enough to keep the women staring across its wild levels when their men are out on it, with hearts that are troubled enough'. -+ 182 *- OF NEW ENGLAND On this monument we read the following in- scription: LOST On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland In the Memorable Gale of September 1846 65 Men and Boys 43 Heads of Families 155 Fatherless Children "The Sea Shall Give Up the Dead That Were In It." A stricken town it was that day! Looking at it now, a place of summer play, its fishing days are as far away .from it as those when the pirates " free spenders they were too," as the old chron- icler tells, an item that must have struck any New Englander forcibly revelled in its streets. 1 Marblehead used to have the flakes that Glouces- ter has now, and dried her thousands of pounds of fish. But she yielded her predominance there when most of her fleet was lost at sea, and later took to making rope. The long ropewalks, down which the makers walked backward, twisting the hemp, were burned in the fire that swept the town in 1866. It was a blow that left the little village crushed for years. Many an old house went in that fire, the wonder being that so much of the town was preserved. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS The spirit of the Marblehead native has not lost its character. He does things his own way, and in his own good time. Many a story is told by the summer visitor to prove the difference in the point of view of Marbleheaders from ordinary folk. " I wanted to get a lawn mower to cut the grass on the lawn of my old place, which had been pretty badly neglected, the first year I was here," said one of these " foreigners " to us. " It was during the last week of April, but the season was forward and the grass had responded. " So I went to the store where we got about everything we wanted, and asked the proprietor whether he kept lawn mowers. " ' Ye'm, we keep them.' " I asked to have one sent up, but he shook his head. " ' We don't sell any lawn mowers before May first,' he said firmly. " It made no difference when I explained that I needed it at once. He admitted he had them in stock, c but they're clear up in the garret,' he told me, and there he intended they should remain until May first. So I had to send to Boston for my lawn mower." " It's no use coming to Marblehead, expecting to be a Marbleheader," another told us. " I've been doing that for fifteen years, and I'm only -*- 184-*- OF NEW ENGLAND beginning to see now how little I understand the place and its people. It's the queerest but most adorable old town in the United States." Which strikes me as an eminently just estimate of the place. Sister said she wanted to make it stronger, but we couldn't think how. And when the day came for our friends to motor us to Salem, to take the train for Plymouth and New Bedford, our hearts were sad at the parting. Plymouth and New Bedford CHAPTER VIII E felt it to be a matter of honour to go and gaze upon the famous rock with which our history as a nation begins. " You, with your passion for rocks, could hardly let Plymouth Rock pass without homage," Sister stated. But I knew that she was quite as eager as I to stand on that small spot of ground where first the Pilgrims settled. Perhaps it is because in all of us there lives a feeling that we are heirs of all the ages, and that our true busi- ness has far more to do with eternity than with time, that we derive a pleasure in linking up our own minute of worldly existence with those of our forerunners. To stand and say " Here stood the beginning of what is now " brings the past very close to the present, and so the future too. We are a portion of all three, and such bits of proof are welcome. So, leaving our baggage to proceed on to New Bedford, where we were to spend the night, we reached Plymouth early of a lovely summer day, and proceeded to do our American duty. -* 189-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Plymouth is old and quiet and sleepy. It lies on a bay with the same name, and of the same character. Green trees have been growing in it for a great many years, and old houses standing calmly under them. Children play along the streets rather sedately, it seemed to us. " It must be well, something or other to be born in Plymouth," Sister thought. " Somewhat the same sort of thing as one imagines to burn in the breast of the only heir to some vast and ancient estate that has come down in an unbroken line from the days of William the Conqueror? " " Yes. A kind of noblesse oblige." It was only a turn or two until we reached Pil- grim Hall, a large stone building which we left for later observation, our motto being " On to the Rock!" The canopy that has been built over the his- toric, cracked fragment on which, according to one version, John Alden was the first to put foot, and according to another, just as reliable, Mary Chilton, who became, later on, the wife of John Winslow, is familiar to every one who ever read a word about Plymouth, for the picture of the solid and not beautiful structure has been scattered broadcast on postcards and in school readers all over our land. In the upper part of this canopy t-*- 190-*- OF NEW ENGLAND is a chamber where repose a number of human bones dug up on Cole's Hill, which rises close beside the rock. Here the Pilgrims buried about half their number during the bitter and terrible months that followed their establishment on American soil. And as they buried them they levelled the mounds and in spring sowed wheat over the place that the watchful Indians might not know how busy death had been. The story of the rock, like that of the landing, has two versions. The actual stepping-out spot is said, by some earnest folk, to be now hidden under the wharf that pushes out into the quiet water in front of the canopy. The portion beneath this having been broken off and placed where it now lies. The other story is to this effect. In 1774, when the land was burning at a white heat with the fire of patriotism, an unknown poetic soul suggested that the Forefathers' Rock should be consecrated anew, to form a new start- ing place for freedom. A day for this ceremony being appointed, every one who could by any means make his or her way to Plymouth came to the settlement. It was the fifth of October, when all the forests about were splendid with autumn colour, when the marshes were a field of cloth of gold, and the wild ducks .-*- 191 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS gathered in the countless pools and lakes that lie about Plymouth, reflecting heaven with unabating constancy and making a beautiful land more beau- tiful by their presence. Through this sunny splendour came the people, each bearing his own flame of dedication and of enthusiasm. They gathered round the rock, and proceeded to lift it from its bed, that they might place it in the centre of the village green, as they intended that what it stood for should stand in the centre of each heart. Suddenly, as the stalwart crew struggled to drag the huge stone from its position, it burst in two. A thrill of terror ran through the throng. This must be some evil omen. Many were for stopping the whole demonstration, even for seeing here a sign that the matter which had brought them on this errand, the revolt against oppression that had urged them on, was itself doomed and shattered before it was well started. But at this instant some one, either more quick- witted or of a higher faith than his companions, sprang up and declared that here was a fortunate promise, a presage that the Colonies should break from the parent empire and stand on their own base. Shouts of joy greeted this bold declaration, the upper half of the rock was dragged with tri- -* 192-*- OF NEW ENGLAND umphant pageantry to the spot that had been selected, a tall liberty pole was erected behind it, and a flag on which were the words " Liberty or Death " was run up into the clear air. And there for many years it rested. But in 1881 it was taken back and placed again on the portion that lay under the canopy. And there it now is. Inside Pilgrim Hall we looked upon the sword of Miles Standish. There is a great deal else to be seen there, especially interesting being Eliot's Indian Bible. But this sword, with its power to evoke the vision of the stout soldier who carried it, and all the romance of the two young people so closely associated with him that was something to linger over. Standish's house is in Duxbury, lying only a lit- tle way to the north, where too is Captain's Hill, named for the same stalwart gentleman, and easy to see that clear day from Burial Hill, which we climbed, as much for the view as for a look at the old stones dating back at least as early as 1627, for under that date lies Mr. Thomas Clark, who had reached the age of 98. A fine spirit the old man must have harboured that would lead him to take the journey across the Atlantic when most people of his advanced age would have thought + 193-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS that a few steps to the sunny seat in the park was enough and to spare! Governor Bradford is buried here, he who wrote what people call the Log of the Mayflower, but which was really the " History of Plimoth Plantation," writ in the very hand of Bradford himself. The long blue reaches of the bay, with slender strips of sandy beach and low green islands beau- tifully marking it; the dim outline of Cape Cod beyond; the charming town, which looks busy enough from this elevation, and is in truth a manu- facturing place of importance; the slender monu- ment to Standish at Duxbury with green country in between and miles of orchards and fields and for- est land, with ponds agleam and a river glancing here and there among the sheltering trees; close by the National Monument to the Pilgrims, with its figure of Faith on top and four other figures seated about her, representing various virtues; of course there is a lighthouse, the Gurnet light, marking the safe entrance to the harbour, and equally of course a fragrant growth of lilacs in the old gardens around the old houses. "What was the reason that the Pilgrims and the Puritans chose the dead of winter to come here? " Sister wanted to know, as we lay on our backs in the green soft grass and looked at the OF NEW ENGLAND master commingling of green and blue in the view. " If they had come at this time of the year things would have been far more pleasant." " I'm sure I don't know. Perhaps they thought the hostile Indians would be too frozen to trouble them while they were getting settled and build- ing that stout fort which stood on this very hill. What a splendid set they were ; and here they lie, long since mingled with this soil under us, real pioneers, not one of them going back when they had the chance on the Mayflower, though only half that came on her were left alive." Yet, though we knew of their hardships, it was difficult to believe, as we looked out on that serene landscape, that sleeping bay, that any mortal could have suffered privation in such a spot. We began to move among the graves, step- ping carefully. Dandelions rioted, and pale star flowers lifted their green and white faces in clus- ters. We found one stone consecrated to the memory of a preacher, the Rev'd Chandler Rob- bins. He it was who once was requested by the town selectmen not to have more horses grazing on Burial Hill than should be really necessary. How many horses are necessary in such a place? Emerson was married in one of the old houses here in Plymouth, known as the Winslow House, built 1754, whose stout frame was made in Eng- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS land. And the gambrel-roofed house on Maine Street saw the birth of Warren, President of the Provincial Congress. " You ought to go to Morton's Park," we were told by an interested waiter at the little place where we stopped for lunch. " It's fine out there, right along the shore of Billington's Sea, and the place is full of flowers." It sounded good to us, but Plymouth had been a sudden inspiration, not part of our plan, and we must follow out suitcases to New Bedford, for, fool ourselves as we might, we were after all but the slaves of time, and not much of our vacation was left us. The train had to be taken. We said so. But Sister, ever on the search for information, wanted to know why the name was Billington, and why sea. They know their history in Plymouth, scorning such ignorance as we ran up against in New- buryport. " They say that it was a man called Billington who climbed a big tree when the Mayflower party was exploring round about here," said our dis- tinguished waiter. " He saw that big lake and thought it was the sea, and so that's what they've called it to this day." Sometimes it is as immortalizing to make a mis- take as to be right. Here shines Billington from - 196-*- OF NEW ENGLAND generation to generation, because of his skill in climbing, and his confusion as to the points of the compass. " Of course it's interesting to see the Rock and the points generally round the town," concluded the waiter, as we prepared to depart, " but it's the country round Plymouth that makes it worth staying here. If you ask me, there isn't any prettier country in the state." " We'll come back another season and see it," said Sister, firmly. " Do you know Massachu- setts well?" He refused to commit himself. " I've come from Boston," he said, vaguely. The train we took was almost empty, and we were able to look out at both sides and to keep the windows open. And as we looked we agreed with the waiter that there was no lovelier country, either in that state or any other. " Things can be as charming, but they can't be more charming than perfection," we decided. The bold and grim glory further north was not here, but there was another glory, tender, dream- ing, full of soft contours and mingling colour. It was a gracious land, this old home of the Pilgrims. There was one lone carriage at the station in New Bedford, one of those dark and shut-in af- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS fairs that are reserved for funerals and these briefer transits from railroad to hotel. We asked the driver what was the best hotel. He appeared to ponder awhile. " The best hotel ain't finished yet," he said, finally. "They're buildin' it, and it's to be real up-to-date, but it ain't anywhere near done yet." " How about the second best hotel? " " I guess it's the Parker House," he ventured. The Parker House became our haven. There is certainly nothing up-to-date about it, but it had an old and musty quality that is not disagree- able. It seems to belong with the old days of New Bedford's past, forever gone. It too, we felt will soon go. The new hotel will surely empty its antique halls and chambers, its vasty dining halls where a frantic group of coloured musicians en- deavour to make you believe you are in the whirl of modern existence by banging away at ragtime melodies or just ragtime without the melody. It is a doomed place, and therefore it has its sad at- traction. " We aren't much in the hotel line now," said a young lady whom we met later, " but when we get the new place that's being built, New Bed- ford won't need to be ashamed of its accommoda- tions any longer." New Bedford is getting to be so very modern -- 198-*- and efficient, and is building so many new struc- tures of stone and brick, that this hotel question is evidently a sore one. It will give a self-satisfied " thank goodness " when it is properly answered by the new hotel, which will doubtless be of the latest and best pattern. As we walked up to register we passed a small room on one side of the lobby in which, upon a large sofa, was seated the largest and stoutest man I ever looked upon. A great head was supported upon a neck that swept outward to tremendous shoulders, and be- neath these the whole body broadened out on a superb scale. A benign expression on his face, the air that hung about him of something regal and unanswerable, a huge fact not to be gain- said, all produced the impression that must have been given by Doctor Johnson in his prime. Col- lected about this magnificent human creature, solid as a mountain and as awe-inspiring, was a circle of lesser men, who were listening in various attitudes of supreme attention. His voice, deep and sonorous, boomed out as he conversed, mak- ing slight but telling gestures with one hand. We could not hear of what he spoke, but to see was enough. Profoundly convinced, we moved slowly on, to put our names into the book and have our rooms assigned us. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS " That man will never move to the new hotel," I declared, as we followed a bellboy to the rooms, facing on the main business street of the town. There was no bath, only a strange contraption with a tin container on top from which water, of a slightly dingy aspect, dripped, when you re- leased a spigot, into a small handbasin below. The hotel was certainly ancient. " The King of the Coffee House," murmured Sister. " Did you notice the huge chair standing out on the street, against the wall, as we came in? I wondered what it was for. From it, I suppose, he dispenses justice to the populace at large." And we were glad that the new hotel was still unfinished. For though there was nothing of the whaler in the appearance of our Doctor Johnson, there was much of an age that is gone and a type that is lost. He gave New Bedford a flavour. When we went down supper was in progress, and a cafe beside the dining room was crowded with travelling men. The dining room itself was entirely empty, and we were waved on deep into its mighty spaciousness by an irreproachable major domo, who appeared to think us more nu- merous than we were, since we were motioned to a table long enough to contain at least eight, past modest little boards laid for two. The food was abundant but characterless, and '-*- 200 -*-' /sJte^ W^^}\ & *s yVr> - Vj -^^V - f\i*. ^***^.\&'* a ' 1 * , ---' _Ji-r'^ OF NEW ENGLAND we ate the clammy banana fritter that appeared in the middle, the flavourless soup at one end, and the oversweet dessert at the other with that resig- nation with which all Americans eat a poor meal in flamboyant surroundings, especially when under the menace of a noisy and energetic orches- tra. Then we wandered out to take a look at the whaling town by night. Nothing lovelier than New Bedford's situation on the Acushnet River could be imagined. Our first walk took us straight to the fine bridge that crosses over to Fairhaven, from which you get a view of the wharves, of the lighthouses and isl- ands, the curve of the river mouth, the green banks and picturesque old water-front buildings. There was plenty of shipping to be seen, and we were told that even to-day whalers still put out from the city, and that whalebone is one of its products. Cotton is an import, and the great white fluffy bales were heaped high on many a dock, so that you get quite a southern effect, and are somewhat surprised not to see a hurrying row of negroes trotting back and forth with burdens on their heads, loading and unloading the lighters. New Bedford still keeps in touch with far and foreign places by way of the sea, for there is, de- lightful fact, a sailing packet service to the Cape -*-2OI -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Verde Islands, and passenger and freight steamers to Lisbon and the Azores. It was Joseph Rotch, back in 1765, who started the whaling business for New Bedford. He bought a tract of land along the river where the city now stands, built some docks, and began to send out ships. Before the industry ceased, or practically ceased, New Bedford led the world at whaling. Now it pretty nearly leads America in making cotton goods of the finer grade, with quantities of other manufactories, one item being blackfish oil, of which it makes about all that is used in the world. This oil is valuable for clock and watch works, we were told by a postcard seller who had a picture of a blackfish that was impressive, the creature being as large as a dolphin. In spite of all this traffic with the sea New Bedford has less the appearance of a seaport town to-day than any other of the towns we had yet visited. It looks perhaps more like a city of the Middle West than a New England town. Most of the fol- lowing morning Sister and I spent in walking through its charming residence quarters and the many lovely parks that help to make it a perfect wealth of greenery. All these broad and quiet streets are lined with magnificent trees, while care- -*- 202-*- OF NEW ENGLAND fully tended gardens sweep back from the side- walk to houses set in their midst, houses square and comfortable, with lots of room in them. These beautiful streets go on mile after mile up and down the river, and there are many cross streets that are just as attractive. But walk on one of these and very soon you touch the country beyond, stretching out into woodlands, where already the city is laying out new parks. Wherever we went in New Bedford we were struck by the civic pride and enterprise that are evidently its strongest char- acteristic. It wants the best, and it is getting more of it year by year. " Don't miss the drive along the shore and round by Clark's Point," our friends in Marble- head had told us, so we decided that we were about due for an automobile. The chauffeur's idea evidently was to get the thing done with, for he began running at a lively clip just as we struck the broad road that swings out into the open, with a wonderful outlook on the bay Buzzards Bay and a fresh sea breeze that contended trium- phantly with hats and hair. " Are we in this machine for the purpose of hanging on to our head covering and wiping the salt tear from our eye, or to see one of the pret- tiest drives in the country? " We put it to him. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS He gave a sort of amazed stare at the water, on which millions of white caps appeared and dis- appeared, keeping time to the measure of the wind. It was not difficult to see the thought labouring in his mind. What sort of freight was he carry- ing? Why had we taken a car when what we wanted was a Shetland pony? He scorned us, but he brought down the pace to what we wanted. There is a stone fort, called Ford Rodman, at Clark's Point, and here the business of being a soldier is still carried on. This fort is one of the twenty-six places reported on in 1909 by the U. S. Chief of Engineers as being a " per- manent coast defence." Of course, the ideas of the Chief may have altered since the happenings on the other side of the Atlantic. Forts nowadays look like curious survivals of faith rather than real defences. But the lay mind is incapable of judgment in such matters, and a seacoast fort has more than itself to depend on. Anyhow, this one looked efficient and low and strong enough to make the biggest ships behave. We came back through Brooklawn and Button- wood Parks. In the latter there is a little Zoo very well arranged, also a ball park where boys were running and shouting, pouring their whole soul into both occupations with that entire aban- don demanded by the national game. A fine statue -*- 204-*- OF NEW ENGLAND in this park has been raised to " The Whalers and their Successors, the Manufacturers," to both of whom New Bedford owes its healthy prosperity. The work is by Zolnay, and the figures of the whaler and his wife at the base and the mechanic at the summit are really superb pieces of sculpture. The buildings that you are expected to see in this thriving city are not the old ones but the new ones. There is, of course, the old town hall, but it has been so done over and refitted that it looks extremely new. It is now the library, one of the first free libraries in the country. A splendid one it is, with an excellent collection relating to the whaling industry and other items of New Bed- ford's previous incarnation. The rooms are large, sunny, airy. The halls wide and decorated with some fine pictures and statues, each bearing on the sea story that made the city known around the world. Outside, near the entrance, is Belah Pratt's well-known " Whaleman." It is finely con- ceived, showing the prow of a boat dashing through waves, while a young man stands poised, harpoon in hand, watching his chance to send the iron home. A quotation cut on the pedestal from Herman Melville's great whaling story, " Moby Dick," summarises the whaleman's life: "A dead whale or a stove boat." OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Up in one of the rooms of the library we found a young woman who was willing to take any amount of trouble in showing us old prints and books relating to the history of her city. Away back it was known as Dartmouth. The Acushnet was an Indian name, of course, but it used to be spelled Acoosnet. We asked her what we ought to see, and she told us that the Marine Historical Society, or the Dart- mouth as it is called, was well worth a visit. " But it is in such a bad part of town," she said, apprehensively. " I don't believe you had better go there unless you go right away, while it is bright daylight. And do please not ask any ques- tion of any one there, man or woman. If you want to find out anything, wait till you see a policeman, or ask a car conductor, for you can trust them. You know, anything might happen in one of those streets down by the water. Why, I've never been to the place alone in my life and I'm a native here." She looked at us with intense warning in her eyes, and we regarded her with a deep thanks in ours. But we refrained from telling her that only the night before we had wandered cheerfully along Water Street, and in other spots very near the water, and that we had seen men going in and out of the saloons that are somewhat frequent in -* 206 *-. OF NEW ENGLAND that neighbourhood. After all, there is a lot of solid satisfaction in believing that the perils of un- believable wickedness lurk on the street corners of any but the " best " parts of your city. It pro- vides some of that sense of adventure, that feel- ing of helplessness, that necessity to turn to the stronger sex for protection, which is so inherent in every woman's breast. So why should we tell her that we had passed in security through darkest New Bedford, and that we had even been courte- ously directed by one of its inhabitants? Among other things in the Dartmouth building we discovered that New Bedford got its name from one Joseph Russell, who came from the fam- ily of the Dukes of Bedford. The city is not one of the earliest, for it was not till 1760 that there was anything that could be called even a village on its site. It reached its top mark as a whaling cen- tre in 1857, when its ships were engaged in the Arctic seas as well as in more southern waters. The Civil War spent a good deal of energy in smash- ing up the great adventure of this tremendous hunting, many of New Bedford's ships being sunk or captured by the Confederates, and most of the rest being taken by the Federal Government, loaded with rock, and sunk off southern harbours to prevent blockade running. Later there were terrible losses in the Arctic seas, scores of vessels H- 207 -*-. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS and hundreds of men going down. Certainly the whales have had their revenge on New Bedford! A touching thing in regard to these losses is what is called the Sailors' Bethel, which was built in 1831, and is full of memorial stones to men lost at sea. New Bedford may not be so picturesque now that she makes cotton goods instead of har- pooning whales, but her children are far less apt to be fatherless and her wives widows than in that glorious era of her existence. Quakers have always been numerous in the city, and they seem never to have met with any hard feelings here, in which New Bedford is distin- guished from most other New England towns. There is a beautiful building, The Friends' Meet- ing House, on the corner of Seventh and Spring Streets, that we were glad not to miss. It is of brick, plain and delicate in colour, severe in its lines, yet eminently noteworthy. We bought a copy of the " Mercury " at a stand close to the office where it is published on Union Street. This is the oldest continuously published paper in the country, the first copy having been printed in 1807. It is a good lively sheet, well- written and with a local flavour that gives it proper value. We stopped to see if we couldn't have a moment's chat with the editor, Mr. Pease, but he was away at the time. After all, no editor -- 208 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND knows how much he escapes in a life he doubtless considers hard, the mere fact that his paper is al- most a decade over a century old probably laying Mr. Pease open to many such attacks. Every one who goes to New Bedford also goes to clean, bright, model Fairhaven with its hand- some modern public buildings and well laid out park and wide streets and general air of neat, charming propriety, like a well washed school child in her Sunday clothes. All this or most of it is due to H. H. Rogers, who was born in the town, and retained a filial interest in her that ex- pressed itself in high schools and libraries and town halls and churches of the best pattern and various types of architecture. It is probably an eminently satisfactory place to live in, though it lacks interest to the tourist seeking character and originality, that thing called personality which be- longs to towns quite as much as to people. " I suppose you can't do too much for a town without the risk of imposing yourself on it, any more than you can for a man or a woman," Sis- ter put it, as we walked idly through the decidedly pretty town. " Like most good things, the busi- ness of giving can be vastly overdone. It's dan- gerous. Let's walk back across the bridge to New Bedford and go to a moving picture." But we only got part way across the bridge, be- '-*- 209 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS cause once again the beauty of that harbour view held us. Along the docks were several square- rigged ships, and for anything we knew to the contrary they might be whalers refitting for deep- sea hunting. Such things still are. The bark " Canton," the oldest whaler in existence, still at- tends to her business, we were told. But of course most of the staunch old vessels have yielded to time. A thrifty touch in this is notable here. When it came to breaking up a whaler no longer fit for the sea, one company thought of packing the timbers into barrels, ready to burn in open fireplaces, and created a demand that was met by the shipment of hundreds of barrels of firewood, that burned with a green and blue light from long contact with salt water. Sitting before such a fire of a wild autumn evening the fancy might be bewitched to strange adventures. " The first ship that ever flew the American flag in an English port sailed from New Bedford," our friend in the library had told us, " and was called after the town, l Bedford.' " And the first ship ever built here, the " Dartmouth," 1767, was one of the famous Tea Fleet in Boston harbour. It was our last evening here, and we wandered up through Hawthorne Street for the association of the name, and to enjoy the wonderful elms that make a complete arch of green overhead and -t-2IO-*- OF NEW ENGLAND stretch onward in a fine vista. Then through County Street, with its porticoed houses, looking like Southern Colonial homes, and the County Court House, with its Greek pillars and pediment. City Hall Square is a dignified centre, every new building being planned to harmonize with what has been done before. The spirit of progress is vitally alive in New Bedford, and whatever it is doing in the line of improvement seems to be ac- complished with taste and discretion. It is a city that is evidently beloved by its citizens, and be- loved with intelligence. New Bedford is within easy reach of over a hun- dred summer resorts, all along Buzzards Bay and up the charming Acushnet River. The islands in the bay have their own attractions, and there are beautiful beaches within a few minutes' reach of the city. The westernmost of these islands, Cutty- hunk, was the place where Bartholomew Gosnold, the discoverer of all this section, tried to establish a colony in 1602. A monument erected by the Dartmouth Historical Society commemorates this effort, and stands on a small island inside a lagoon that runs up into Cuttyhunk. Since we were going up to Provincetown we were to take the ferry to Fairhaven and connect with the train there early next morning. The ferry is but a few blocks from the hotel. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS " Let's get a man to carry our suitcases for us, and walk down to the boat," Sister proposed, so I left directions for a man to be ready for us right after breakfast. The boat goes early, and we had a nip and tuck business of breakfast, but came out to the desk with time enough, if none to spare. Instead of a man a small messenger boy with a bicycle stood at the curb. He had spent some ingenious minutes in binding those solid cubes of weight to his wheel with leagues of twine, and started blithely off as we came out. Bang went the wheel and down tumbled the suitcases, dragging the twine after them in a tangled mass. And the moments that were left us were very few! At this instant two very small and ragged boys, hauling a little express cart of a toy kind behind them, came cantering round the corner. I hailed them and they responded instantly. We cut loose our baggage and piled it into the new vehicle, while the messenger boy stood gaping. Then we ran, the small boys ahead dragging their wagon, over the cobblestones of Water Street, past de- lighted inhabitants of that wild and rough neigh- bourhood, on, on, on! " It ain't much farther, Ma'am," gasped the gal- loping boys, as we turned corners and rushed down hills fortunately the way to the water is -+ 212-*- OF NEW ENGLAND down in this world. We struck the pier at the wrong side and had to make a mad detour to reach the entrance, but we did it, and the boat still waited, with two minutes to spare. We sank upon a seat, while the two small boys bit upon the coins we had given them. Then, riding his wheel with speed, the messenger boy charged down and leaped toward us. "You gotter pay me," he cried. "The Com- pany says so." " Go back," we told him, gently, " and say any- thing you like to the Company, and tell them we said it. But not one cent for tribute." And so we left New Bedford, wondering whether the messenger boy rifled the two smaller boys of the coin we had given them, or whether they had already made good their escape. "Anyhow, I think, though they were small, that they looked like fighters," Sister remarked hopefully. " I don't believe it would be possible to take that money from them living." 213 Provincetown CHAPTER IX Provincetown HERE is nothing wild and dashing about the train that takes you to Provincetown. It stops at every station and looks about, while passengers get slowly on and off, chat with the brakemen, and swap news among themselves. Perhaps, in the season, it gets more brisk and businesslike, but in the early days of June it makes you think of the progress of a rural mail delivery wagon up a Maine country road where the farms are rather sparse, and the farmers apt to be at the box ready to get their bulletins from the Agricultural Department and their mail-order goods, and to pass the time of day with the driver. After the conductor had decided which car was to go to Provincetown and we had carted our bag- gage and ourselves into it, and found separated seats, since the place was filled up, and cussed the stupidity of the management as usual, we turned to look at the passing landscape, which is attrac- tive enough to make you forget far bitterer travel woes. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS At the broad base of the Cape farms spread out, and huge trees crowd close to white houses and march beside the winding roads in splendid pro- cessions. Lovely little lakes and rushing brooks lend their variety, and where these fail the blue sea takes up the charming story. Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Harwich, the names of old towns awaken memories of Eng- lish trips. They are as picturesque and as inter- esting too, though very different. These old places date back to 1639 and keep all the racy flavour of their seagoing past. Nothing of spick and span modernity here, but ship-folk's neatness and individuality, old houses sturdily remaining where the centuries have met and passed them, and old retired seamen crammed with marvellous stories dominating the village life. On the south side thunders the ocean, on the north sleep the wide reaches of the bay. Sum- mer folk choose one side or the other, and become fanatical in upholding the rival claims of either. The ocean side has its wild splendour and more rugged character to recommend it, and all the fresh tang of Atlantic winds. It has also a suc- cession of fogs throughout the summer, and there is where the north shore triumphs. Old Maus- hope, as the Indians had it, smokes his pipe less often on the bay than facing the inrolling surf. -*-2i8-*- OF NEW ENGLAND As we got on toward the centre of the Cape the landscape changed. More and more sand, and great stretches of dwarfed pine with tawny bark and dark needles, and a general appearance of be- ing the veterans of an unending warfare. The little hills roll up and down, and between them are wide cranberry bogs, carefully drained, with narrow ditches full of water that remind you of irrigating projects in the West. Cape Cod grows most of the cranberries that are marketed, and in the picking season her bogs take on a populous look that is like that of the English hopfields at harvest. The pickers come in hundreds, some de- pending on their hands, others using various ma- chines that have been the fruit of Yankee inge- nuity. Some of the pickers make as much as four or five dollars a day at the work, though a six-quart measure only brings a few cents. As we drew on to the narrower part of the Cape, where it makes the elbow bend, the sand grew in power, the little pines more desperate in their struggle against it and against the wind, that lifts and tosses these sand-hills almost at will. The un- believably blue water came closer. Earlier in the day we passed along the edge of the canal for a few miles, and saw a steamer going through. Only one can go through at a time, since the passage is OLD SEAPORT TOWNS too narrow for ship to pass ship, and signals set at either end determine the right of way. There are fine roads now on the Cape, roads where motors fly easily along, but turn off these into the original tracks that lead from farm to farm or through the scrubby woods from village to village, and your horse sinks fetlock deep at every step. Nothing more different than the forma- tion here from that of Cape Ann could have been achieved. Here the land is in greater flux than the water, and at Truro the harbour has been prac- tically swallowed up by sand, in spite of great sums spent to keep it open. 'If twenty maids with twenty brooms swept it for half a year, Do you suppose' the Walrus asked, ' that they could sweep it clear? ' ' I doubt it/ said the Carpenter, and shed a bitter tear." " A navy man told me lately," I informed Sis- ter, as she quoted the above, " that since the canal was built Provincetown stands a like danger. These places will probably be inland towns one of these days, with only vague memories of the sea stirring feebly in the mind of the Oldest Inhabi- tant." " But aren't these sand-hills wonderfully beau- tiful?" Sister demanded. ^^w^^^^i y^si^.' ^ > r3k, '^" ^ ; i|&|3t' !a " r '* p ' J <^ ^f s -^sIiS^S i >^: *- ,^ ^ ^^^x?j&tf>tSis&&*~.**~,- &_ .^~-* ^^'^^- VJ.: 1 ^ ^^'^^^i^ ; ' : ^ B- ff*ff# feg^^lg^WHto K Ir-xM ^^tei^'j^J^^f; -fSs?-^ ^->i-:^fi- '.^^ii C:^v v ^^?:^^ : ^^"^H; ^ (^^^^B 'W/'tea OF NEW ENGLAND So they are. Their colour, their long curves and abrupt cliffs, the vegetation that clings to them, dwarf pine and oak, slender birch, close-growing berry bushes and bayberry, the coarse grass that shines in the sun, each with its own soft hue con- trasting with the pale yellow sand in a thousand shades of green and tawny and brown and red, and framed by blue sea and blue sky it is a shout of joy, and your spirits rise to it. Back in 1690 the fisher folk in these parts used to fish for whale from shore and make their kill- ings too. They would row out and bag a whale before breakfast, and think nothing of it. But the whales were more disturbed, even to the extent of moving away from close contact with Truro or Provincetown or Eastham. Upon which the fish- ermen built boats and followed, passing the At- lantic and Pacific and going into the Arctic and Antarctic Seas after the flying monsters. The country must have its whales. Thoreau tells us that it was decided to give the pastors a share of every whale cast up by the sea, and exercises his dry humour on the picture evoked " of the old parsons sitting on the sand- hills," watching for the Jonah fishes that were to eke out their scant salaries. And now we pulled toward Provincetown, see- ing for a good half hour the long curve of the -*- 221 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS point of the Cape on which the town lies, and the dominating monument to the Pilgrims that stands on its highest hill, called High Pole Hill, from which you can not only see the whole of Province- town, but apparently most of the world besides, though it is but seventy feet in altitude. At the station stood a delightfully ramshackle bus drawn by two horses, into which we mounted and were taken, in a turn or two, to the Central Hotel, which, like all the rest of the buildings on the sea side of Commercial Street, is built out into the water behind. Provincetown has, properly speaking, only two streets, which used to be called most appropriately Front and Back. Now these names have been superseded by Commercial and Bradford. This is the only mistake the adorable town has committed. Early as our start from New Bedford had been it was a long way past high noon before we got to the Central Hotel, and we wasted no time in getting into the dining room. And oh, the delectable seafood, chowders, and broiled fish and fish cooked every other way, and good roast meats and marvellous pies of that room! Throughout our stay, and how we wished that it might have been prolonged for a whole summer, we went with joyful anticipations to those meals in the dining room that hung right -*- 222-*- OF NEW ENGLAND over the harbour, and always those anticipations were beaten by the reality. A homey, unpretentious place is the Central Hotel, a place you like from the minute you enter it and to which your thoughts return with longing after you have left it. Our room was big and full of sea wind. It looked down into the water, and beneath its win- dows old boats and seagulls lay rocking on the wave. We were awakened next morning by the eerie, sad callings of these birds, supported by the minor diapason of lapping water. " Magic case- ments opening on the foam " could not have pro- vided a sweeter reveille. Just beyond our chamber an upper veranda with great rocking chairs and a view that took in all the harbour tempted us to long, sweet hours of doing nothing. An occasional grunt of content- ment, a slight shifting of position how simple a thing is happiness! You can see New York or San Francisco or Chicago. It may take some time, but it can be done. But you can never see Province- town. Of course, you can go all over it in an hour. Walk up and down its two long streets and weave back and forth through its fascinating lanes. What of that? Walk them again and again, till -- 223 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS every foot is familiar; go down on every old wharf head and climb the changing sand-hills. Keep it up a lifetime, and then, if some one asked you if you'd seen Provincetown, you, being truth- loving, would hesitate to say yes. After all there was a to-morrow, and doubtless Provincetown held something fresh for that morrow, as it had for all the yesterdays. We stepped out from the hotel to be confronted by a man ringing a large bell. He wore a some- what large and very round hat and a coat that, I think, used once to be called a roundabout. Any- way, the word describes it. " It's the Town Crier," exclaimed Sister with delight. It was, and when he had finished ringing he made an announcement that a small power boat belonging to a certain resident was to be sold the following day. Then he moved farther on down the street. People stopped to listen for a moment and then went on about their business. Town criers were nothing more to them than an extra is to New York. The name of this stout-voiced gentleman is Wal- ter L. Smith, and he earns a tidy little sum every season by his work. Probably in winter he has little to do, but when there is news of a shipwreck, a fire, or even something from the war front that OF NEW ENGLAND seems particularly important, Mr. Smith sees that it is cried for the benefit of the villagers. The last time I had heard a town crier was the year before the war, in the little French town of Grez, close to the line where the German peril was broken and flung back along the Marne. He had been crying a lost cow, I remember. " Thank goodness the brutes didn't get there," I exclaimed, and Sister stared astonished. So I explained the workings of my mind, and we set out to explore Provincetown. " Are we going to be faithful to our old loves? " Sister asked, as we walked along the water side of Front Street, which is about as straight as a trout brook through a rocky pasture, following as it does the irregularities of the shore line. " Don't forget how we regretted having to leave Ports- mouth, for example, or Gloucester. And are we now to forget those ancient stone places for this village built on the sands? " " Maybe," I admitted. For already the strong charm of the little town had gripped me. There was something about the way it comes crowding down to the water, sticking its feet right into the harbour, pushing its houses right between its boats, the way it tucked itself close together, little 'house by little house, as protection against the sea wind, the beckoning charm of those narrow, OLD SEAPORT TOWNS flower-edged lanes that were so short, and which nevertheless managed to curve mysteriously, as all lanes should, that caught and held you from the very first instant. A high gable to the one or one and one-half story houses, sharp pointed and steep, that is the Prov- incetown pattern. There are little oblong houses too, without a gable, and a few that rise to all the dignity of three stories, but they are not so char- acteristic. A few steps from our hotel is the old Town Hall with the bronze relief before it commemorating the signing of the famous compact aboard the Mayflower, which remained in the harbour for close upon a month, while the little shallop looked for some place where a home could be established, finally fixing on Plymouth. It was a difficult month, marked by Indian attacks and bitter cold, death, and illness. It was here that little Peregrine White was born. The landing was made at the end of the harbour close to the present mile-long break- water leading to the Woodsend Light, and here an- other tablet is set up. There were many explora- tions of the land inward from the shore, but the sandy hills were not likely to appeal to an agricul- tural group such as arrived on the Mayflower. A few wanted to stay and fish for cod, but they were overruled, particularly after the Indians had let '- 226 -- OF NEW ENGLAND fly some scores of arrows at a party led by Miles Standish. The Pilgrims were not the first visitors from Europe to visit Provincetown, but they made more of a stay. The first authenticated visitor appears to have been Gosnold, on that voyage of his in 1602. He landed here and declared himself " so pestered with cod fish " that he gave the Cape the name it has borne ever since. A beautiful old church is another charm of Front Street, its spire making one more of that gracious, slender sisterhood piercing the New England skies from Maine to Connecticut. Both these old buildings face the harbour, and back up against the slope of the hill behind, as though the builders wished to put them in as safe a spot as could be found. We walked round the Town Hall and took the path leading up High Pole Hill to the Pilgrim Monument, a lofty tower of granite that is modelled upon the tower in the Public Place of Siena. An old sailor lives in a small, neat caretaker's cottage beside the shaft of stone, and sees that no blade of grass grows awry on the greensward surrounding the monument. He told us that if the day had not been a trifle hazy we could have seen Cape Ann and much of the shore. As it was we overlooked a very great deal of water and land and distant -*- 227-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS towns and white lighthouses, while the charming town beneath us was visible to its last Portuguese cottage. For in addition to its other fascinations Prov- incetown is largely populated by these dark-eyed, vivid children of the sun, who run much of its business and supply an element of human colour and beauty that is almost startling. You are prepared to meet bearded captains with the roll of blue water in their gait, or tanned youths whose shoulders are broad and strong from the pull of an oar and the weight of a seine. You expect slim maids with a Quaker demureness, and patient old women who have looked in vain for the return of their man from his calling. But you are not prepared to catch, at some lilac shrouded corner, the low laughter and soft tongue of the Cape Verde or Azores Islands, to see the silhouette of a keen dark face, the glint of blue-black hair under a brilliant shawl, and a round soft brown throat dec- orated with coral beads. Yet here they are! Men with dark, drooping mustachios wearing loose white shirts and trousers that were never made for the legs of an American take you out in a motor boat in the harbour, or run the big motor buses that dawdle the length of Front Street, stopping to talk with any one who has information to give or to collect, while the passengers sit comfortably +228*- OF NEW ENGLAND waiting, watching the moving, changing life of the lively little street. The shops that have probably impelled the in- habitants to change the name Front to Commercial, a change to which both Sister and I refused to submit, are divided between those that frankly ap- peal to the wandering tourist and those that sup- ply the needs of boat and ship and fisherman. There are cold storage plants too, where fish bait can be procured, but we saw no flakes, and perhaps Provincetown has entirely ceased to dry any cod or halibut. It used to be second only to Gloucester in the work. But there is plenty of fishing going on, for half the talk we overheard in the street be- tween man and man was concerned with it. " Can we get a boat for a couple of hours? " was one of our frequent inquiries. " Well, now, let me see. There's old Sylva, he might be able to let you have one. I don't know of any one else you see, they're all out fishin'." And Mr. Sylva, Portuguese, a big, soft-voiced man with flashing black eyes, was greatly dis- tressed, but could not get us a boat: "Maybe, to-morrow we see." But it doesn't matter. It is just as pleasant, per- haps even more so, to make your way, somewhat gingerly, out to the end of one of the old wharves, there to sit and watch an enthusiastic artist, palette -- 229-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS on thumb, sketching the clustering town, with its red roofs climbing one above the other so steeply from the water's edge. Each wharf has its artist, as well as its small, adventurous boys, who appear to be partly amphibian, from the careless way in which they tumble in and out of the water or grub about waist-high after hidden treasure when the tide is low. The wharves are most dilapidated, with huge gaping holes and whole boards missing, and bear- ing old signs that warn the passer of peril if he tread upon them. They are about equal in risk to the wooden sidewalks of a western mining camp whose boom is over, only here you drop into the sea instead of a dry gully or arroyo. We found it great fun to get on one of the buses in the evening, while the sunset still flushed the sky and echoed in the water, and go trundling up and down the street from the Truro line at one end to the junction of Front and Back at the other. Be- yond this point the street still continues, but it is narrower, and is known here as Way Up Along. You go on afoot here, if you choose, to the Break- water, and then on that to the beach opposite where the surf breaks, and Woodsend Light is set to guide the mariner, one of the five that are nec- essary along this dangerous shore. Of course, one morning, we did choose. As we OF NEW ENGLAND reached the point where the stone is set that marks the landing of the Pilgrims we met a Ford con- taining a couple with the honeymooner look. They stopped. " Can you tell us where the rest of Provincetown is? " the young man asked us. " How much have you seen? " " We've just come right along the road here from Truro." " Well, when you go back, take the road to the left, keep on past the railway station and as far as Allerton Lane. That will take you back into the Truro Road, and there you have the whole of Provincetown unless you want to walk." They looked at each other, smiling. " Can you beat it! We thought this place was a big town. But it's been a good run, anyhow, if there ain't much at the end of it." And nodding to us, they bustled away, on the search, I suppose, for a nice crowded city. There was a country freshness about them, and it was the whirl of life they wanted, not village peace nor nature's solitudes. Walking on the breakwater, made as it is of huge blocks and slabs of Cape Ann granite, with the water running through beneath your feet with all manner of little gurgles and tinklings, with the gulls crying overhead and a breeze playing round OLD SEAPORT TOWNS you, is distinctly good fun. It revives the joys of childhood, when you tripped along the top of any flat wall that came in your way, or sprang from stone to stone up the rushing brook when spring had filled it. There is a full mile of this walking, and then the beach of golden sand, the Life Sav- ing Station, the Lighthouse, snow white and at- tractive. A bit of garden braved the sea, some men were at work painting a boat. We sat at the edge of the surf while little sandpipers dashed curi- ously toward us and off again with squeaks of ex- citement. Just as the Chinese date their history from the dynasties of their emperors, so Provincetown dates hers from the great storms that have proved par- ticularly destructive and terrible. They still speak of the " Magee storm," when a government ship went down in 1778, of the " Great October Gale " of 1842, ami it is said that the only ship that was ever got off Peaked Hill Bar, once she went aground, was the San Francisco, in a bad storm during the Spanish War of 1898, who was safely brought into port The keepers of the string of lighthouses along this treacherous arm of sand have an anxious life of it. Now that the canal is cut through the Cape a great amount of coastwise travel will no longer have to take this roundabout and dangerous course, Vtyj&*\'> ^t, ; ^%5T- ^^^%^- __* "to*?*- '>i<'' :; "'r** /*2BP ls t' i - =ar ' xf -SaffA**. JZ&^v***^ Jm ' fc"^4'^xx' *Tii*l '''V.-'fev.'^.. fei^^frii^^iK" v. .^Pi^ - l^.-^l? '' :: " S! '-' !Z r4*f^S^I^''m OF NEW ENGLAND but the seagoers and the fishing fleets still watch for those far-reaching beams as anxiously as ever. A huge bell hangs before the Woodsend house, lending its aid in the fogs that are even more dreaded than the tempests. Man and the elements play a close game from end to end of the New England coast. One strange case was that of the " Somerset," an English man-of-war chased by the French fleet during the Revolution, and striking on Peaked Hill Bar. A gang of wreckers from Provincetown took everything from her that was worth the work of removing, and left her high and dry on the sands. Gradually she was buried from sight, and as the years went on she was forgotten. Then, in 1886, a series of high tides and furious seas tore away the shrouding sand, and the skeleton frigate was once again exposed to the enemy, this time to be picked over by summer tourists and relic hunters. Then again the sands mounted and hid her, the grass grew, and to-day no sign of the great ship is left. Provincetown folk had plenty of the New Eng- land cantankerousness, at least in the past. Front Street has in parts superseded its long plank walk with concrete, but this walk was once the subject of bitter controversy in the town. For, when An- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS drew Jackson gave the seaport its share of the Sur- plus Revenue, this money was devoted to building " a wooden footway " that would save the towns- folk from the necessity of struggling through ankle-deep sand as soon as they stepped out of doors. The element opposed to this use of the money was so enraged at being beaten that it refused ever to use the walk, and plodded in the middle of the road with its shoes full of sand and its heart of bitterness till its dying day. The Portuguese part of the town is particularly fascinating. Here the little lanes are no more than foot tracks, and go twining in and out between lovely, brilliant bits of gardens and small cottages, some weatherbeaten grey, others white as the stones that are set about the flower beds. Soft-eyed chil- dren play on the doorsteps, wearing cotton dresses of orange, blue, scarlet, anything gay that comes to hand. From the cottages come snatches of foreign song as the mothers go about their household tasks, getting dinner ready for the olive-skinned men working in the little farms that only a Portuguese could bring to harvest there among the sand-hills, or fishing out in the harbour for bait that will be used in deep-sea work. Many a charming walk lured us out among those same hills. Desolate old graveyards lie here, the -4.234-*- OF NEW ENGLAND sand tossing over the bones below as the sea tosses over those that found their last bed in the water. There are the cemeteries of the Methodists and the Quakers, where some attempt at decoration has been made, and the Catholic burying ground where stark crosses give the spot a look of the battlefield. Leaving these behind the wandering paths take you on between fragrant pines to the shores of clear ponds. In one of these the Pilgrims washed their accumulation of soiled linen while they awaited the reports of the exploring party. Now they harbour wild fowl, and are left as solitary as though there was never a home or a house within fifty miles. On Way Up Along there is a Red Inn that is a delectable hostelry run by a New York woman who has had the old house altered and enlarged for her purpose with the most careful considera- tion of its original form and aspect. It is perhaps the oldest house in Provincetown, and was known for years as the Old Red House. Inside it has the narrowest staircase that ever allowed a family to get from one story to another. New England fish- erfolk do not run to fat, and certainly no one who lived in this house could ever have approached stoutness. There is another stairway to-day, in the new portion of the building, but the old one, and -+235-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS the old rooms, with their low ceilings and charm- ing proportions, remain as they were. The view is one of the best in town, and you can slip on a bathing suit in the early morning and drop right off the veranda into the silver water, warm as new milk. Each room has its charming colour scheme, its private bath, its quaint and com- fortable furnishings. The place was like an old story beautifully told rather than a real thing. To any one seeking lux- ury and unerring taste in the picturesque seclusion of this old town, the Old Red Inn is a counsel of perfection. The artist, Charles Hawthorne, has a school in Provincetown that is rapidly becoming famous. Since we determinedly claim a remote cousinship with this painter we tried to find him, but he had not yet arrived at his summer studio, though signs of life about the place spoke of his imminence. Every now and then on the street a palpable art student swung by, in smock and futurist colouring if a woman, and sometimes if a man. Province- town does not turn her head as they pass, though New York would probably block her traffic for a better view. The seaport considers them as useful in their way as the now vanished cod and mackerel were to its past. It sells them its goods and poses for them in oils and souVesters, and rents them its -*- 236 *- OE NEW ENGLAND cottages, as well as rambling rooms in the empty store garrets of its tumbing wharves for studios. Provincetown, more than any other of the sea- ports we had seen, gives a sense of unchangedness. There are little new cottages with little new names, " Grace Darling," " Celia," " Wind-Rest," to be sure, but they are not noticeable. Its character is too absolute, too marked, to be affected by the slight inroad to-day has made on yesterday. There it lies among its wild sand-hills beside its wonderful har- bour, quaint, lovable, unique, full of stories of the sea as it is of sea wind, murmuring like a shell and restful beyond any words. " It seems to have learned the lesson of immor- tality from the sea and the sand," Sister said. " It will endure as they endure, with immaterial changes and telling constancy. I want to put on a purple smock and rent a studio on an old wharf and stay here forever, don't you? " " I do." Alas I It is the simple wishes of the human heart that are the most difficult of achievement. In the old fairy stories it is the third daughter, who only asks her father to bring back a white rose, while her sisters demand pearl necklaces and diamond tiaras, that puts him to real trouble and danger. Our path led back along the length of the Cape to -H 237 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS the palaces of Newport, and the red roofs of Prov- incetown might shelter us no longer. " This is the last of the small places," I moaned, as we packed for departure. " The more I see of them, and the more I see of cities, the surer I am that the latter are no fit dwelling place for a human being. It is the little places that we love. Home, in other words, should be where the heart is." We looked up the street that went so leisurely on its way, depositing its houses at greater and greater intervals in the direction of Truro, giving room to the boats that prodded its very sidewalk, reaching out its long wooden arms into the har- bour, edging close to its gardens, and hospitably receiving its little green lanes that ran to it in search of the sea. Yes, it hadn't taken long to learn to love it. " You may jest, but your heart is breaking, like my own," declared Sister. " But, thank goodness, we have one more dinner coming to us at the Cen- tral. Let us go and eat it." 238 Newport CHAPTER X Newport |HERE is a very pretty sail from Fall River to Newport, first through Mount Hope Bay and then into Narragansett, as diversified and lovely a sheet of water as the Atlantic provides. So we decided to make the short trip by boat and since there was no dan- ger of rough water Sister agreed with me that to take a train when you might take a boat was fool- ishness personified. We ate supper on board while the boat still clung to the wharf. Fall River appears to be mostly a collection of tall, many-windowed, clean, and attractive factories, whose many wheels are all turned by the tumbling swift river that gives the town its name. We got back to the deck just as we were pulling away, while the sun was tuning up in the west with a red and gold extravaganza, which the broad bay was doing its best, and a most creditable best it was, to copy. It looked like something Urban might do for white-limbed maidens to dance before. We had noticed a trail of rice as we came OLD SEAPORT TOWNS aboard, and now the couple appeared, shedding still more of this vegetable, sacred to weddings, and giggling as they shed. They were stared at with that mingling of interest, amusement, and pity with which honeymooners are regarded in public places, and they seemed to enjoy the notice with- out bothering about its constituents. Four youthful marines who marched together in a solid phalanx, watched them with particular delight. When the honeymooners moved, they moved, and when they paused the marines stood rooted. The bride, not averse from this interest in eight young male eyes, managed to show that, if deprecating, she was not unaware nor indignant. The newly made husband had the air of one who says: " You may be potential heroes, but look what I've done." The sunset continued to make quick, crafty changes in its colour combinations and patterns, hoping to catch the bay napping. But the bay was alert, and doubled every move with little rollicking variations of its own that showed it could do more still if it were pressed. And now lighthouses began to swing their beams of white or flash up and down like signal fires, red and white, some slow, some fast. The land turned dark but held its soft contours. It was, in fact, a perfect night. Lighting up its own myriad lamps, our -*- 242 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND galleon moved nobly onward through the pomp, carrying its freight of lovers, soldiers, and ordinary folk toward whatever fates were theirs. And so we swept on into Newport Harbour, a fairy scene if ever there was one. The Indians called Newport Aquidneck, which is to say The Island of Peace. This soft evening, in the tranquil bay, with ships moored close on every side, each with its riding lights and many brilliant from stem to stern, the wharves more dusky, the mounting city behind, islands and points of land stretching into the harbour, lighted with chains of lamps, the name came to mind. Island of Peace it was. Now we stole in and out among the anchored vessels and harbour guides till we reached the Fall River Pier, which was crowded with people who had arrived to see the boat come in. Also, as we found, to see the bride and groom on the boat. For some twenty or thirty young people were there to shout, screech, and sing a welcome, interspersed with witticisms at the expense of the groom. The happy couple leaned obligingly over the rail on the lower deck and listened to all, but made no answer beyond an occasional giggle. Not so the marines. They took a hand at once, especially the youngest, an energetic young man who reminded us of Ortheris, in " Soldiers Three." This boy cheered -+243-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS when the crowd cheered, he jumped with joy when a dance started on the wharf, begging the whirling girls for a turn: "Say, you in the pink dress, gimme a chance too," or else he shouted for songs that he loved. A sailor on the dock observed him and called up some dark insult to a marine. What it was we couldn't hear, but Ortheris immediately started to climb over the boat's side, stuttering broken phrases. His companions laid stout hands on him and hauled him firmly back. " D'you hear what he said? He wouldn't dast say that if I was down there lemme get at him, I tell you." Then he raised his voice, begging, im- ploring that sailor to come on deck where he'd show him. And then, the welcoming party on the dock starting a new song, he burst into applause. When they had finished, " Give us ' A Bit o' Heaven,' " he implored, and still he begged for that morsel of blessedness, and still the crowd sang other songs. And so we left him, every inch alive and active, surging full of youth, ready to love, readier to fight, friends with all the world and fit for any ad- venture. There are many in Newport's cottages who might envy him, though you could hardly convince them of the fact. There are two distinct Newports, one of which OF NEW ENGLAND is a splendid bore and the other full of history, charm, and colour. The Newport of Washington Square and Touro and Clarke and Farwell and Pelham and Thames Streets, the Newport of the wharves, the Newport of the Point, where the old prim hiproofed houses edge the water between strips of garden, where ancient men potter about mending lobster pots and painting boats a bright pea-green ; the Newport of Trinity Church with its lovely spire and ancient graveyard, where among other " noteworthy corpses," as an old lady told me, lies the Comte Louis d'Arsac de Ternay, of the suite of Rochambeau, a visitor at Newport during the Revolution, where, in the old house that is now oc- cupied by the Newport Charity Organization, he and Washington discussed the plans that brought about the final victory. That is the Newport Sister and I lingered in and found good. There you really do find cottages, grey and vine-hung, shelter- ing under huge buttonwood trees, as they call the sycamores, and growing clumps of daffodils among the grass of their old lawns. But of course all this is not " the real " Newport. That has its heart in the Casino, and sits proudly on the cliffs, having spent all the money it can in every way it can think of, struggling for luxury and social eminence with a whole-hearted devotion that fill the be- holder with amused admiration. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS " Cottages" first became an institution in 1852, when there were twelve magnificent houses owned by Bostoners and Southerners, for it was the South that first made Newport a summer resort. The winter that followed the summer of '52 was a great one in Newport's history. More than sixty cottages were built by persons whose chief idea was to look as though they had never entered a cottage in their lives. By 1879 Bellevue Avenue as far as Bailey's Beach was adorned with wondrous homes. An article published in that year in the Providence " Journal " has these words : " Every known and unknown order of architec- ture is represented. The styles of old Germany and modern France, of Switzerland and Italy, of England and the isles of the sea, are faithfully re- produced." It goes on to tell of the gardens, " standing out in bold relief are trees like the elm, the oak, and the sugar maple," and further it dilates upon the " graperies," where fruits " are ripened almost at will. Nectarines, apricots, peaches, and figs grow in the graperies. Tiny dwarf trees are set in pots, and when ripened fruit hangs on the branches the trees are placed upon the dining table that the guests may pluck the fruit themselves." Where now are those hundred and two hundred thousand dollar cottages, those graperies, those simple, fruit-plucking guests? - 246-*- OF NEW ENGLAND Disappeared more utterly than the shingled houses of the Point and the wharves where once a dozen West India men were docked in a single day. These still remain, solid and genuine as the land on which they stand and the water into which they project. But where those early German and late French and nondescript rich men's homes stood so flamboyantly there are now other cottages on which millions have been spent, built of white marble and porphyry, pillared and arched and huge, roofing over a vast collection of resplendent rooms, superb witnesses of what can be accom- plished, if you put your money to it, in getting away from the mode of life indulged in by our cave-dwelling ancestors. Actually, there is a third Newport, besides these two extremes. It is the Newport of the boarding house. The town is filled with them. Practically everything that isn't a cottage or a public building is a boarding house. And to these lodgings, for their two weeks or month of vacation, come the hardworking clerks and stenographers, come the shop-girls and the floor walkers, come families from Harlem and the Bronx, to have a " good time." They have it, too. They walk where they may look at the motor cars loaded with society flash by, they point out individuals known to them through the Sunday supplements, they even get OLD SEAPORT TOWNS glimpses of tennis and polo, and they row into the bay out around the famous yachts. All the glamour of the Midas fairyland shines for them, they admire its clothes and are shocked at its man- ners, and go home refreshed, unconsciously, by the soft sea air and misty skies of the beautiful place, and stimulated by a view of those human heights which if not they, then surely their grandchildren, shall attain some distant but never impossible day. The mystery of Newport is the old Stone Tower or mill, and to this Sister and I bent our steps after an excellent breakfast in a small hotel in the old town. " Everything old in Newport lies just round this old tower," I told Sister, and we decided that we'd see the old first. Our time was not long, and why should we risk losing what we chiefly cared for? The palaces must wait, poor things. After all, there is always something ludicrous about a new palace. The old fellows belonged, just as knights in armour and courtiers in silk and satin belonged to their own age. Nowadays the appearance of a cocked hat or an embroidered waistcoat would be an occasion for hilarity, and the discomfort of even the best chain armour was pointed out years ago by Mark Twain. But the humour and oppression of wearing a huge ornamental house has not yet been so widely recognised. .-+ 248 H- OF NEW ENGLAND Washington Square was paved in 1772 from the proceeds of a lottery, Pelham Street sharing in the good fortune. It must have been a big haul, for the paving has lasted nobly. Up at the head of the Square is the Court House, which used to be the old State House, built in 1738, a dignified and sat- isfactory structure. The balcony of this house has been the scene of many proclamations. Here in 1761 the accession of George III was announced, and here in '76 the Declaration was read by Major John Handy. For many years the elections of the Governors of the state were here declared. In the old Senate Chamber is the Stuart portrait of Wash- ington. In the little park the statue of Perry stands, almost in front of the house he bought shortly before his death, the old Seixas mansion. This fine building was the bank of Rhode Island from 1795 to 1820. Touro Street leads you past the Synagogue, built in 1763, and the oldest in the United States, to Touro Park and the old mill. The street used to be called the Street that Leads to the Mill, and got its present name from the first Rabbi. We walked up it, guide in hand, and gave dutiful glances at the Historical Society Building, where there are collections of old-time things, Indian relics, and manuscripts, such as every self-respecting New OLD SEAPORT TOWNS England town collects and displays for the benefit of the historically minded. The queer old mill we found to be as picturesque as all the speculations concerning it demand. Built of rough stones, over thirty feet high, the thick round body of it stands on a circle of thick round pillars of the same rough-hewn stone. An iron fence surrounds it. For at least a hundred and fifty years that tower stood there, a conspicuous object from the sea be- fore the town was as built up as it is at present, and no one bothered about its historic significance. It was just a ruin from which the woodwork had fallen or been stolen. What it had been used for people did not trouble to inquire, nor would an answer have come. Then some one with an " eye " remarked that the architecture was distinctly Norse. Whereupon the tower sprang into the limelight and fame was thrust upon it. Danish scholars de- cided that the tower had been built by ancestors of theirs long ages before the Columbian discovery of America. The old sagas that sang of far jour- neys to a strange land were once more deciphered, bringing delightful proof of the ancient construc- tion of this stone mystery. Moreover, was there not on the shore of Taunton River, a tidal stream of Narragansett Bay, a curious rock carved over -*- 250-*- Trinity Church Newport OF NEW ENGLAND with hieroglyphics which had long puzzled stu- dents and laity alike? There was, what is more there still is. Though time and water have done their best to erase the strange carving, it is still traceable. There had been those who claimed the work of Indian origin. But the Danes who looked upon it swore that it was the work of their wild forefathers. So here was a tower and here was a stone. And then came the man. He was only a skeleton, but he had that about him which spoke as loudly as words. Attached to his breast was a shield of brass, and round his mid- dle hung a belt curiously worked, of the same staunch metal. He was discovered buried deep in Fall River township, and the Danes who saw the armour said it was the same as that worn by men in their own land before the twelfth century. The chain was complete. But it was all a Cook's tale without foundation. For the tower turned out to be like one or two others that had been built in scattered portions of New England, and was moreover mentioned in the will of Governor Benedict Arnold, 1677, as " my stonebuilt windmill." And the more the Runic characters of the stone were studied, the less in- telligible they became. As for the skeleton, the -+251 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS brass he wore was not the sort that the Scandina- vians beat into arms or armour, and did very closely resemble the work of the native Indians, a chain about his neck being almost identical with others discovered in the burial places of the red men. So there was an end of the Norse significance of the tower, which once again became a mill; re- maining none the less precisely as beautiful and pic- turesque as it was before the story was told and disproved. What is more, Longfellow believed in the tale at least strongly enough to write " The Skeleton in Armour," and tell how: ' There, for my lady's bower, Built I the lofty tower Which, to this very hour, Stands looking seaward" We looked upon it, moralising how stories are born and grow and die. " Still," remarked Sister, " old Governor Arnold's will doesn't say that he built the tower. Perhaps he just requisitioned it, and it was here before he came. And after all the Runic Stone is there too, and the characters are as likely to be Scandinavian as Indian. And the skeleton might have been a Norseman who had lost his own weapons and was carrying Indian ones, and fell .-*- 252 -*- OF NEW ENGLAND and was buried. They do say you know that he was bigger than any Indian." " I wonder if any one has dug under the tower to see whether the lady of the ballad, with the mild blue eyes, who was buried there by the Skeleton, is truly there? That would go a long way to prove it all fact." So we left the tower and walked round Wash- ington Square, a most attractive place, and to Trin- ity Church. The spire of this exquisite church is as perfect as anything in America. It is more decorated than that at Newburyport, without losing anything in dignity and chastity of style. If Newport had nothing in it worth seeing but this old church, it would be well worth a journey. The trees before it, the graveyard beside it, with the white burial slabs and crosses, the fine old gambrel-roofed houses near it, all lend their aid in the ensemble. It was in 1727 that Dean Berkeley came to New- port, on his way, as he supposed, to Bermuda, there to found a University for the " instruction of the youth of America." Romantic mission! Perhaps, if it had succeeded, Bermuda would now be a Uni- versity centre, with college men and college girls overflowing its rosy coral beaches and shattering its silences, which not even a motor cycle is al- lowed to disturb, with staccato college yells. It -* 253 +- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS was Roger Walpole who pricked the gentle bishop's bubble, announcing, after the Dean had waited for three or four years in Newport for the promised funds, that if he were waiting there with the notion that twenty thousand pounds were com- ing to him from any exchequer over which Sir Robert had control he might as well desist. During his stay in Newport the Dean preached many a sermon in Trinity Church and here, in the graveyard, he buried his infant daughter, Lucia, the stone still standing. He must have been a most lovable as he was a most distinguished man. To the old farmhouse, called Whitehall, where he lived, came every one of importance who visited the town. It was built in a green vale behind the sea, and once, when a friend inquired why the bishop lived where there was nothing to be seen, he replied that " if a prospect were continually in view it would lose its charm." That he enjoyed a " prospect " seems to be clear from the fact that you are still shown " The Bishop's Rock," an over- hanging cliff where he is said to have had a study, that commands water. Pastor Honeyman was preaching in the three- decker pulpit of the old church the day the Dean arrived, with his wife and three learned friends, but the service was brought to a hasty close, and pastor and congregation all hurried out to the -+ 254-1- OF NEW ENGLAND wharf to welcome the great arrival. In those days Newport must have been a wonderful town. Every sect was free to worship there, for Roger Williams opposed no man's method of communicating with his God. Here were of course many Quakers, Baptists, Methodists. Here too were the gayer elements of the fashionable world, dressed out in scarlet and purple and fine laces and with plumes to their hats. The Dean of Derry found the town a most likable place during those months he spent in it before retiring to the farm. During this stay he made several visits to the Continent, as his wife called the mainland. Newport was even more of an island in those days than it is now, an entirely separate thing from the state of Rhode Island, with farmlands, wildernesses, and woods of its own. It was distinct from the Continent. Berkeley exercised an amazing influence on Newport, for he was a man of the most urban breeding, of deep scholarship that sat upon him lightly, of a broad and tolerant mind. He knew Europe well, and brought with him the atmos- phere of all the capitals in the old land; he had been friends with its great and wise men, and was himself great and wise. Among all the narrowness, the fierce sectarian- ism, the absorption in fish or in maize or in other people's sins which marked New England from OLD SEAPORT TOWNS end to end, Newport stands out as a place where art was loved, where architecture and books were studied the Redwood Library was built in 1750 and where men could worship as they chose. Here in this little corner there was true freedom. It is curious to remember that the town, now, is thought of chiefly as a social playhouse. It seemed on the road to be an American Athens, or the centre of another renaissance. But the artists and the philosophers and the students and the preachers have gone elsewhere, or never arrived at all, and the rigorous rules of society have super- seded the free spirit of the arts and sciences. It was in Newport that gas got its first trial, Dan Melville having lighted his house and even his street with it, before ever even London used it, and it owned Stiles, who observed the transit of Venus in 1769, and capped Dean Berkeley's famous line, " Westward the course of Empire takes its way," with the prophecy that English would be the vernacular of " more people than any one tongue ever was on earth except the Chinese." We walked up to the lovely Jewish cemetery, fenced with granite and iron, and marvellously abloom with the new summer's flowers. We en- tered the Redwood Library, with its splendid fern- leaf beech sending dancing shadows shivering -*- 256 -*-. OF NEW ENGLAND over the fagade; we looked upon the old Market House, now turned into offices, but retaining its fine proportions, the design of Peter Harrison, one of Newport's first architects, and we lingered by the Channing Memorial Church, with the statue of William Ellery Channing, caught in a gesture of benediction, standing before it in the Square. Wherever we went, old Newport smiled upon us with a winsomeness, a charm, that was like the old spirit of it. " We never knew anything of this side of New- port," was the burden of our remarks. The pic- turesque old Coddington burial ground, holding so many Governors, the prim old house where Feni- more Cooper wrote "The Red Rover," the Nichols House on the corner of Farwell Street, once the famous White Horse Tavern all of these belonged to pages of Newport we had never seen turned. " And now," said Sister, as we finished break- fast on the third morning of our stay, " let's take the great Cliff Walk and go to Purgatory and watch the sea sweep up on the beaches." It was one of those silver-mist days that seem to belong to the island. A soft sweet climate is Newport's boast, and a true one, so far as our experience went. People who live there tell you it is never very cold nor very hot, and way back in -1-257*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS the seventeenth century the climate drew words of praise from those who lived in it. The natural scenery of this walk along the cliff tops is extraordinarily varied, considering that it is only about three miles long. We reached it by way of Bellevue Avenue, stopping before we turned eastward on the walk to look at Bailey's Beach, private, where the fashionable people bathe, well thumped by the surf. The Public Beach is weedier, more sheltered, also more crowded, maybe safer. Walking on a cliff that overhangs the ocean is an excellent occupation. We wondered that we were practically alone in it. Bellevue Avenue had been crowded with motor cars, buzzing away to Ocean Drive, that swings round the whole of the south- western peninsula. But here, along the footpath, there was room and to spare. We had taken our lunch with us, and had the day to do what we chose in. Any one who goes to Newport and fails to spend hours and days along this frontier of the sea loses the enjoyment of one of the glories of the New England coast. At the northern end of the walk we reached broad, hard Easton Beach, where the surf rolled up mag- nificently. The bathing season had not really started, yet there were young men and maidens in suits that showed the modern influence running OF NEW ENGLAND about on the sand and flashing through the white breakers. It was a warm morning, and we felt like joining them. " Why didn't we bring our bathing suits? " we mourned. And we wished that life were not so complicated, and that it might be possible to take a swim without dressing for it. But as it wasn't, we climbed upward again, for we wanted to get a look at Whitehall, which has been kept in fair order by the owner. It is back from the Hanging Rocks, along a beckoning roadway. The long slope of the roof, the fine front, the charming greenness of its vale, make it a spot well suited to the memory of the benign and scholarly man who built it, back in 1729. There was something very modern about Bishop Berkeley, and his house, with its fruit trees and flowers, unchanged since he lived in it, did not have that aspect of desertion which sometimes hangs so desolately about old landmarks. " One could easily believe that a knock on the door would bring him out and I suppose even then there was tea in the garden, as there is in Eng- lish bishops' gardens to this day," Sister remarked, as we sat in the grass and gazed on the place. We walked slowly back to the sea, and did not wonder that the Dean had chosen a seat in the rocks to write his " Alciphron " in. Calm and OLD SEAPORT TOWNS solitary, Sachuest Beach, or Second Beach, as it is also called, shone softly in the sun, with the blue outline of the point beyond. The rocks are sep- arated by little valleys, ridge on ridge, and Para- dise is the name of the section. It is an appropri- ate name, and we ate our lunch in the blessed re- gion feeling that life was good. We also took time to study Purgatory, which must be passed be- fore you get to Paradise. It is a dark and dismal gash in the purplish-grey rocks, which seem to have a bloom on them, where the water sucks and rushes, another Rafe's Chasm, in fact. "A shore full of surprises," I exclaimed. Newport is the same a place of surprises, of contrasts. The old and the new walk hand in hand, yet do not merge. And everywhere is beauty. It may be the Marble House built by Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt, it may be a gambrel-roofed home where history was made a century or two ago; perhaps you stand spellbound before the ar- tistic perfection of some wonderful effect in land- scape gardening, along Bellevue Avenue, or silent and content on the cliff with its seaward view, or deeply interested at the wharf-end where a man-of- war's launch is spilling out a load of Jackies or a bevy of fluffy girls is making ready to get to a yacht, or a few old men are swapping yarns over a pile of nets; it doesn't matter, for you are sure -*- 260-*- OF NEW ENGLAND to 'decide that Newport is tremendously worth seeing. " Some one has said that the society folk who come here to spend the prescribed portion of the summer given over to fashion in this town are the veriest slaves of the clock. At such an hour Bailey's Beach, at such the Casino, at such a drive, at such a luncheon, a tea, a dinner, a dance. Every minute of the time planned and regulated and ruled. Possibly it's so. The craving of humanity to be coerced is one of its salient peculiarities. But Newport itself is singularly free from the tyranny of time. Its oldness is hale and fresh and undis- turbed by its newness." We were walking along Newport's principal business street, Thames, as these ideas found words. Thames is so narrow, so winding, so quaint only twenty feet wide, we were told and yet so thoroughly capable of attending to the most up- to-date necessities or whims. It would take much more time than we had to give to begin to know Newport. All we achieved was a series of impressions. The effect is cosmo- politan and yet extremely individual. Army, navy, business, society, and sporting circles meet and mix here, yet they are all tinged with the old colouring of ancient Newport. It was at Newport that the French landed when -*-26i *- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS they came to throw in their fortunes with those of the struggling colonies. One officer in this fleet was called Claude Blanchard. He kept a diary. " A small but handsome town," says this French- man. " The houses, though mostly of wood, are of an agreeable shape. As for the Americans, they are slow, and do not decide promptly in matters of business, nor is it easy for us to rely upon their promises. They love money." He also draws a picture of the home life of the inhabitants during Revolutionary days that is not attractive. "Americans are almost constantly at table; and as they have little to occupy them, and as they go out little in winter, spending whole days beside their firesides and their wives, without reading, without doing anything, going to the table is a cure for ennui. Yet they are by no means great eaters." The Revolution ruined Newport for a long while, and during its continuance there was indeed little for those in the town to do. Frenchmen have often come to the town since. It was here that the well-known Count Boni made his American debut. Manners have changed. But the town is still handsome, and many of the well-shaped wooden houses admired by Blanchard still stand and call for admiration. -*-262-- New London CHAPTER XI New London EING in New London was an old habit for us. Back in the days when we wore short dresses though to-day that has no relation to the 'teens we used to spend delightful days, even weeks, in that old seaport, which is now so much more of a manufacturing town than a seagoing one. When the races were held, there we would be, in a mad state of excite- ment, trundled along in a flat-car on which a bank of seats allowed every occupant a perfect view. We always rooted for Harvard, rejoicing to de- lirium when she won, suffering beyond expression when she lost. What a scene it is! The river so crowded up to the edges of the course, with yachts of every cali- bre, each decorated with every shred of bunting in the owner's possession. Rowboats loaded to the gunwales, canoes rocking on the slight swell of the tide, the Judge's launch bustling importantly back and forth. A ship or two belonging to the Navy looking on in calm dignity. Every inch of the shore occupied by young girls in brilliant -*- 265 *- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS dresses or in white ones, with men in flannels and ducks, the cars with streamers of bunting, and not a hand in all the assembly but it waves a crimson or blue flag. Volleys of cheers rose and fell, bands played in an irregular sort of manner, starting and stopping abruptly, people hurried, boat whistles and car whistles tooted shrilly. Then the start, the long, hard desperation of the race, the tense thrill of a close struggle, the satis- faction or despair of a walk-over. Slowly the cars moved along, keeping in line with those slender shells, with the bending, straining bodies. We yelled and yelled, waving our flags, glancing contemptuously at the opposing colours and those who yelled and waved on the other side. And then the finish, the outburst of whistles and cheers rising to a mighty crescendo, and the crowd break- ing up, streaming away, the yachts bobbing, the launches setting off in a hundred directions at top speed wonderful! Each year the crowds gather, turning New London into a cross between a county fair and a college commencement, the rival shells flash down or up the course, crimson or blue tri- umphs, and all, even the losers, have a perfectly gorgeous time. For a whole day the old town plays like a child in the sun, youth fills its streets and camps on its verandas, while even the oldest inhabitant acts as though the most important thing OF NEW ENGLAND in the world was just that possible inch or two be- tween the leading and the beaten boat. Nothing of this sort is known to any other town in New England. In those days we \ised to come to New London from Sag Harbour, on the other side of Long Isl- and Sound, a fine sail. The New London boat was a little, top-heavy, important sort of a craft, mak- ing various stops on its way, each interesting be- cause of the glimpse of wharf life, the rapid load- ing and unloading by sprightly porters of boxes and barrels and sacks, the arrival of new passengers and the departure of those who had reached their destination. As for the harbour on which New London lies, it is full of enchantment. Up from the Sound the boat puffs its way some two or three miles maybe through the Thames River. Little coves reach into the land, trees grow along the shores, the Groton Monument looms high on the opposite bank, and then the city with its crowded roofs and the long wharves that stand so close to- gether, and are so lined with ships and schooners and sloops and barges and other passenger steamers. A gay, jolly approach to which that by rail cannot hold a candle. But it was by rail we came now. As we drove along State Street we nudged each other at remem- bered sights. +267*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS There was the Civil War Monument, still look- ing like a long thin segment of layer-cake stood endwise, just as we had always seen it. This ap- pearance being caused by a mingling of fancy and the fact that the monument is composed of alter- nate blocks of light and dark stone, the dark about half the thickness of the light. On top a female figure stands rather forlornly, and other figures, of stalwart soldiers and sailors, appear lower down. There too was the First Church, built of stone with a white spire of wood. It dates only from 1851, but there are no very old churches in the town, new ones having been built on the old sites as the city grew beyond the old ones. New London does not present the appearance of an old town, though you run across many a fine old house still surviving. As soon as you leave the water's edge it looks more like a prosperous but somewhat sleepy inland home city than anything else. Its wide streets are lined with comfortable suburban houses standing in their grounds and shaded by elms and chestnuts. There has been no attempt to follow the Colonial pattern in these new buildings. They are of every shape and type. There are parks and squares where fountains spring up, where statues are put to commemorate OF NEW ENGLAND historic happenings or famous sons of the town. The parks too seem to have been created as memo- rials, for there are the Hempstead and the Will- iams Memorial parks, both charming and charm- ingly kept up. Width, space, leisure, these are the New London characteristics that strike you, after the green wealth of trees and gardens and squares. The city climbs up steeply from the water, so that there is often an unexpected view of the harbour or the river that brings you suddenly back to the realisa- tion that after all it is a sea town. And cars are running to Ocean Beach crowded with people go- ing there for the day or living there in the ex- tremely pretty summer cottages that have been built along the water edge, as well as on the road leading to it. Many a happy day we used to spend on Ocean Beach, playing in the sand and on the rocks and in and out of the water. The bath houses are sump- tuous affairs, real little bungalows, with verandas to them. We had been shown the little wooden house, somewhat disfigured by the window that had bulged out in front since the days when it was first built, where Nathan Hale taught school. New London is identified not only with this young hero, but with the villain of the Revolution, Benedict -*- 269-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Arnold. Go up to the Ancient Burial Ground, where, in one corner, Jonathan Brooks lies in a sepulchre. Many old stones are here, stones that tell plainly enough of the town's early battle with the seas, for here you will find a shaft set up for a father and all his sons, whose bodies are lying in Martinique or Barbadoes or at the bottom of the ocean. Go up, and look abroad over New London. Right here once stood Benedict Arnold, directing his soldiers to the sacking of the town and the plundering of the homes of his old friends. Here in truth he played traitor to the very limit. A few Huguenots came to New London at the time when they were driven out of France, and made a mark in the town, lor they built several of its finest old houses, some of which still stand. One is the fine Shaw-Perkins mansion, with a dis- tinctly French effect, and another is what is called Huguenot House, an ivy-bowered, one-and-a-half- story oblong structure with hip roof and end chim- neys, a beautiful place. Then there is another old house that is, I believe, still in the same family, after centuries of life. This is the Hempstead House, built by Sir Robert Hempstead some time after 1643. This gentleman was the founder of the village bearing his name on Long Island. " Let's go and see the Old Town Mill," Sister -*- 270-*- OF NEW ENGLAND proposed, after we had settled down at the com- fortable Crocker House. The Old Town Mill used to be a favourite walk, and an object of great interest. It stands on a part of the old Governor Winthrop estate, where Jor- dan Brook comes rushing and shouting to tumble over the mill wheel and into the Mill Cove. It was built as far ago as 1712 by a Richard Man- waring, and ground wheat for over a hundred and fifty years. But now it rests in dreamy idleness, with the water murmuring past it, the trees crowd- ing it close, flowers shining in the grass that grows so thickly. " It is just as beautiful and just as romantic as I remembered it," I said, somewhat surprised. For you can't always trust these old places. They have a way of shrinking from the fair picture we carry along with us, losing out in one fashion or another, and leaving you feeling rather flat at having re- membered them at all. But the Old Mill was safely and soundly perfect. It has been carefully tended by the present owner, put into repair, swept and garnished, machinery and all, and not one whit spoiled. There are many new mills in New Lon- don to-day, turning out all sorts of merchandise. But one is willing to bet that they will be wrecked and superseded when interested folk of ages to come are still visiting the Old Mill, studying its -* 271 -*-. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS stout machinery, admiring its harmonious propor- tions, and wishing, it may be, that it were still pos- sible to get such flour as once was ground here. In the days when the mill was new New London was really a seaport and she was much more than merely a fishing town. Her ships were traders and far voyagers, and though she came late to the whal- ing business, not till 1819, for some unfathomed reason, she made up for being slow once she got to work. What is more, she still goea whaling and sealing, though with diminished splendour. Her harbour is the best on the coast, there being no rea- son at all for the town's standing where it does unless it turned to the sea for its work. Mare Liberum is the legend inscribed on the city's seal, and though manufactures are to-day the real indus- try of New London it has by no means given up its ocean life. It was in 1646 that New London was founded, by John Winthrop. For six years the settlement retained its Indian name of Nameaug, while the river was known as the Monhegin. But the home- sick settlers wanted to create at least an illusion of home, so they petitioned the Connecticut General Court to allow them to name the place after the city in the old country from which many of them had come, and to make the stream conform to the new name. -(-272-*- V ''^s^ysiiBfiac** IPP^u^ll^ 1 ^ . v; &4;^li;8R sS ^*t;'*& JB|'3? ; - .!" n '', f..; ' .' ^ w --.^ Btev. iu s*%f ii te *';* mi OF NEW ENGLAND There was no manner of use trying to raise any- thing in the harsh and sterile soil, so the early fathers turned at once to the sea, building big and little boats, with which they began immediately to trade, taking the skins and furs the Indians brought them to the towns up and down the coast from Maine to the Virginias, and bringing back household goods, stuffs, ammunition, as well as money. It was the Coits, father and sons, who started the shipbuilding industry in New London. At the close of the sixteenth century, the father having died, the sons decided to tackle a bigger job than any yet attempted, and built three fine big barks. One of these, captained by Samuel Chester, loaded up with cured pork and beef and several strong little horses, with other odds and ends, sailing away without making much talk on the matter to Bar- badoes. Among harmless articles like sugar and molasses, the doughty captain also shipped, for the return journey, a cask of rum, fancying that his neigh- bours would take kindly to the new drink. But somehow the magistrates of the state had got wind of the trip to the West Indies, and had heard that rum was to be found there. They also knew that other colonies had had cause to regret the impor- tation of the heady fluid. -H- 273-1- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS " You can't land any of that stuff here," was their decision. So the cask was delivered into the hands of the authorities, after which all traces seem to be lost. But it was not long before Connecticut reversed the magisterial degree, rum becoming one of the greatest assets of the swiftly growing New Lon- don-West Indian trade. There wasn't a busier town in all New England from early in 1700 on to the Revolution. Another big shipyard was built opposite the first, over in Groton, and both turned out stout barks and ships as fast as ever they could. The merchants on the water front bought these up and sent them on their way. For miles back the country brought all it had to trade to New London's docks, and took away what came to them from the sea and the tropic isles. The long village street was the scene of a tremendous energy in those days. Great wains drawn by four and six horses or as many oxen toiled in and out of town, the shouts of the drivers, the cracks of the long whiplashes, the creakings of the wheels, all adding to the noise and excite- ment. What was more, droves of cattle, hogs, and horses also came down to the wharves along the same road, concentering from towns and villages inland over a wide area. Wild men some of these drivers and drovers, with a tavern of their own OF NEW ENGLAND down on the water front where they put in glorious hours while the wagons were unloading and load- ing once more, scattering through the town in gangs whose horseplay affrighted the sober citi- zens, but did little real harm. Then came the Revolution. New London turned practically all her ships into privateers, and fought bravely through the whole war. At its close her trading days were over, not to return. The huge warehouses stood empty, ships rotted at the wharf- side, the shipyards lay unused and silent. The story of the ups and downs of American shipping is surely one of the strangest in the world! Then came the whaling years, beginning in 1819. Two men started this industry, Thomas N. Will- iams and Daniel Deslon sending out three ships. The first voyage was mildly successful, but on her second, having been at sea over a year, the " Mary " came into port with 2,000 barrels of oil on board. With the high prices then obtained, this was a tremendous haul, and instantly all New London rushed to the business of catching whales. Once again the shipyards worked building vessels from morning till night. The ships sailed in and out, the mariners congregated in the lower town, the merchants opened once more the huge warehouses, to be filled now with whalebone in bales, with bar- rels of oil, with the pure white spermaceti. Once '-* 275 *- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS again the country roundabout poured its provisions into the port, and all went humming. This whaling business was far healthier than the earlier trade, since it was carried on largely on a co-operative basis, the whole town benefiting in- stead of a few traders. New London soared to the top of comfortable affluence. Practically every man either went to sea, to the shipbuilding work, or to the busy wharves. The eyes of the town turned seaward. No storm swept in from the east or tore out from land, but faces turned white and anxious women climbed the hill to stare out for possible sails. Every returning ship was greeted with frantic scenes of joy. As soon as her bow rounded the headlands of Fisher's Island her signal flags told who she was, and the town streamed down to her wharf. Sometimes a heavy tale was brought for the hearing, for the long hard voyages, enduring for years, had much of tragedy and loss. But at least some had come safe to home and wife, and their share of the gold-bringing oil in the hold. But the whaling days followed the West India trade, and New London fell asleep again. She has never waked up to the old-time picturesque life of the harbour after that last collapse, though she still counts herself a seaport town. But she is a prosperous, hardworking, home-keeping city -^-276-*- OF NEW ENGLAND to-day, with fine public buildings and attractive streets, busy factories, growing environs. As a summer resort she is getting more popular with every season, and more and more do those who come to spend a few weeks or months decide to re- main for keeps. As a place to build a home it is difficult to see how New London could be beaten. A telephone call from an old friend bid us to the Pequot Casino, on Pequot Avenue, a fashion- able and delightful place, right on the water, with a long bridge connecting with an island. The Casino is wide-spreading, verandas continuing the tale begun by the house. Yachts almost climb up on this veranda, and every one who comes in and goes out has a sea tang to him or her. Of course there are all the other things to do that are done at Casinos, but the sea call is the strongest. New London, in her play, is entirely faithful to her old history of work. No one can go to New London without also see- ing Groton, the town across the river where oc- curred the massacre of Fort Griswold on the occa- sion of Benedict Arnold's attack. Here the garri- son of the fort was basely slaughtered after its sur- render, the brave commander, Colonel William Ledyard, who had resisted against tremendous odds, dying as the result of the treachery of a man who had once called him friend. -+277-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS We took the little ferry on a clear morning, for we meant once again to climb the long spiral of the stairway that leads you up the 135 feet to the top of the monument raised to the memory of this massacre of brave men. The stone obelisk is as simple as can be wished, built of the granite under- foot, in whose defence the little band had given up their lives. Up we clumped, round and round with steadfast tread. Going up one of those twisty flights into dizzy distances always has a hypnotising effect, I find. You get awfully tired, of course, but you feel, at the same time, as though you were capable of keeping on at it forever. Round and round and up and up. " I wonder who invented stairs," mused Sister, " and where the first ones were built? " " I don't know, but this I do know, that they have been found in Egypt's oldest relics of build- ings," I answered, sitting down the better to im- press Sister, who also sat down the better to hear. " And they say that the best types of circular stair- ways were made in the spacious times " Of great Elizabeth," interrupted Sister. " So, all these countless centuries people have been walk- ing upstairs, just as we are doing now." And she resumed the work of getting to the top. The view is worth it, after you have got up, if -* 278 ^ OF NEW ENGLAND not while you are doing so. All New London lies before you, with the sweep of the broad, slumber- ing river, the wide arch of the bay, the little coves, Fisher's Island, humped and green, the various lighthouses, the pale blue Sound beyond. Close below lies Fort Griswold, only a relic now, with ancient cannon guarding ancient ramparts against ghosts. The Navy Yard, full of modern ships, lies up the river a bit, so do the boathouses of several clubs and colleges, Harvard's red building con- spicuous among them. The harbour front, with the many wharves and the closely crowded tall warehouses built long ago and just as fit and stout to-day as when their timbers were hewn and knit, looks extremely imposing. Inland the prospect spreads on and on over vil- lages and farmlands and rolling hills. Connecticut has a soft and welcoming aspect, a home look. When again we stood on grass at the foot of the tower we felt more as though we had been travel- ling in an aeroplane than simply looking off the top of the stone obelisk before us. The rise on which it stands giving it a far greater sweep of horizon than seems possible from its base. The Monument House near by is a place that must be looked into, since it is full of Revolution- ary salvage of many kinds. Weapons, shot, uni- forms, old letters, personal belongings of Colonel OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Ledyard, everything arranged most happily. There is, however, no shred of Mother Bailey's flannel petticoat, and this for the very excellent reason that its title to fame consists in the fact that it was entirely sacrificed. This is the story. When Admiral Decatur was locked up in New London harbour there was reason to fear an attack by land. Soldiers and marines undertook to guard the approaches, but ammunition was somewhat low. They set to work to make more out of what- ever could be got for the purpose. A shortage of wads was one serious item. Patriotic persons brought rags and scraps of woollen goods, but Mother Bailey did better. For when it came to her ears that even with all that was brought to help out the material was still insufficient, she gave all her blankets to the cause, and, these even not being sufficient, she surrendered her flannel petticoat. " How useless women would be nowadays com- pared with the heroic past," I remarked to Sister, as we listened to the story of Mother Bailey. " What one among us all owns such a thing as a flannel petticoat to-day? " " Yes, but to-day they don't use flannel petticoats to make cartridges," Sister retorted. It all works out, after all. That evening we went sailing in the harbour, and as we came idling homeward on the failing -+280-*- OF NEW ENGLAND wind we were told an old legend, the legend of The Hunt for Treasure, which is part of New London's story. It seems that back at least a score of years be- fore the Revolution, when New London was at the height of her trading epoch, a Spanish galleon loaded with a rich treasure put into the harbour, having encountered heavy weather. She was some- what the worse for wear, and her crew, fearing her to be sinking, rushed her up on land, to be sure of saving her cargo, which was then taken off and housed for safe-keeping in charge of a certain Joseph Hill. Throughout the winter the ship's company re- mained in the town, but when April came the supercargo bought a new ship, and was ready to load his riches once again and set sail for Cadiz. But the cargo was not to be found. No one knew anything of it. The boxes of doubloons, for it was whispered that the ship had been piled with Span- ish-American gold, the ingots and bars of precious metal, all had disappeared. Desperately as months went by the owner tried to recover that fortune. The galleon had long since gone to pieces on the shore, and now his treasure had grown wings and flown. He appealed to the Governor, but the Governor looked blank. He cried out that he had been robbed, accusing Hill, -*- 281 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS but this gentleman disclaimed any knowledge of silver or gold or any other sort of treasure. Yet there were not wanting those who whispered that there had been shadowy figures digging at night where the long wharf touched the land. What they were doing could not be ascertained. But it was strange; strange too that the Spaniard was so precise in his accusations. Gradually the feeling that he had been treach- erously used grew high in the little town. Was this a way to treat a stranger, driven through stress of weather on their shores? Such wrath was engendered that the Governor lost the next election, Hill was shunned, and any who might have a knowledge of the Spaniard's wealth were watched. Should so much as one doubloon be offered for exchange, people would know what to do. The Spaniard finally sailed home with empty hull and a full heart. But, if any one knew where that gold of his lay hid, they dared not touch it till the fury had abated. Few had the secret, if secret there was, and in one way or another death took these one by one. The war came, to distract men from all other thoughts. The treasure was forgotten. Many years later an old witch living in Ver- mont told two of her clients, stout young men who OF NEW ENGLAND feared neither God nor the Devil, just where this buried treasure lay. It would make all three rich beyond any dreaming. They were to dig for it ac- cording to directions, at the stroke of midnight on All Hallowe'en. Here was a chance indeed! So on the proper night and at the perfect hour, two sturdy men with pickaxe and shovel and bucket, for the water as well as the sand lay over the gold, came down to dig. To be sure, before long the iron struck wood. Feverishly the two flung themselves at the work. But fast as they dug, the cask sunk faster. All night they worked, groaning with fatigue and cupidity. But at dawn they were no nearer suc- cess than when they began. And, as the sun rose, sand and water rushed into the gaping hole where they had struggled all night, so that it was only by a miracle that both were not swallowed up. Since which time no one has attempted to re- trieve that Spaniard's lost wealth. These old stories, and the old buildings and sea- edge of New London seem to belong together and apart from the rest of the town. Like New Bed- ford it is more modern than ancient, and yet these two cities are more closely identified with the past era of trading and whaling and privateering and -+ 283 -H OLD SEAPORT TOWNS generally keeping things lively on the ocean than almost any other part of New ' England. But where, in Portsmouth, Gloucester, Provincetown, the past broods tenderly about the present, quite as real, quite as visible, here it is more like a story told by a fireside to pass the time; half fanciful, half true, but completely gone. The antiquarian can hunt up much of the deepest interest in the Historic Museum in town, or over at Groton. He can find relics on Burial Hill and in out of the way corners, can even find an old man here or there who has played his share in the vanished past. But so far as the casual visitor goes New London is simply a charming place for the summer, with its fine beaches and good clubs, its handsome public library and other buildings, its well-kept streets and excellent houses. Yet, for all its modern trimness and efficiency, there is a veil of quaintness and the fashion of an older day spread over the town, something that flees and haunts you, and that gives New London a fascination that a really new town can never have. It is ripe. It has had many experiences, it has suffered, much that it loved has died. It makes you feel this. " Is it because we used to visit here when we were children that we love the town?" Sister wondered. OF NEW ENGLAND " Partly that, perhaps, and partly I don't know but it seems to mean so much." For the old seaport, in its various stages of loss and gain, adventure and sleep, in its sacrifices and its glories, is so thoroughly American, perhaps most so in the way it has met modern conditions and set itself to a new pattern. 285 New Haven CHAPTER XII New Haven S you set foot on the platform of the sta- tion at New Haven the inhabitants do not rush up to you with glad proud cries telling you that it is the largest city in the State, as they would if the city were west of the Rockies instead of considerably east of the Hudson. That is not the New Haven way. Yet, as you traverse the New Haven streets, so broad, so serene, so shaded with overarching elms, as you linger on the Green or stroll through the college campus, as you pause in admiration before noble architecture or sit at ease in charming parks, you gather that the city is proud of itself, that it is fully conscious of both its size and its impor- tance, not to speak of its beauty, and that its lack of self-advertising flows from a profound convic- tion that it is totally unnecessary. " Here I am. And mighty fortunate you are in that fact," is the thought it conveys. A thought to which even the most casual visitor within its limits must heartily subscribe. Sister and I had begun our journey along the OLD SEAPORT TOWNS New England coast in the Forest City; we were to end it in the City of Elms, for that is New Haven's pet name. The Maine town has lost many of the trees that gave it its name, but New Haven has almost as good a reason to-day as yesterday for the description. So many and such magnificent trees we had found nowhere else. We mentioned them with words of praise to a seller of postcards in a drug store a little distance from the Green. " You ought to see these streets after a fall of fresh snow or an ice storm," he answered. " I guess there isn't such a sight anywhere else in America." It was the only superlative we heard during our stay. " I wonder if we could dash out here next time there's a snowstorm," I interrogated Sister, as we strolled away under the leafy canopy. And she replied that she was game. Everything in New Haven began at the Green, and naturally we began there too. The whole city centres there, and radiates from it in beautiful streets, stopping every five or ten minutes to make a tree-encircled square, a little or big park, a flower- packed garden. Spread out on the level plain that slopes slightly upward from the shores of the bay to the ridge of hills behind, New Haven has plenty of room, and takes it. Practically every house has -*- 90 -*-. OF NEW ENGLAND grounds about it, not a mere yard, but lawns and shrubbery and trees, tennis grounds, shady places sweet with bloom. But to get back to the Green, on which our hotel faced. A reason, if there were no other, to put up there. But the Taft Hotel has plenty of good reasons for getting you to stay there, and keeping you after you get there. It stands on the site of the old New Haven House, a hostelry of many years and much history, closely identified with Yale, but increasingly old-fashioned and incon- venient. The Taft is everything of the contrary. A star-like pattern of paths leads away in every direction on the surface of the green from the liberty pole in the centre of the upper portion, the white lines in the green grass very attractive. We walked over to the three churches first, all of them built in 1814. They stretch across the centre of the green, along Temple Street, the North, or United, as it is called now, the Centre, and Trinity, one of if not the oldest Episcopal society in Con- necticut. This church is built of a dark brown- stone with a square tower ending in corner finials. The other two are true New England architecture, Centre, with its severe simplicity, its blunt topped spire and the fine pilasters that adorn its fagade being possibly the handsomer of the two. Undoubtedly it is the more interesting. It stands .-*- 291 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS on the site of the first meeting house, as the follow- ing inscription tells us: A.D. 1638, A Company of English Christians led by John Davenport and Theophilus Eaton were the Founders of this city. Here Their Earliest House of Worship was Built A.D. 1639. Underneath the church, the crypt contains the remains and tombstones of the early Puritan fathers and their families, while in the rear is the monument to John Dixwell, one of the regicides who stirred New Haven to its depths in 1661. The Colonel, to be sure, arrived after the excite- ment was over by a few years, and incognito, an- nouncing himself to be a Mr. James Davids, re- tired merchant. He was wealthy, and he settled down for the rest of his life in the town, and it was not till some time after his death that the truth came out. He was one of those who had a share in condemning Charles I. to the scaffold, and who had to flee England when Charles II. came to the throne. The monument was raised much later by his descendants. But there is a more interesting reminder of the link between New Haven and that tragedy of the -* 292-*- OF NEW ENGLAND English Court. It is some way from the Green, but Sister and I walked out to it The Judges' Cave, on West Rock. It is more of a pile of huge boulders that make a chamber large enough to en- ter than a cave, but it is all the more striking in appearance. Here the two regicides, Major-Gen- erals Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, spent many weary weeks. The two had been high in Cromwell's service and confidence; there had even been some talk of making Goffe the great Commoner's successor. But things befel other- wise; the two gentlemen were obliged to flee for their lives, and sailed for Boston, where at first they lived openly, but finally Charles sent over an order for their arrest, and Governor Endicott set about capturing them. The Reverend John Davenport, one of the founders of New Haven, had been a friend of Cromwell's, so that it was to him the fugitives turned for help. They reached New Haven on horseback on March 7, 1661, and for three weeks lay hidden in the house of Davenport or of a friend of his, William Jones, whose father had been exe- cuted in England for the same crime. Officers armed with the royal warrant came from Boston, upon which there followed a game of hide-and-seek in which the regicides, assisted by many New Haven folk, wore out the patience 4- 2031- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS of the officers, who at last went home. But before they went they posted a large reward. That set thrifty souls to the work of hunting themselves, and for two years the two " wanted " men dodged about from one friend to another, hid in a ruined mill outside the city, and made their home in the cave we sat before, as well as in another lower down the side of West Rock. Finally the two went to Hadley, and are lost to the sight of history, as they were to that of those who looked for them so earnestly and ferociously. Our old friend Whitefield, whose tomb we had seen in Newburyport, had his day on the Green, where he preached, in the open air, to a vast crowd of people on one of his later visits to America. In the old days when New Haven was a separate Colony and later when she shared the honours of being the capital city with Hartford, she had a State House, indeed, more than one, for it got to be a habit with her to pull down the old and build the new every few years. They all stood on various sites about the Green, the first being erected in 1717, and the last pulled down in 1889. The pulling down of this final State House, built, it is said, on the general plan of a Doric temple, was the occasion of a good deal of inter- est. A newspaper in Boston got much worked up on the subject, and printed words to the effect that OF NEW ENGLAND it would be a shameful thing to destroy this " priceless memento of a glorious past, a perpetual reminder that New Haven was originally an inde- pendent colony and for nearly two and a half cen- turies a sharer of the capital honours. Tens of thousands of men and women throughout the land," continued this moving recital, " who are now in middle or advanced age, remember, with all the pleasure that attaches to youthful impres- sions, the picture of the Capitol Building at New Haven, which was in so many school books forty or fifty years ago. To tear down that building would be to obliterate a chief milestone on the path of time." To this a New Haven paper replied with the fol- lowing stern rebuke: " It will be news to most New Haveners that the State House is ' a priceless memento of a glori- ous past.' It is not. It is a memento of New Haven's folly in allowing Hartford to gobble the capital . . . neither is it a * chief milestone on the path of time.' Rather, it is an encumbrance, a public nuisance, a bone of contention, an eyesore, a laughing stock, a hideous pile of bricks and mor- tar, a blot on the fair surface of the Green. The Boston paper doesn't know what it's talking about." So there! Anyway, it is pretty certain that, to- -f- 295 -*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS 'day, the town is perfectly willing to have Hartford bear the burdens and the honour of being the capi- tal. New Haven has quite enough to attend to without that. The old town pump once stood in the corner of the Green near the college, and there was also a whipping post, last used in 1831, but who was whipped then and why is no longer remembered. And here the County Fair used to be held. One of the old chroniclers gives a picture of this event that Sister discovered and showed me with de- light. " There have been years when, on the Green, large wagons from Bethany and the towns near New Haven made a very attractive appearance trimmed with evergreens and adorned inside and outside with specimens of golden corn, big squashes, and strings of red peppers and other vegetables, the most charming exhibit of all being the healthy and lively daughters of the people, who rode in the wagons wearing holiday attire. And there were few finer sights of a big fair than the long line of famous red cattle from the Wood- bridge hills, the sweet breath of morning in pearly shimmer on their broad, cool noses. What large, intelligent, and lustrous eyes had those cattle of the Connecticut hillsides." On this same Green slept the invading British -* 296-*- OF NEW ENGLAND force that had come to burn the town on July 5, 1779. They had landed at old Lighthouse Point, and joined with another attacking force, sweeping the Americans before them. The only thing that saved the place from destruction was that many Tories held property here, and it was impossible not to destroy the goods of the faithful with those of the rebel. Four years later the Green was the scene of a great jubilation in thankfulness for the ending of the Revolution and the triumph of the Americans. New Haven had given her best to the cause, both in men and treasure. " What a pity that every town or city doesn^t have a fine, convenient, central place like this beau- tiful Green where all historical events of impor- tance can take place," Sister said. " Here we sit, on this comparatively comfortable bench, and watch the centuries whirl before our eyes. And, where the Green ends, the college begins. Shall we make for Phelps and enter the campus?" " Let's stick to the town awhile yet. There's the old Grove Street Burial Ground, and some old houses and fine streets, Hillhouse Avenue among them. Come along, it's walk and not sit the rest of the morning." Hillhouse was near, to the northward, a short but broad and stately street, with grass-plots on either side of the driveway, great trees, and at the -j- 297-1- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS end a vista of columns. This end used to be known as Sachem Woods, a real forest not so many years ago. It has been bought by the University, except one part that is laid out in a park. Sheffield Sci- entific makes a fine effect along one side of Hill- house and there are charming houses. Here the sense of grave spaciousness that makes so much of New Haven's charm is at its noblest. " Living on a street like this ought to do some- thing for you," was my thought, as we walked slowly up and back again to Grove Street. " All the advantages of a city and all the attractiveness of an ancestral estate. And just listen to the orioles! " There must have been a nest to every tree, judg- ing from the flash of brilliant wings along the green avenues of the boughs, while the clear wild notes rang sweetly down upon us. Wise birds to choose a home so lovely and so secure. " In many ways," said Sister, " this big city is less like a city than the little ones we have been seeing. There ought to be a new and special name invented for it." We soon found our way to the old graveyard, where so many men of mark are buried. Yale Presidents, inventors, writers, governors. Here Timothy Dwight lies, he who wrote deprecating the presence of the dead on the Green, saying that -* 298 +- OF NEW ENGLAND death was too solemn a thing to have graves lying close to the life of the town. Most of those who, in his time, lay there are now with him in Grove. Another President of Yale, her first titular presi- dent, is remembered by a large red sandstone on which this is cut: " The Reverend and Learned Mr. Thomas Clap, near 27 Years Laborious and Painfull President of the College." Noah Webster, whose house still stands, and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin which did so much for America, Theodore Winthrop, Jedediah Morse, Admirals and Generals, many other fa- mous sons of New Haven lie here under their head- stones, well in the heart of the city. In spite of President Dwight's objection to this close and familiarising presence of the dead in the very midst of the city's life, there is a charm, a tender- ness, a friendliness about these old burial grounds in New England towns that the modern cemetery neither attempts nor achieves. When Noah Webster was a lieutenant command- ing a company of Yale students General Washing- ton paid the town a visit. The young man was ap- pointed as escort, and " on the day and time of it " he noted in his diary that the General gave him a compliment for the manner in which he performed the service. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS There is of course a tremendous lot of New Haven that is just homes. Lovely homes, in fine grounds, street after street of them. And then there is the waterside. For New Haven was a seaport, though she was never identified with the sea to the extent of the other New England sea cities. Her most famous contact with it was when the steamer Fulton sailed into her harbour from New York, in 1815. She has, however, her own particu- lar legend, the Phantom Ship, sung by Bryant: "A ship sailed from New Haven; And the keen and frosty airs, That filled her sails at farting, Were heavy 'with good men's prayers." It was in 1647 that a ship, with Lamberton, Master, set sail in December for England, with a large company on board, among whom were many distinguished citizens of New Haven. Lamberton did not like his new command, for new she was. He remarked of her that she was " walty," and that he did not doubt but that she would end by being the grave of some ship's company. The friends of the departing company followed them to the end of the wharf and watched them draw away, while the pastor, no other than the Reverend John Davenport, bade them godspeed with these cheer- ful words: " Lord, if it be thy pleasure to bury -*- 300-*- iy^~*^pT>V^1^''V 1;r;;i * r j^>^^*r fc '.^^**';''^iV^?' "yjy~*^~t -*J ^''^S; V j / '"K^r ~ --.^-3- *3&&{^'^ s **^* - -jsjr Kr .' ; vc^m jj^J-Jr-^ L^M^S^St . ) ^vO P< Ji^- -'^-^.--A -as Q OF NEW ENGLAND these our friends in the bottom of the sea, take them ; they are thine." And that, so far as any word came, was the last heard of the ship and all her company. But one June evening some watchers on the shore descried a ship full sail coming into port, which was the more remarkable as a stiff offshore breeze was blowing. But in she swept, the sunset on her tow- ering canvas. The town gathered, awed and dis- turbed. On came the ship, until she was recog- nised for the one which had sailed away in the dead of the winter, on until friend descried the face of friend on her deck. Then, suddenly, her topmasts went by the board, the rest of her rigging fol- lowed, the hull reeled, quivered, sank. A slight mist hung over the sea for a brief space, cleared, and nothing of the vision remained. We walked along Water Street to Waterside Park, lying between the docks and reaching right out into the bay, with trees, or it wouldn't belong to New Haven, planted thickly. There were plenty of townsfolk enjoying the fresh wind and the fresher prospect. Boats were busily going in and out, launches chugging. White sails were visible clear down the bay. Along further, where Mill River joins the bay, is the Yale Boathouse. The waterfront is used by the citizens in this wise and happy town, not given up, as in so many of .-+ 301 *-. OLD SEAPORT TOWNS our Americans cities, to dirty tracks and freight yards. For all its appreciation of beauty, space, and nature New Haven is no sleepy college town with nothing to keep it occupied from Commencement to the Fall opening of the big gates of the campus. It is, next to Bridgeport, the most important manu- facturing town in Connecticut. Its docks and wharves are as busy as its streets are broad and green, and probably if some one who was as inter- ested in New Haven's business energy as I was in its outward charm were to write of the city, there would be an astonishing array of figures, stirring descriptions of first-class factories, heartening rec- ords of great accomplishings. But Sister and I, turning our backs on New Haven's sources of wealth, engaged an automobile and went whirling through its parks and gardens and shady avenues and up in long loops to the top of East Rock. The hills backing the broad plain on which the city is built, end at either extremity with a bold pile of rock, splendidly precipitous on the sea side, with fine trees clambering up wher- ever there is a hold. The road up East Point, which is a public park, gives view after view of town and harbour, broad meadows, shining, twist- ing rivers, the old Light House on the Point, the church spires and the great spread of the Univer- OF NEW ENGLAND sity buildings. No one can say he has " seen " New Haven unless he has climbed East Rock and looked down upon her. The Rock is crowned with a monument to the sailors and soldiers of the Civil War. " No wonder those old Puritan fathers were glad to go no farther when looking for a home," said Sister, as we sat on top of the Rock and let our eyes range the prospect. Quinnipiac it was called then, the Indian name, that still clings to the valley be- hind. The town was planned during the summer that followed the landing, in April, 1638, by a civil engineer, who had given up a fine career in England for love of a Puritan maid, and fol- lowed her into exile. The Green, or Market Square as it was then called, was laid out, with the squares that still exist round about it, perhaps the first rectangularly planned city on the Con- tinent. Houses were built, some mere huts, others almost mansions. Of course the first public build- ing was the church. It was used for other pur- poses too, being a town-hall, a voting booth, and a place where the grave seniors of the new Colony dispensed the Puritan law. New Haven has in- herited a name for extreme blueness. The whip- ping post was set up as soon as the church, and there was an immense amount of interference in the personal concerns and home behaviour of the OLD SEAPORT TOWNS villagers. The Reverend Samuel Peters, in his history of the settlement, quotes forty-five " blue " laws as being enforced, but there is a good deal of doubt as to the accuracy of this little history. " Married people must live together or be im- prisoned," was really in force. " No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day " is not so certainly proved. Perhaps it was because it had been so enforcedly good in its extreme youth that later it developed into one of the worst smuggling and illicit trading ports on the coast. It carried on a fairly large trade with the West Indies, and built a good many ships at this time, following 1750. But most of these ships had a way of stealing up the river after sundown, mighty dark and mysterious, and of un- loading with a good deal less noise and commotion than is customary with jolly tars and stevedores. We had been told that it was an excellent plan to see the sunset from the Rock if that were to be managed, and found the counsel wise. As the sun drew down after it the last waves of rose and gold and lavender, and the woods showed dark, lights began to spring up in the plain below, rows and groups of them, a fairy pattern of sharp silver. The water also held its illuminations, and chains of pale light marked the streets and roads. " I wish I were a boy and coming here for four -+304-*- OF NEW ENGLAND years of college life,' 7 Sister murmured, as we be- gan to whirl softly back to the hotel. " But it's good-bye for us to-morrow evening." We found that the ideal way to spend the even- ing in New Haven was to sit out on the Green. There were other things to do, of course, and we noted that moving pictures appeared to be patron- ised here as elsewhere. But it was the Green for us, and for many more. The fragrant June night had collected a few early fireflies, and was tossing them idly about over the grass, as an Egyptian queen might play with diamonds. The chimes from Trinity sounded, very sweet. Young lovers passed, arm linked close in arm, head to head. A buzzing of motor cars gave the emphasis of a city to the country vision of shadowy trees and open grassy spaces. The story of how New Haven got the college that is so integral a part of it has a spice of adventure. It is told in these words by that same Reverend Sam. Peters whose remarks on the blue laws Sister and I had read in the library, and which I have quoted. His history was written in 1781. A slight introduction before we allow the parson to speak. In 1701 it was proposed to establish a Collegiate School in Saybrook, Connecticut, for the proper training of the youth of the land. Har- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS vard was already an actuality in Massachusetts, but it seemed bad policy to let Connecticut send all her sons to another Colony for their education. A number of Connecticut parsons met, therefore, in Branford, each giving some of his cherished books as a- nucleus for a college library, making forty volumes in all, the beginning of the Uni- versity library of to-day. At the same time a citi- zen of Saybrook, on the mouth of the Connecticut River, donated to the service of the college a house and lot. It was a very small house, but as for the first six months the President and a single student divided it between them it was sufficient. For fifteen years, during which time 55 students were graduated, the future Yale remained at Saybrook. Then fate began to act. " A vote," .says our historian, " was passed at Hartford, to remove the college to Weathersfield; and another at Newhaven, that it should be re- moved to that town. Hartford prepared teams, boats, and a mob, and privately set off for Saybrook and seized upon the College apparatus, library, and students and carried all to Weathersfield. This redoubled the jealousy of the saints of Newhaven, who accordingly collected a mob sufficient for the enterprise, and set out for Weathersfield. There they seized upon the students, library, etc., etc. But on the road to Newhaven they were overtaken -+306*- OF NEW ENGLAND by the Hartford mob, who, however, after an un- happy battle, were obliged to retire with only a part of the library and part of the students." The war for the college raged bitterly for some time, and it was only when Massachusetts entered as a mediator that peace arrived. As the parson historian bitterly says, she was, " as ever," looking out for her own advantage, and desired that a rival college should be as far from her own as might be. Weathersfield, but a few miles south of Hart- ford, was far too close for comfort. So New Haven beat Hartford in this contest, at least. Though the rage of the Hartford and Weathers- field saints was such that they sent all their young men to Harvard for many years. Two years later the college was given the name of Yale, after its greatest benefactor, Elihu Yale. The picture of that struggling mob, with the poor distraught students being snatched back and forth, brother torn from brother, first and second volumes of important works separted by the frantic fighters, who cared not what sorrow or confusion they wrought so long as the other fellow didn't get the college, this picture is so little like the usual conception of the founding of a seat of learning that it has a special appeal. Possibly the well- known pugnacious spirit of the University had its birth at the same moment. '-* 307 *- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS Phelps Hall is the gate by which you enter the college campus from the Green. It is a square tower, heavy and solid, built over an archway, very deep and finely curved, looking through which you see iron gates and beyond the greenery of the campus. Gone are most of the fine elms that used to stand here, the elm beetle and other causes work- ing against them. At one time the trees within the college walls were as fine as those outside. Now they are young and small in comparison. But the great quandrangle is a magnificent and effec- tive sight. Yale has an old and grave look, for all that so many of her buildings are comparatively new. The Old Brick Row has gone, leaving Con- necticut Hall to the left, built in 1750, Old South as it used to be called, as the oldest portion of the University. This has been restored to its original pure Colonial style, from which it had lapsed. Vanderbilt Hall lies just behind, and we were told that it was the best college dormitory any- where on earth. On one side the ivy-covered Art School, on the other handsome Osborne Hall. Op- posite were the Library, Dwight Hall, and Alumni Hall. Beyond these High Street, and be- yond that other buildings, Peabody Hall Museum among them. Behind us, as we stood after enter- ing through Phelps, one building adjoined another, -+ 308-1- OF NEW ENGLAND making a great parapet between the college and the town. There is a superb quality to a fine University that no other group of buildings can ever equal. Dedicated to the mind of man, they touch the imagination with particular force. There is a cer- tain compactness about Yale that heightens the ef- fect. Wherever we looked, one splendid building belonging to the college touched or almost touched another. Behind these lay more, so that we seemed to be in a town given up to learning and to beauty. We walked its streets with joy, passing through the exquisite Whitman Gate, taking turns that gave unexpected and thrillingly lovely vistas, watching the hurrying students and the more stately prog- ress of a professor as they went about their busi- ness. The shadows of trees fell on stone walls and grassy places, towers rose, arched and battlemented gates opened in the walls or accentuated the strength of the iron fence. We saw many of the fraternity houses, and famous Skull and Bones; we passed the Gym and swung around by White Hall and the Lyceum, where the college plays are given. It was all a long enchantment, as it should be. " Don't let's miss the Yale Bowl," Sister urged. We didn't, in its empty serenity. But the time to see that is when the football battles are on, every -* 309-*- OLD SEAPORT TOWNS tier a solid row of excited humanity aflutter with flags, the air shaken by yells and cheers, the con- testing teams swaying below there. Yet, in its calmness, it gained beauty. " Being a college boy has many desirable aspects," we decided, as we came out on the Green again. " But being a professor, and settling down here for keeps " " Incomparably more delightful than the job of being President," was our conclusion, as we re- turned to the Taft Hotel. We still had a perfectly good afternoon, and planned to use it in seeing Donald G. Mitchell's old place, the Edgewood Farm, two miles to the west of the city, where Ik Marvel had lived more than fifty years, devoted to the enduring pleasures of gardening and authorship. " My Farm at Edge- wood " is a book that can be reread just about as often as haymaking comes round, while the whim- sical sentiments of " Dream Life " and " Reveries of a Bachelor " lose nothing of their fresh appeal as the years pile up on them. We asked permission to wander about the grounds, which are beautifully laid out. Mitchell was an artist with trees and shrubs, curving paths and bosky slopes, quite as much as with words. His writing, indeed, was simply an avocation. It was agriculture and gardening that were the OF NEW ENGLAND passion and the labour of his life. The comfort- able but rather fussy house was full of large win- dows that looked out on every side. Little did Ik Marvel care as to the architecture of the house that sheltered him, so long as he might be per- mitted to see every change in the seasons, to study the coming and going of summer and winter, from those broad verandas and those commanding win- dows, what time the severity of the weather kept him from going out. Oddly enough, Mitchell appears to be the only distinctively literary man who has made New Haven his home. And he was more amateur than professional. We drove back to the station, where our bags were waiting to be checked to New York. We dreaded them no longer. Even here, in the large purlieus of the Union Station, they held no peril, for porters were to be had without the asking. We settled ourselves comfortably, but sadly, for the short return trip. Our little holiday was over. " It will all seem like a dream to-morrow," I said. " New York grabs you again so quickly, swamps you, stifles anything but itself out of you. The lilacs over the rocks above the sea, the mur- muring pines, the little, twisted, up and down streets, the old, old houses, the distant prospects, the bells of Sunday morning, the drying fish, the OLD SEAPORT TOWNS lobster boats and ancient wharves, all that was yes- terday and is to-day, all will seem the insubstan- tial fabric of a dream." " Cease those complaints," Sister retorted. " It doesn't do any harm to have things seem a dream, quite the contrary. And we'll never forget our New England spring, not a jot of it. What's more, you know, we're going back." I brightened. "Of course we are! That's settled." And the train rolled swiftly onward to the im- mensities of New York from the immensities of rock-bound coast and sea and sky. Nor did any brakeman or conductor come through, shouting that we must move out of the car we were in and into some other if we wished to get to the metropo- lis. There are some things in which New York does not insist that you shall step lively. The train, as though definitely closing our coast town journey, swung away from the seaboard far enough to close the view. Having noth- ing better to do, we went forward to the dining car. 312