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^ c)v?.rzoi..._.E.zi^.s. 'di t B^ \ BY AGNES EDWARDS Author of "Our Common Road" 'The House of Friendship" THE SALEM PRESS COMPANY SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS 1915 cy a-'J> ^"^ Copyright 1915 By Aqnes Edwards Rothery Wei-lesi-ey. Mass. Chapter I. Chapter II. Chapter III. Chapter IV. Chapter V. Chapter VI. Chapter VII. Chapter VIII. Chapter IX. Chapter X. Chapter XI. Chapter XII. Chapter XIII. Chapter XIV. Chapter XV. WiNTHROP Old and New . . 1 Revere, the Playground of Boston 6 The Forgotten City of Lynn 12 Golden Days in Nahant. . 23 Salem 32 Quaint Marblehead ... 50 The Wings of a New Morn- ing 66 The Fashionable North Shore ....... 70 Gloucester— Flood Tide and Ebb ....... 83 A Deserted Village ... 96 The Romance of Rockport . 102 An Annisquam Garden . . 108 Ecclesiastical Ipswich . . 113 The Whittier Country . . 130 Charming Old Newburyport 145 iii PAGE Winthrop Highlands 1 Those characteristic beaches and bluffs and rocks commence here in full loveliness. The Deane Winthrop House, at Revere 2 One of the six oldest buildings in New England. Built by the captain of the Mayflower. Revere 6 With its bandstands, and scenic railways, its merry- go-rounds and loop-the-loops. The Playground of Boston 8 Here the city dwellers come in thousands. High Rock, at Lynn 16 That cliff of dull red porphry affording a view not parallelled on the New England coast. Nahant 23 Its wild and tattered coast line unmistakable for miles around. The House of Seven Gables 32 Salem is rich in Hawthorne memorials, and the House of Seven Gables is exquisitely preserved. The Salem Custom House 36 Which faces the wharves which once received a yearly import worth $7,000,000 in duties alone. Old Tucker Wharf at Marblehead 50 An abolished Landmark which once stood at the present ferry landing. iv ILLVSTRATIO^S— Continued Barnegat in Marblehead 54 Where notoriovis pirates stalked the streets, and smuggling was indulged in as a legitimate occupa- tion. The Wings of a New Morning 66 Where two hundred years ago men were hanged for witchcraft, flying machines now circle freely. Twentieth Century Progress in Seventeenth Century Setting 68 Far out over the harbor the flight of an aviator above the irregular outline of the New England coast. The Fashionable North Shore 74 The North Shore of high stepping horses and smartly painted traps: of hunting clubs and polo ponies. Gloucester Harbor 83 From which a fleet of two hundred fishing schooners goes to the Grand Banks. Fishing Racks at Gloucester 88 The smell of fish and salt — curious, indescribable, oily, penetrates Gloucester Town. A Deserted Village 96 An oddly impressive spot, revealing no trace of the hundred families who lived here two centuries ago. Rockport Harbor 102 Passed by seventy thousand vessels annually, it is never ice bound and has excellent holding ground. Rockport Quarry Sheds 104 There are more than six hundred acres of quarry land, finishing, cutting and polishing sheds in Rock- port. Annisquam 108 To the west across the water swell the white irreg- ular sand dunes of Ipswich. V ILLUSTRATIONS— Conimwed In an Annisquam Garden -110 A slope of green trjrf, the pleasant roof of a house half way down the cliff, and far below, the calm of Ipswich Bay. "The First Church" at Ispwich 120 Meeting house green, which has borne a church for nearly three hundred years, is the symbolic center of the town. Whittier's House at Amesbury 130 An ordinary building, interesting only because of its associations. Whittier's Birthplace at Haverhill 136 The square house in which Whittier was born in 1807 was built by his great grandfather in 1688. The Chain Bridge at Newburyport 145 Spanning the Merrimac between Amesbury and Newburyport. Harriet Prescott Spofford's house is visible in the background. VI Of all the thousands of miles of our inspiring coast- line, east and west, there is no part more rich in ro- mance, more throbbing with legendary and historical associations than the North Shore of New England. Try to imagine the story of the early colonists; the growth of architecture and literature and religion in this country except against this background. It is impossible' So much that is of permanent value in the poetry and prose of America has its roots in this region: so many profoundly significant events of our national and social life have developed here, that no American who has not at least knocked at the door of this treasure house is properly educated in the pat- riotic sense ! Much has been written about the North Shore, but each new comer finds a new message and yields to a spell that can never pall. vii CHAPTER I WINTHROP OLi) AND NEW Those visitors to New England who have set forth upon the pleasurable task of exploring the historic and beautiful North Shore must surely begin at Win- throp, which is the smallest town in Massachusetts — one and sixth tenths square miles — and boasts no less than nine railway stations in its limited area. For it is one of the most convenient of Boston's suburbs, and most popular of Boston's summer resorts, and those characteristic beaches and bluffs and rocks, which stretch and curve and tumble down past Newbury- port, commence here in full loveliness. * Beside its thriving summer and winter population, Winthrop has many fine old houses, streets and trees. *A loveliness that has not escaped the poets. One of the best achieve- ments is given on page 163. .5- ~\ c; ( ~ o 0) WINTHROP OLD AND NEW On the south side of a hill still stand a few reminders of the great sassafras grove which once furnished sassafras root to London at forty cents a pound! But the unique possession of the town is the Deane Win- throp House — one of the six oldest dwellings in New England. It was built by Captain William Pierce, who was commander of the Mayflower and of several other vessels which brought Plymouth and Massa- chusetts Bay colonists over from the other side. And it was bought by Deane Winthrop, sixth and youngest son of the first Governor, a farmer and a good one, who lived under these sturdy timbers until 1703. Substantial, plain and excellently preserved it looks forth without resentment upon the twentieth century agitation of boy scouts and casual tourists, energetic inhabitants and annual summer influx which flood the streets of the once sequestered village. Around it are playgrounds and parks and club houses : there are two forts owned by the United States Government, five yacht clubs and more automobiles than horses. But within the rooms of the slowly settling cottage the great brick fireplaces, the wide pine boards and the oaken beams brace themselves for another three hundred changeless years. The Winthrop Historical and Improvement Asso- THE ROMANTIC SHORE elation has bought the place, and carefully preserved those relics and data which testify to its heritage. You may, if you wish, step under the narrow little front stairs into a deep, closely concealed brick recess, whose original purpose has long since been abandoned and is now forgotten. Standing there in the cool darkness you try to imagine for just what mysterious use this elaborate cubby hole was intended. Was it a smoke house for hams? Was it a hiding place for priests who were violating that severe law which for- bade them to minister? There is more than one such refuge in guileless looking New England farmhouses: however, usually in such cases one could enter from the fireplace, which is not true here. It is not im- probable that it was intended as a place to protect women and children if the house should be attacked by Indians, although it seems almost too near Boston for that. Well, we shall never know, and it will stand there with its secret locked by a rude latch until the years which will crumble its newer and more pre- tentious neighbors will crumble it, also. As we step out of the bricked recess and walk about through the little cottage with its low ceilings and narrow doors and curiously arched support of the chimney — visible from the cellar — we have to force our imaginations to 4 WINTHROP OLD AND NEW picture Governor James Bowdoin, Lady Elizabeth Temple and Robert C. Winthrop who all lived here in turn in contentment and esteem. Our dignitaries of today would hardly find it sufficient. The whistle of the narrow gauge train stopping at one of its nine stations, the welcoming voices of those who have down to "see it come in" and the sigh of relief with which the business men, weary from their day in the steaming city, step off and whiff the clean ocean air, remind us that we are in a very modern suburb. The automobiles chug off: the train pulls out: the last straggler directs his steps toward home thinking gratefully of his salt water dip before supper. Our eyes turn once more toward that survivor of another age and time — standing patiently like some hale old man who watches the racing and romping of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren with an indulgent smile about his bearded lips. But in his eyes there is the loneliness of one who has outlived his generation, and is waiting", uncomplainingly until he, too, may be allowed to depart. The Pl^rour\d of Bx)stoi\ _j CHAPTER II REVERE THE PLAYGROUND OF BOSTON There is no more perfect beach in all the world than that firm white sweep of sand three miles in length, which is called Revere. Originally a part of Lynn, it curves in a crescent between Winthrop and Saugus, and is accessible by train, by trolley and by boat. And here the city dwellers come in thousands and thou- sands. 300,000 was the number for one hot day in June. They flock to the bath houses and swarm out over the beach; children, mammas and papas: older sisters and rollicking lovers : pale clerks from the city and tanned lads from the country: serious faced couples whose hoarded scanty savings are barely sufficient to cover their car fare and a side show: 6 REVERE prodigal young society belles and beaux who have run through the gaieties of more fashionable resorts. Automobiles come tearing down from town with hilarious cargoes: the trolleys fling forth a new crowd every five minutes: the excursion boat from Nahant groans under the weight of its passengers. And the smooth blue water and the whitest, hardest of sands welcome them all with gregarious hospitality. There are bandstands and pavilions at Revere: there are galleries where one may have three Shots at a bobbing wooden duck for a nickel, and sidewalk stoves where hot frankfurters are forever sizzling. ''Won- derland"— the Coney Island of Boston — is here, raising its fantastic structure of painted "Scenic Railway" and its perilous framework of "Loop-the-Loop" against the faultless sky. Ice cream cones and salt water taffy: fish chowders and peanuts: soft drinks and pop-corn are perpetually on the menu of those street shops where idling, laughing groups are strolling. Within the confines of "Wonderland" all those delights which have been concocted to rouse the jaded senses are in full ferment : upholstered chariots which lift you with a horrible rotary motion above the screaming earth: "Shoot-the-shoots" which whirl you through the air REVERE with sickening velocity : floors that wobble under your feet and fireworks that dance before your eyes: and everywhere the din of excited humanity. You may be scornful of these garish pleasures and formulate supercilious remarks about the ''hoi-polloi." But the hoi-polloi is wiser than you : it realizes that this place has been set aside for its especial amusement and it intends to amuse itself here as blatantly as it pleases. And, after all, there is something rather magnificent in the sight of these thousands and thou- sands of men and women out for a few hours of re- creation. The tourist in Rome demands to be shown the Coliseum. Why? Not merely because of its architectural features, but because its bare and shat- tered shell still bears mute witness to the huge mobs that once assembled there to make a holiday. He who is seeking to reconstruct the meaning of the Coliseum tries to picture to himself the vividness, the roar — the crush and impulse of that mob. History is no longer defined as the recital of the deeds of kings : it is recognized as the story and the temper of the people: what they wanted: the way they worked: how they enj oyed themselves: the objects for which they were willing to exert themselves: the ideals 9 THE ROMANTIC SHORE which appealed to them. And one phase of the de- velopment of the United States is exemplified more completely by a place like Revere than by all the heavy economic tomes that were ever shelved in the recesses of a library. Stand now, and survey this multitudious throng of red capped, leaping bathers — their legs and arms twinking against the white background of infinite sea, their shrill cries mingling with the strains of popular music and the rhythm of the ocean! Yes — this is part of New England's historic North Shore, and as a part it infuses its tinge of color into the com- posite picture of the whole. We must not leave Revere without taking one glimpse of it from the rear. As the train whirls down toward Lynn and Salem we may see from the car window the most absurd conglomeration of houses, sheds, huts and shanties that ever accomodated a cheerful and promiscuous summer colony. Small shacks with large piazzas, and smaller ones with no piazzas at all: one-story-one-room edifices of tar paper and clapboards: shelters improvised from discarded electric cars and ancient piano boxes: buildings that once were houses and are now sliced in two or patched together — bedecked with baby carriages and scatter- 10 REVERE ing window boxes and clotheslines flappingly burden- ed with a casual wash. There are crowded together in small settlements like hastily sprung mushrooms — or sporadically dotted here and there, on a ledge, in a pasture, by a road, or irrelevantly^ off the road, or anywhere at all. As the train curves by you see in your imagination not only the little community but the spontaniety that went into its rearing : men with a half holiday, families with two weeks' vacation, build- ing their houses as they lived in them like nautaluses : groups of neighbors with little cash and immeasurable good humor. The train flies past: Revere, with its ''Loop-the- Loops" latticed dizzily against the sky, with its peer- less sweep of beach and its ephemeral jumble of cottages, is gone as swiftly as it appeared — a bubble bursting in a many colored splatter of light. 11 r CHAPTER III THE FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN The stranger passing through Lynn, conscious only of factories and railways, automobiles, trolleys and jitneys and all the insignia of a modern industrial metropolis is not surprised to be told that this is the third city in Massachusetts in value of manufactured products and the leading center for women's shoes in the world. But he is surprised to hear, perhaps, that underneath this brick-bound, teeming city there lies another city, almost forgotten, like one of those dim churches into which the curious may penetrate buried beneath a superstructure of modern or medieval Rome. This other Lynn is the Lynn of the long silver beach: of storied glens and rocks: of leafy shelters and deep woods into which no sound of shoe making has ever penetrated, and where the 12 FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN echoes of crude colonial life still linger like the faint sounds of that ancient obliterated church above which beat the throb of a thousand unconcious feet. The first settlers came here from Salem in 1629 and they changed the Indian name of Saugus — which meant flat or extended, and was suggested by the broad salt marshes— -to Lynn, or King's Lynn, from Lynn Regis in England. For a long time Lynn — or Saugus — included Swampscott, Lynnfield and Nahant, but now the old name is only left to the river and fragment of the original territory. He would see this old Lynn must not content him self with glancing at the store houses and machine shops, or even at those specimens of colonial archi- tecture which survive here as in all New England towns, but must find his way to High Rock — that cliff of dull red porphyry within the city limits, topped with a tower which is to Lynn what the Citadel is to Quebec. From it one looks down and out upon the kingdom of earth, circled with its shining beaches and distant towns and happy meadows, and up into the kingdom of heaven springing from the infinite rim of the ocean. It is a view not parallelled on the New Eng- land coast.* Here on High Rock — which will remain forever unchanged in the flux of man-made changes — ♦Elizabeth Merrill's poem is a pleasant assistance to a more intelligent appreciation of the spot. Page 165. 13 THE ROMANTIC SHORE one can most easily leave modern Lynn and take the first step back into the shadows of Saugus. Perhaps the first figure he will encounter on such a journey will be Moll Pitcher — she who, when this cliff was a lonely and isolated spot, lived at its foot for fifty years and told fortunes, quite simply and with a terrible surety to the cultivated and the intelligent, who made special and clandestine pilgrimages to her, as well as to the ignorant sailor lads who came, half in fun and half in superstition, when their ships cast anchor in Saugus Harbor. She made no explanation of her gift — which was not a vulgar fakerism but an inexplicable psychic power — and neither her own generation nor those that followed have made any denial of it. She held Fate in the hollow of her hand, and, gazing through the flimsy mortal frame into the past and future, directed ships to far ports or foul de- cay, and predicted disasters and triumphs that came to pass ten and twenty years later. Poems, stories and articles have been written about Moll Pitcher, but no one has ever discredited the secret or the sincerity of her occultism. The stranger in Lynn must also go back to those unspoiled primeval forests broken by cliffs from which one may see the summer colony of Swampscott, the 14 FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN "splintered spurs of Phillips Head," the peninsular of Nahant and the houses of Lynnfield — the modern divisions of the ancient Saugus. In the heart of these woods are glens and ravines, redolent with historic^ tales of pirates and witches and trampling horse- men and charmed circles. Captain Kidd left some buried treasure on the Point of Pines — rubies as big as a hen's egg and strings of pearls a yard long. And they are there today, no doubt, waiting the magic key of a twentieth century Robert Louis Stevenson. For what more thrilling plot for a Treasure Island could Robert Louis Stevenson have desired than the story of Pirate's Glen and Dungeon Rock — known to every child of Lynn and gravely accepted as part of the town's history? It began on a summer evening in the middle of the seventeenth century when a small and unknown bark crept up the Saugus River and cast anchor in Saugus Harbor. The people of Lynn viewed it un- easily, for credulity regarding ghosts and pirates and witches was not confined to the nursery in those days. A boatload of men landed and disappeared, and the next morning the ship also had vanished. Terror fell on the little settlement, especially when it became noised about that a note had been left on the anvil of 15 ^^ oMi >^ High Rock — ^that cliff of dull red porphyry, marked by a tower which affords a view not parallelled on the New England coast. FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN the village blacksmith, promising that if he would bring a certain number of shackles and handcuffs to a remote and wooded spot he would find awaiting him their weight in gold. The blacksmith's love of lucre overcame his fear of the devil. He carried the shackles and handcuffs to the appointed spot, left them and scooped in the glittering pile. Then, half fearsomely, the men began to search the woods, leav- ing the women to scan the seas for the sight of a skull and cross bones against the sky. But the uninvited guests had departed, and it was not until some months later that it was discovered that they had again re- turned, this time bringing with them a beautiful woman. They selected a narrow valley shut in on two sides by precipitous rocks, from which they could command a view of the sea, and screened by a thick undergrowth of evergreen by which they were com- pletely hidden. During that winter the simple folk of Lynn often speculated about the mysterious glen, and when, in the spring, it was rumored that the beautiful woman had died and was buried near the treasure, a leader, braver than the others, organized a band, hunted out the evil doers, captured three of them and sent them to England where they were promptly hung — this being during England's gibbet 17 THE ROMANTIC SHORE craze. One escaped, and a little later wandered back to the glen. He was a shoemaker and practised his trade harmlessly in the woods, coming to town occa- sionally. There seems to have been no complaint against him: he neither added to nor subtracted from the ill gotten booty, but simply lived with it. There were tales, of course. Why not, with an ex-pirate for a neighbor? Whether Lynn would have been content to let him stay on unmolested will never be known, for while they were deliberating, an earth- quake shook up the town in an alarmiag fashion. When it came to its senses and took account of stock it found that the entire face of the rock in the Pirate's Glen had been split off, and that the ex-pirate and the treasure were entombed within. After this Lynn remained apparently unconcerned about the Pirate's Rock until a good many years later when Hiram Marble, directed by a spirit medium, decided to search for the treasure which had been closed by the earthquake doors. It was called Dungeon Rock now, and Hiram worked long and fiercely to excavate a way through a mass of porphyry as hard as adamant. But the spirit medium had sent him on a profitless chase, for he died, like many another seeking but not finding. His son took up the 18 FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN excavation work, and claimed to have discovered piratical looking relics, but the only money ever un- questionably produced by the Dungeon Rock was that left by the curious at the door grating of the tunnel. It was to these same woods that Winnepurkit, the Sagamore of Saugus, brought his bride. She was the dusky daughter of Passaconaway, the chief and wizard of the Merrimac county. Passaconaway sent his daughter to her future husband with braves and nobles and fitting ceremony, for they were both mighty chiefs and proud to honor one another. When, after a brief season in the wigwam village of Saugus, the bride announced her desire to return home to visit her father, Winnepurkit sent her back with as distinguished an escort of warriors as had accompanied her before. But when, however, the lady was ready to return and her father sent word to Winnepurkit to arrange again for the body guard, the young husband refused, declaring it beneath his dig- nity to send his men to bring back what was already his own. It was her father's place to furnish escort. The Chief of the Merrimac retorted that he had sent her once with pomp, and that if she were worth coming, she was worth sending for. She was the 19 THE ROMANTIC SHORE squaw of the noble Winnepurkit and not the daughter of the famous Passaconaway. The wrangle continued for some time : the father was perfectly willing to keep his daughter but his dignity forbade him to bestow her twice in the same grandeur. The husband wanted his squaw but his reputation forbade his sending for what was already his own. And while the two chiefs quarrelled interminably, the little wife hung dangling between them, until one night she loosed a canoe and fled down the river to her husband's tribe. But only the broken canoe, empty and wave tossed, reached Saugus the following night. Besides the early tradition, there is another phase of Lynn's history which will always be memorable, and that was in the early days of its shoemaking before the trade had become specialized as it is today. Then everybody made shoes or parts of them. Practically all the women and girls of the community stitched and bound in their odd minutes at home, making a little extra pin money. The men who worked in the small shops were intelligent and respected citizens, who kept their wits sharpened by having someone read the newspaper aloud to them as they worked. Many of the noted men of that day and region passed an apprenticeship at the Lynn shoe bench. John Green- 20 FORGOTTEN CITY OF LYNN leaf Whittier was one, and William Lloyd Garrison was another. It was one of those informal industries, comparable to cranberrying on Cape Cod a decade ago when everybody — father, mother and children and grandchildren — all went out to pick on the bogs in cran- berry season, taking their luncheon, picnic fashion, and transforming the whole affair into a sort of sociable. This friendly and genteel activity was characterictic of Lynn until the sewing machine appeared in 1852, and ten years later steam power was applied to machinery. Then everything changed. Factories and factory conditions became established, and the huge shoe industry of Lynn — which today has an annual payroll of $25,000,000 — was born. It is Lucy Larcom's ballad of '^Hannah's at the Window Binding Shoes" that best crystallizes, in a form which will always fill a page of every New England history, the spirit of a time when there was certain idyllic touch to the home industries of this country. This old Lynn of romance and legend and demo- cratic simplicity seems at first glance incalculably removed from modern Lynn with its fifty churches and seven theatres and its myriad complexities of urban life. But to those who like to trace the blend- ing of the old and the new, there is a peculiar satis- 21 THE ROMANTIC SHORE faction in that magnificent boulevard, curving beside the ocean for two long and perfect miles. This shore drive, with automobiles whirling over it and a throng of people constantly moving up and down the wide promenade is a ribbon that binds the past with the present. For after all, it is not the factories and hospitals and postoffices that make Lynn: it is the age-old ocean that, long after the last factory has crumbled, will beat against the long silver beach as it did before the first white men set foot upon it. The sky, the woods and the incomparable shore are the Lynn that is neither ancient nor modern but of all time. Such flying reflections glance through the mind as one skims along the boulevard to Swampscott and Salem.* ♦Longfellow's "Bells of Lynn" have admirably caught the spirit of the "Lynn of all time." Page 167. 22 CHAPTER IV GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT Nahant, which was the first genuine summer resort on the New England coast, maintains a gracious prestige to this day, zealously guarding its two treas- ures— a striking natural beauty, and a history of in- finitely varied charm. The embouldered peninsular, attached to the mainland by the narrowest of necks, rears itself abruptly from the sea — its wild and tattered coast- line unmistakable from the ocean or the high inland hills for miles around. It is so conspicuous and so superbly bold that it is delightfully easy to accept the 23 THE ROMANTIC SHORE tradition that the Vikings once landed here — not coming from Lynn by trolley as we do today — but gliding up in their long boats to one of the little coves sheltered by splended spurs of rock quite precipitous enough to appeal to the most intrepid of Norsemen. We cannot verify the exact spot where Thorwald anchored, was attacked by natives, killed and buried — for, after all, a saga is not a Baedeker — but, never- theless, it seems wholly reasonable to believe that the ''rocky promontory," mentioned in the ancient legend, was Nahant, and to believe that the dust of the first adventurer of our race to set foot on this soil, still mingles with the earth we tread today. Five hundred years passed, and then the Cabots on a voyage of discovery took cognizance of the place: hardy fishermen from England and Brittany, seeking Eldorado, mentioned it: Captain John Smith included it in his map of the coast, and Gosnold and his companions, going back to England after a winter at Cuttyhunk, took back descriptions that might have given Shakespeare his inspiration for the setting of "The Tempest." One hundred and twenty-five years after the Cabots had come on their brief exploring expedition the May- flower weighed anchor in Plymouth Harbor, and a 24 GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT fishing station at Cape Ann was established. And then in 1634, Thomas Dexter drove one of those dashing bargains which illuminate our early colonial records. He bought Nahant from the Indians for a suit of old clothes. For a good many years after this it was held by the Lynn settlers as pasture land. As William Wood, a member of the first settlement tas succintly explained, ''It is used to put young cattle in, and weather goates and swine, to secure them from woolves. A few posts and rayles across the narrow necke keepes out the woolves and keepes in the cattle." It was at this time that land was offered free to any- one who would bother to clear it, with the result that, in true American style, the trees were promptly leveled to the ground, and what had once been a heavily wooded place became so barren that years later, when people began to consider it a summer re- sort, several thousand shade trees had to be planted- But in spite of most careful forestry Nahant will never be wooded again — that first ruthless beginning has left an everlasting wake of barreness. During all the seventeenth century this unparallelled bit of shore and greenery was considered only as a fish- ing place or a woodlot to furnish fuel to Lynn and Bos- ton. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth 25 THE ROMANTIC SHORE century that it came gradually into its present use. And yet this complete disregard for a place which would have been crowded with tourists had it been situated on the Mediterranean is quite under- standable when we remember what hard working and meagre lives were forced upon the early colonists. They had neither time nor money for recreation: travel was slow and immensely expensive. It never occurred to a family in ordinary circumstances to take a little trip to the seaside or spend the summer months at the shore. After the Revolutionary War the country re- covered from its exhaustion, and commerce gathered to itself and diffused from itself a new life : ships from" Salem and Boston went all over the world, fortunes — many of them existing to this day — were made. And with the fortunes came the desire and opportunity for relaxation. Nahant appeared in a new guise: it was the first scene of that phenomenon now so char- acteristic of the United States — the summer migrat- ion. It is rather interesting to tr^^ to picture to our- selves those first few scattering visitors. Young men came down in sailboats from Boston, or down in chaises from town, ploughing cheerfully across the two miles of the shingle of Long Beach if the tide hap- 26 GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT pened to be high — an arduous and difficult trip, which only enhanced its romance. More and more people began to come. Every house became a board- ing house. In 1820 a steamboat route from Boston was established, and the steamboat which made the trip in three hours was dubbed the ^^Eagle" without thought of jocularity. And then a hotel was built and cottages began to spring up. Thus gradually Nahant slipped into the golden period of her long history, when not only ''gentleman of wealth and leisure and ladies of taste and refinement, with occasionally noblemen and persons of distinction from Europe," as an old guide book of a hundred years ago says, gathered at the place, but the most distinguished men in the coun- try established the happy custom of summering here. Then it was that Daniel Webster in the full flush of his fame, William Story, the sculptor and poet, Rob- ert C. Winthrop, senator and speaker of the house, Choate fresh from the triumphs of the bar, Oliver Wendell Holmes and George William Curtis formed a coterie which has never been equalled before or since in the history of the United States. One may see the modest cottage of Mrs. Hannah Hood where Motley began his ''Dutch Republic" and stand where Long- fellow stood when he listened to the sweet sounds 27 THE ROMANTIC SHORE which were long after echoed in the verses ''The Bells of Lynn." There has never assembled a more bril- liant American gathering than that which congregated at Nahant in those days, and as we stroll along the pleasant roads with their careless, prosperous informal- ity our sense of enjoyment quickens as we remem- ber that here walked Charles Sumner, President Felton of Harvard and Judge Prescott.* And the thing which brought them to Nahant brings the summer visitors today. The gloriously wild shore with its crags and castellated cliffs stand- ing sharp against the blue Atlantic: the rocks with their myriad shadows: the sea with its ceaseless rhythm. As we walk along the Cliff Walk where so many of the wise and the foolish, the simple and great have trod before us, the same curiosities of rock formation which were, doubtless, pointed out to them with admiring forefinger, are pointed out to us. There is Pulpit Rock — a perennial lure to small boys to scramble up its sheer rough sides, Natural Bridge, The Spouting Horn, Irene's Grotto, The Sisters, Egg Rock — an isolated, surf-incircled islet crowned with a lighthouse eighty feet above the sea. One never tires of enumerating the wonders of this beloved coast. While it is still untamed — for who can tame the *Story's verses are fraught with a reminiscent sentiment that brings Nahant cuiioiisly dose to us. Page 169. 28 GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT winds and waves and the cliffs? — yet there is every- where that mellowness of a place which has been con- stantly frequented. Lynton and Lynmouth recur to the memory, not because their mild grace is compar- able to this stark grandeur, but because of the similar sense of companionship with those who have passed this way before which clings to those favorite English haunts. Musing on the famous Cliff Walk, which hugs the jutting steeps and ledge and affords the windiest and dazzlingest of promenades, one likes to picture the long boats of the Vikings which may have anchored here, eyed with suspicion and hatred by the red skin- ned Indians: the few carefully guarded cows from Lynn which grazed serenely in their oases of safety: the undaunted little sailboats, tossing down from Boston like cockle shells with their cargo of young men off for a holiday: and then the first steamer, the trolley line across the neck, the first automobile and now — a neat and homelike village, with an at- tractive club house and library and town hall: with a goodly quota of spacious summer homes which are rather inaccurately called "cottages," and many well-built all-the-y ear-around houses. There is every variety of summer life at Nahant to- 29 THE ROMANTIC SHORE day. Over at Bass Point the excursion steamers from Revere land and empty upon the beach their loads of merry-go round riders and imbibers of ice-cream cones. There is a dancing pavilion and a band stand: cafes and all the paraphernalia for what is considered ' 'pop- ular amusement." But the genuine Nahant residents hold themselves aloof from such frivolity. The dignified residence of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge maintains the tone which was struck a half a century ago, and of which the present day successors of those celebrities are fully and proudly aware. Brown limbed children sprawl on the rocks of the little beaches which are tucked with their bathhouses into the sheltered coves. Comfortable automobiles pass in leisurely fashion up the unpretentious streets. Here and there a stranger peers, seeking for "The Swallows Cave" or Agassiz's cottage, where he wrote "Brazil."* It is a long time indeed, since the day when Thomas Dexter bought the promontory from the Indians for a suit of old clothes: a long time from the big snow storm of 1717 when the deer, venturing out of the woods were pursued by "woolves" and plunged head- long into the sea and were drowned : a long time from *It is interesting to read Longfellow's sonnet on Agassiz in this connec- tion. Page 170. 30 GOLDEN DAYS IN NAHANT 1749 when hay was so scarce it had to be imported from England. And a long time, too, since Long- fellow walked arm-in-arm with Tom Appleton — that wit and artist and man of letters— and Willis' flashing pen struck that description of Nahant which has clung to it all these years of "si mailed fist stretching out into the sea." We have records of all the early dwellers of Nahant but one: Longfellow and Whittier and Mrs Sigourhey enshrined in their poetry this place of their delight: Willis and Curtis sang its praises in prose that was read all over the country fifty years ago: even the militia from Lynn who were sent out to kill these much discussed 'Voolves" are mentioned in the town records. But of the Indians, those first fierce and faithful lovers of the place, we have no record except the name, Nahant. And that name — meaning the Twins — has not been altered. Even the men who cut down every tree left the word untouched. Per- haps they felt even if they did not know the warning of the Persian sage who charges us: ''Change not barbarous names, for they are given of God, and have an inexpressible efficacy." 31 CHAPTER V IN salem's treasure house It was in 1799 that some old sea captains were swapping yarns, and were earnestly substantiating their recitals by proof positive in the form of curios. Determined to convince, one produced a rhinoceros horn, another an elephants tooth, another a two-stem- med pipe from Sumatra — and lo! the Peabody Acad- emy was created! To be sure, it was not called the Peabody Academy until George Peabody left his money and his name to what is now one of the most valuable of all the muse- 32 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE urns in Essex County. But the rhinosceros horn and the elephants tooth and the two stemmed pipe were undoubtedly responsible for the present institution, and in glancing back to them we cleave a swift path through one of the most varied and glowing bits of history in America. Let us linger for a morning in this still and well- ordered Marine room, where lie the clues to all the ramifications of the past, and let them lead us, like the magic thread of Theseus, through the winding chambers of memory back to the splendid days of the last century when Salem's wharves were crowded with vessels — barks and brigs and schooners — bring- ing in a yearly import worth $7,000,000 in duties alone: when wagons crowded the water front and a forest of tall slender masts rose against the sky : when sailors in pigtails and on sea legs chaffered at the cor- ners or bowled down Derby Street to Kit's Dancing Hall: when the ship candler's shops were full, and sailmakers sat cross-legged in their lofts and stitched the great white sheets of canvas: when sea captains in ruffled shirt fronts issued grandly out from their spacious mansion? to watch a neighbor's vessels set sail for Zanzabar, Ceylon or Madagascar. For al- 33 THE ROMANTIC SHORE most every day some ship fared forth, not to be heard of for a year perhaps, or maybe two, prepared with guns and small cannon to meet pirates on the high seas and cannibals in the Pacific. From this harbor sailed the ^'Atlantic" the first vessel to carry the American iflag to Bombay and Calcutta: the 'Tight Horse" with its cargo of sugar to open up our trade with Russia: the ''Grand Turk" to bring silks and nankeens from Bavaria. Nearly everybody had in- vestments, picturesquely called "adventures," in the voyages of these vessels, and fortunes piled high at the time of the Revolution when other ports were closed. Mariners born in the shadow of Roger Conant's house were in Japan fifty years before Commodore Perry^ in Guam a century before it was added to the United States picket line, and held in prison in France and England, Spain and Algeria. The Salem lad was a cabin boy at fourteen, a captain at twenty, and at forty had amassed a fortune and retired to live at leisure in the big house he had hung with trophies from over the seas. Look at their portraits hanging on the walls of this quiet Academy which is now their home: the strong boyish face of Nathaniel Silsbee, Merchant of Salem and United States Senator: the dignified mien of the 34 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE President of the East India Marine Society: the bronzed faces and keen eyes of Master Mariners, Skilled Navigators and Ship Masters — magnetic with the sense of conscious power which marks the young and fortunate. For Salem's brilliant prosperity flowered while she was still young and sturdy: there was no time for the gradual enervation of wealth, but only the wholesome acceptance of the bountiful fruits of the earth. In this small room are preserved mementos as well as portraits of men who made Salem famous. One may examine images like those seen through the far end of a telescope — minute and scrupulous reproduct- ons of merchant vessels, precisely as they were rigged in each detail when they set forth for Arabia or Van- couver. Here are whaling instruments, harpoon lances, models of fishing appliances, and sextants of two hundred years ago. Here, too, are objects made by the sailors on their long voyages; whales teeth, curiously carved, '^jagging wheels" cut in fantastic shapes from ivory: sailors knots — mute souvenirs of tedious hours of half-bored competition while the ship plowed around Cape Horn. Here is an ivory pricker used in sail making, a ''mackerel plow" to split the fish and score the inner flesh, a tatting 35 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE shuttle and bodkin, fashioned, perhaps, with gentler, more silent thoughts of home. And here are shelves and shelves of the objects brought on the return voyage: tinkling pagodas, necklaces of shell and beads, tartar boots, idols, corals, war clubs, palan- quins, minerals, stuffed gorillas and leopards and gaily plumaged tropical birds. These are still left to tell the story of those lavish argosies, as rich as any pirate ship that ever floated on enchanted waters. The ginger has disappeared from the quaint round ginger jars: the monkeys that swung from their perches and the parrots that chattered from their cages in the shops of every corner dealer — these have gone the way of all flesh. But the touch of Orientalism which once made this New England town different from all other New England towns before or since, still lingers here like the faded colors in a once sumptuous rug. This Orientalism is one of the several links in the rather curious similarity between Salem and Venice. There is little now in the modern second-rank metro- polis with its steam cotton mills to remind one of the city of lagoons, but nevertheless the lives of the two run in peculiarly close parallels. Both were orig- inally asylum cities, both began as fisherfolk in rude 37 THE ROMANTIC SHORE huts, engaged in free boating and small trading in convenient waters. All communication, social and commercial, between the log built villages along the shores of Salem was originally carried on in dugouts or canoes, crude, frail affairs, not unlike the early craft of Venice. This maritime commerce gradually grew until Salem gained, first the monopoly of the salt j&sh trade — again like Venice — then a more general mar- ket, and finally, like that other mistress of the seas, undertook the importation of silks and spices and precious commodities, and became magnificent. The leading commercial families formed an aristocracy not unlike the ''close gild" of Venice, and when the Revolution shut one port after another from Savannah to Boston, Salem rose to a period commenserable with the zenith of her Italian Sister in the fifteenth century. And just as the discovery of the Cape Route to the the Indies, diverting the stream of traffic from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, cut the taproot of the prosperity of the latter, so the railroad which sent all Salem's activities through the gateway of Boston, sounded the first note of her decline. And finally it is not stretching the comparison too far to recall that since the maritime decay of Venice the beauty of her palaces has remained an enduring attraction, and that 38 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE although the commercial prestige of Salem has long since waned, each year sheds a brighter luster on those remnants of colonial architecture which border her streets and are not equalled anywhere else in the length and breadth of this country. Take the Pickering house on Broad Street, with its spreading trees, its curiously shaped chimney, narrow hallways and winding stairs. It was built two hun- dred and fifty years ago, and has ever since been kept in the possession of the same distinguished family. Take the Andrews house in Washington Square, gray faced and white trimmed, with a circular porch and tall colums fashioned of bricks that were dipped in burning oil to preserve them: The pillars are bal- asted with rock salt that John Andrew's ships brought back from Russia a hundred years ago. The stairway in the Pickman house is ornamented with carved and gilded codfish — a naive explanation of the origin of the family fortune. The Pickman Brook house place boasts an opening in the window blind where the spy glass used to rest as it sighted the incoming ships, while on the ceiling of the cupola sails forever a fresco of the Derby fleet. On Federal Street stands the As- sembly Hall where Washington and Lafayette danced, and now as then it maintains a personality dignified 39 THE ROMANTIC SHORE and serene, with Ionic entrance and fluted pilasters. Chestnut Street is lined with mansions, square, well built, not a little suggestive in their proportions of buildings of the Italian renaissance. Some of these Salem dwellings have paved courtyards, nearly all have big old fashioned gardens, and besides these com- mon possessions each one jealously guards its especial treasure — such as a stairway with a twisted baluster and newel post, a handsome wainscoting, carved pan- els or a secret closet. The porte cochere of the Em- merton house on Essex street is one of the most perfect specimens in this country, and the doorways, many of them made from bits of shaped wood, pillars and col- umns brought over in the cumbersome holds of those ships which plied between this and the mother country, are the despair and rapture of antiquarians and architects. Rich in carving and brave in new paint and shining knockers, they shut behind their portals the memory of their golden days. Golden days, indeed, when Salem had a mandarin in her own right — Gener- eral Frederick Ward who led the Chinese troops against the Tai Ping rebels and was rewarded with the red button and the peacock feather of a mandarin of the first rank, and honored a;fter his death . by a temple and a pagoda in the land of his prowess, as 40 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE well as a decree that he be worshipped as a deity. He married a Chinese wife, and his portrait hangs in the pleasant Essex Institute as placidly as if he had never swung through such an extraodinary cycle of ex- perience, nor stirred from the conventionalities of a New England town. Days when the houses had folding doors that could be turned back and thus convert the whole lower floor into a ball room, where gentlemen in ruffs and ladies in powder curtsied de- murely in the candle light through the long numbers of the minuet. Then it was that merchants were called Kings, and Elias Hasket Derby — he whose cupola bears the frescoed Derby fleet — dying, left the largest private fortune accumulated in America's eighteenth century. But these days were not the oldest days. Before the tide of wealth broke on Salem's shore bearing on its crest the ambition for stately mansions hung with balconies and sweetened with gardens, simple gambrel roofed homes, very charming and unpre- tentious, were considered quite sufficient. Many of these gambrel roofed houses still stand in fair pre- servation, not yet wholly wearied by the long pro- cession of births, marriages and deaths that pass in 41 THE ROMANTIC SHORE and out — in and out — in solemn inevitability over their worn thresholds. And before the gambrel roofed house there was the plain frame house with low ceilings showing hand- hewn beams, a lean-to, and a long sweep of shingled roof. In the rear of the Essex Institute stands a very remarkable example of this era — second story overhang, diamond paned windows, well -sweep, bucket, little corner shop and all. There is even a posy bed in which are allowed to grow only those flowers which were cultivated in Salem before 1700, and near by is a shoemaker's shop with the benches and tools of 1830. While there is hardly a street or yard in Salem that has not embedded in itself one of the somber or gay threads of her long history, yet it is in the Peabody Academy and Essex Institute, two buildings almost directly opposite each other on Essex Street, that these multifarious filaments are gathered into a master tapestry, so clearly woven that even the most casual may read, and so comprehensive that even the scholar may study with profit. It is characteristic of the completeness of the In- stitute that it should also contain a complete and life sized reproduction of the interior of the house whose 42 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE exterior stands in the rear. Here is the kitchen, its floor sanded, its open fire place flanked by a roasting jack and a wooden settle, its walls decorated with wooden trenches and bread troughs, with a handmade clock and corner cupboard. In the bedroom stands^ an old fashioned fourposter, impressive in its full number of hangings — it took twenty-eight pieces to make the complete set — and a trundle bed peeps out from under the maternal petticoat. Here hangs a framed sampler: on the painted floor lies a braided rug. The Franklin stove — that grateful innovation — is cornered by a winged chair, and on the high-boy are ranged those entrancing painted band boxes that gave the final feminine touch to the stage coaches as they lumbered out of town. The parlor is also com- plete: the pictorial paper, the hand carved mantel, the spinet made in Salem, and the Sheraton sofa and chairs, all typical of the home of 1750. These four rooms fill one side of the big hall and are barred off from profane intrusion. But the atmo- sphere of the past does not end with the end of this charming series. All about the other three sides stand relics of long ago : old walnut and maple chairs, chests and yarn reels, a settle brought from Normandy by the Huguenots in 1687, hand mills, hair cloth trunks, THE ROMATIC SHORE and even a prodigiously clumsy one horse chaise. There is quite a remarkable collection of the costumes of 1819: bonnets and mantles and wedding garments, infants' clothes with their infinitely fine stitches, christening blankets and ball gowns of a generation long since turned to dust. Wonderful it is and rather solemn that a museum can catch and hold under its glass cases so much of the aroma of a day that is dead. In the library, which is under the same roof but across the hall, are over a thousand log books, filled out in the careful penmanship of a more pains- taking age, many of them illuminated in sketch work in pen and ink and in colors comparable in nicety to the lovingly wrought missals of medieval times. Standing thus and looking at the earthly trappings of men and women whose very names have become obliterated on their tombstones, we can think of the darkest episode in the history of Salem with the curious detachment with which one turns the pages of an ancient book. The witchcraft craze was a madness that swept New England. The grewsome fear swept over all the colonies, and in Salem in the winter of 1692 the fear foamed into a fury. The people of that sedate town, 44 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE once roused to action, refused to be deflected from their stern resolve to sweep such heathenish machi- nations swiftly and forever from their sacred borders. Tituba — an African servant who filled the minds of some hysterical children with superstitions and in- cantations, and subsequently threw them into fits in which they accused her of witchcraft — Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were the first to be examined, found guilty and hanged. The superstition was on, and Salem went wild with terror. Accusations were no longer confined to women of Tituba's stamp, but people of character were implicated and convicted on the most trivial of evidence. Everybody believed everything, and suspected everybody else of diabolical compacts, and secret leagues with the Devil. ''Spec- tral evidence" by a deluded child was sufficient to indite a minister or a woman of repute. For one terrific year Salem was a veritable fiery furnace of in- dignation. Nineteen supposed witches were hanged on Gallows Hill — none were burned in this town of delicate distinctions in the ways of death. And then the wave subsided. Saddened and sombered, Reason came back to her own, and the judges bowed their heads in repentance. Gallows Hill remains today bare of cultivation, black and ragged: a few crooked 45 THE ROMANTIC SHORE and rusted pins, which were supposed to have been used by the witches to torture their innocent victims, are exhibited in the court house to the curious. Salem is sorry for her mistake, but does not ignore the picturesque elements of that era. But there are no mementos of that other fantastic error into which ghe fell almost immediately after her recovery from this one — and this was the cruel persecution of the Quakers. One can buy witch spoons in silver and gold, and stick pins with an evil visaged old woman astride a broom stick; one may climb Gallows Hill and read the death warrant of poor foolish Briget Bishop. But nowhere is pre- served the whip that scourged the backs of the un- fortunate Quaker folk who offended through their very inoffensiveness. Thus Salem, like a preserve of her own making, piled the enchantment of architecture upon the ex- citement of legend, the rich flavor of history upon the intoxicating aroma of adventure, the piquancy of too sweet, too bitter tradition upon the light power of gayety. And in due time came one who drew a , silver blade and carved a slice of the fruity mixture, and placing it upon the embossed salver of his im- agination, laid it before the world. For as an angelic 46 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE face sometimes seems to form from the shadows of a chamber hung with gently moving tapestries, so from the tradition -laden atmosphere of Salem, with its sumptuous old mansions, its gilded mirrors and bro- caded chairs, carved doors and gleaming white man- tels, with its well kept museums and wide shaded streets and its ghostly ranks upon ranks of ancient chronicle, formed the delicate and melancholy genius of Hawthorne. One sees how every phase of his environment laid a deepening shade upon his pensive temperament. The gambrel roofed cottage at 7 Union Street, where he was born; the ugly house at 10^ Herbert Street, where he spent his solitary youth, and which has lately been turned into a still uglier ''three decker," but still clasps the ''little window" under the eaves: the residence at 53 Charter Street to which he came as a lover and which still stands, shabby, low studded, cornered by a graveyard : the Custom House where he worked unjoyously — facing the delapidated wharves — all of these mingled in a soft and composite picture which he threw again and again on the screen of his romances. Salem is rich in Hawthorne memorials, but the glamor flushes most rosily over the House of Seven 47 THE ROMANTIC SHORE Gables, where "the Dutchess" lived and where the novelist often came, contented to sit in the white panelled parlor and look out through the deep win- dows across the garden sloping down to the sea. The house with its heavy oak door studded with iron nails, its tiny gift shop — Hepzibah's shop — its long low dining room and its concealed stairway, is exquisitely preserved. And if the guardians have too conscientiously charted and named each room in accordance with the story — ^for one may see Phoebe's chamber and Clifford's chamber, and the spot where Judge Pyncheon sat dead — (in spite of Hawthorne's assertion that his ''house" was built of materials long since used for constructing ''castles in the air") nevertheless, it is entirely fascinating and well worth a fee of admission. Near the many-peaked abode a little bakery, restored to its condition of two hundred and fifty years ago, its hand hewn beams crudely or- namented with auger holes, and hand-split clapboards, untouched by modernism, is another milestone on the road back to yesterday. "The House of Seven Gables" flickers with the lights and shadows of fancy, but "The Scarlet Letter" glows with the intensity of a more vital purpose. In this tragedy Hawthorne climbed to the summit of 48 IN SALEM'S TREASURE HOUSE his art. And here in the Essex Institute, from which we need hardly have stirred in all our wanderings, lies under glass the very volume which bears the statute which suggested the theme — a grim transcript of man's spirit in a grim time. It was Sir James M. Barrie who thought this blurred and terrible little book the most curious of all Salem's reliquae. For, after all, the ends and the beginnings of Salem's history are gathered up in her two treasure houses, to be preserved for generations of those who care to ponder over them. Could Pegasus be pictured as a span, could the imagination be the reins to guide, then in a golden car to whom distance is nothing and time a mist, one might wheel back through the decades of city that once lived to the full in romance and delight. The trip is over: the enchanted coursers lose their magic shape and become mere buildings of wood and stone, with shelves of tabulated cases. The reins of imagination drop from our hands: the golden car dissolves. We stand on the noisy Essex Street of a modern city, and hear the whistle of the train that is to bear us away. ♦Salem made a profound impression upon Story which he has delight- fully preserved for us in rhyme. Page 171. 49 CHAPTER VI QUAINT MARBLEHEAD Down a narrow tumbling road, around a corner, up a hill — around a corner and down a hill — a sharp turn to the left, a crooked turn to the right, houses packed as tight as sardines in a box, some facing the street, some standing sideways to it, and gardens or graveyards in every patch as big as a pocket hand- kerchief— ^there never was such a higgle-ty-piggle-ty place in all the world as the town of Marblehead. Here is a straggling lane down to the sea; there is one bordered by a gray stone wall and knarled willows opening to rock riddled pastures. In the rear of that old fisherman's house lies an overturned catboat being ''caulked," and in his neighbor's front yard is a dory, domesticated into a nasturtium bed. 50 QUAINT MARBLEHEAD We pass the handsome white house where Elbridge Gerry, signer of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Massachusetts and Vice President of the United States, was born. Down a slope and along a side street: there is the house of Skipper Ireson, cen- tral figure of Whittier's poem which has been de- claimed by three generations of amateur elocutionists. '' He sailed away From the leaking ship in Chaleur Bay — Sailed away from a sinking wreck, With his own townspeople on her deck." And for this evidence of his '^hard heart" he was "Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart By the women of Marblehead." Marbleheaders have long declared this popular ditty to be untrue. But at all events the skipper's house is still pointed out among the first of historic landmarks — yellow, shabby, unspectacular.* Round a corner and up a devious grade, '^The Brig," neat, cheerful for all its eerie history — smiles demurely down upon us. It was here that Edward Dimond — pronounced a wizard by the simple fisher- men of his day — spun his supernatural tales, and where his daughter, Moll Pitcher, was born, she whose ♦The poem is given in full on page 173. 51 THE ROMANTIC SHORE , occult powers were of such a penetrating order that she must not be confused with vulgar fortune tellers, but regarded as one of those gifted psychics who leave no successor and no key to their mysteries. Three more turns and a blind alley: we pass the ''Spite House/' a decaying earthly remnant of a feud long since dissolved by death: down a break-neck incline and two more turns — there is the Old Powder house, which held the ammunition of the thrifty in- habitants during the French and Indian and Revolu- tionary Wars and the War of 1812. It stands in well preserved stolidity, complacently unaware of the proportions of a modern magazine. What? Another turn? One understands why the horses look sleek here: what speed is possible in a labyrinth of streets that would make Clovelly look like a boulevard? And what happens to automo- biles? One scrutinizes the pedestrians to see if they have developed some anatomical peculiarity from stumping over these terrestrial vicissitudes. These plain houses, flush with streets that bear the names of the patriots Captain John Selman — naval officer in the Revolution, and Colonel Azor Orne, another of our Vice Presidents — these houses sheltered merchantmen and navigators, stern judges and up- 52 QUAINT MARBLEHEAD right statesmen in colonial days: now many of them have ''Antiques" painted on their front doors, and blue plates alluringly arranged in their small paned windows. The old Town House stands by itself on a little oasis in Market Square, dumb witness to town meet- ings for over one hundred and seventy years: it was the scene of the recruiting of the famous Marblehead regiment in 1776, and the assembling of the Marble- head Light Infantry in April, 1861. Now the Grand Army has its headquarters there: a flag waves lan- guidly from the loft up under the roof, and traffic eddies desultorily around it. Pushing our way along the meandering street, we see people suddenly appear from little flights of steps that connect one irrelevant thoroughfare with another: everything is criss cross and up and down, and incred- ibly involved; the points of the compass shift confus- edly with those of the weather vane. That gambrel roof we are passing bears half a hun- dred bullets in its stout timbers: this one at the junc- tion of Hooper and Lee streets had that corner sliced off so that Lafayette's carriage could pass by; in yon- der modest house lived Evalina Bray, Whittier's first and only love; on the King Hooper Mansion, once as 53 O X! C t-i m a; O 03 O 03 C5 03 bD ■ bC W -♦J 03 CD O a a o a 03 ■ t=l O 3 9^ 5S oj a a^ o bC 03 u 03 ft OQ 03 o3 ft ^ .a ^ o o3 00 «: -g g ft -1-3 03 bO CD QUAINT MARBLEHEAD magnificent as its title suggests, with banquet hall and coat of arms, a tea-room sign is swinging. Marblehead is undoubtedly one of the most pictur- esque towns on the United States. It is, and always has been, entirely different from the other New Eng- land settlements. At the time when Salem was deter- minedly laying down the law and abiding by it, Mar- blehead was engaged in smuggling with all the compos- ture of a legitimate occupation. While Ipswich was piously fining the wives of its deacons for wearing silk bonnets to church, notorious pirates openly stalk- ing the streets of that section still called ''Barnegat," and sailors in pigtails, citizens in periwigs, and women in kerchiefs and hobnailed shoes conferred in a strange gutteral patois, which never was a part of the English language any more than Marblehead was part of the Puritan commonwealth. There is a pungency in the tradition — well authen- ticated— that in the early days when none but church members might hold office under the Puritan law, Marblehead having no church members, settled the question by dispensing with all government for nearly half a century — and settled it with a profanity which added to the horror of its well-behaved neighbors. For the men who landed on this surf -swept ledge 55 THE ROMANTIC SHORE were not looking for farms but codfish: as soon as the boys were old enough to pull an oar they followed the men to sea, while the women std-yed at home and did the shore work. In the fishing season there were no more men in sight than in those deserted Italian villages to-day, where a handful of women and a few goats are all that are left after the yearly-immigration to America. For half a century after the first rude cabins were raised there was no settled minister and no school- master. When strangers appeared on the streets they were hospitably pelted with stones; when sailors landed they were treated to a glass of grog or a pipe full of "dog leg" or "pig tail." What could be more natural than that a multitude of superstitions and wierd legends, lawless customs and curious dialects should spring up, and that two centuries should not succeed in levelling them to the dull tone of the com- monplace? Thus it was that the old English custom of saluting the moon had its counterpart in Marblehead, where the young girls, on nights when the moon appeared, would gather at some house to catch a glimpse into the future. They would hang an iron pot of tallow over the open fire and one by one take turns in drop- ping hob nails into it. If a young man should enter the 56 QUAINT MARBLEHEAD room he would surely become the husband of the girl who at that moment had dropped the nail. The be- lief, too, that if a maiden should throw a ball of yarn out into the street, the young man who stopped to pick it up would become her lover, gave rise to many romance^. These and a hundred more old folk tales were retold from one generation to another and fol- lowed conscientiously by the maids of Marblehead. Of course they had their witch, "Old Mammy Redd Of Marblehead,'' who soured the milk in the churn and spirited away the linen and pewter and plagued the cattle and crossed young lovers. She was hanged, chiefly upon old wives' gossip, and the Marblehead superstitions continued as before. There are two stories connected with Marblehead which every stranger should know, and which have given the theme to more than one novel. The history of Agnes Surriage has been recited so many times that one cannot improve upon its telling, but it contains such indistructable elements of romance that no one need hesitate to try. Ouida and Henry James could both find material here. 57 THE ROMANTIC SHORE Sir Harry Frankland, heir to an baronetcy in Eng- land, handsome, dashing, youthful, collector of the Port at Boston, was called to Marblehead to locate smugglers. But at the Fountain Inn where he stopped he met an enemy more destructive to his peace of mind than all the smugglers in creation — an enchanting, barefooted, sixteen-year old girl, industriously scrub- ing the floor. Sir Harry, brilliant man of the world and haughty man of fashion, lost his steel clad British heart there and then, and after some rather pretty parlaying took the fisherman's daughter to Boston as his ward to have her educated. All went well until the little girl grew apace, her beauty increased, and her intelligent young mind expanded. And then Sir Harry, bewitched and bewildered, found him- self in desperate plight. He could not lay his um- blemished name and title at a scrub girl's feet, and he would not relinqiush the radiant treasure almost within his grasp. Tradition has it that she settled the vexed question herself: she was made to love and to be loved: she ignored worldly warnings and seized the larger issue. But Puritanical Boston would sanction no such freedom. She might have gone back to her scrubbing, or have been hidden somewhere by her lover: but to 58 QUAINT MARBLEHEAD frankly live an adoring and joyous life of shame was not to be tolerated. So Sir Harry built a fine house in Hopkinton and developed a great plantation where he and Agnes Surriage lived for several years. The hospitality of the mansion and the charm of the lady of the manor still cling to Hopkinton by-ways, for although the elect passed by on the other side with eyes cast down, strangers visiting the province, men of learning wit and parts, the poor and the oppressed of the neighborhood often sought the shelter of those deep porches and the welcoming cheer within. In course of time Sir Harry even ventured to take the Marblehead maid to England with him to visit his family who promptly refused to recognize her. Fin- ally he was called to Lisbon on business, and there their life was less critisized. But when the fair, faithful lady who had suffered the humiliation of her position so many years begged for the title of wife, it was denied her. When in 1755 the great earthquake shook down the city of Lisbon, Sir Harry lay with many others under a crumpled wall. Agnes Surriage, qiuckened by her love and sustained by the endurance born to Marblehead girls searched frantically until she found the spot where he lay, and then tugged at 59 THE ROMANTIC SHORE the stones and dug with her hands and screamed for help until she rescued him: whereupon her lover, touched by so heroic a passion, made her Lady Frank- land. And then the elect of London and of Boston lifted their eyes and held out their hands and admitted her into their midst, and to this day relics of the splen- did estate at Hopkinton are sold at fancy prices: the site of the house on Beacon Hill where she was shunned, and the fountain of the Inn in Marblehead where Sir Harry first saw the dainty ankles of Agnes Surriage as she scrubbed the floor for his passing, are pointed out to strangers. * Although Marblehead never boasted the aristo- cratic dwellings of Salem, nevertheless one of the very finest mansions of all colonial times is preserved here, and as it is the property of the Historical Society, is accessable to all. It was built in 1768 and cost ten thousand pounds: about one hundred feet long and sixty deep, three stories, of brick — originally clap- boarded — both the design and the timber came from England. There is a magnificent hall, running from front to back, with panelled walls and a sumptuously wide stairway with baluster of twisted and polished mahogany. The picture wall paper, the perfect panelling, the secret stairway, the finished cornices ♦Even Oliver Wendell Holmes could not resist the temptation to versify this romantic tale. Page 176. 60 QUAINT MARBLEHEAD and the handwrought nails all deepen the beauty of the picture which the imagination so readily recon- structs. In the kitchen food for a hundred could be prepared, as in a Medicean palace, and from the side hall opened the door to the slave quarters. It is not difficult to image Washington in these spacious cham- bers as he was in 1789, as were Munroe, Lafayette and Andrew Jackson later. The regality of the pro- portions is proud proof of its glory. Another unique building in Marblehead is St. Michael's Church — the second oldest in this country. It was brought from England in its entirety, frame- work, pews, altar, gallery and reredos, and set up in 1714 on the spot where it now stands. The organ that played the wedding march for George Washington and Mary Custis in Philadelphia has been brought here, and a silver cross made from the ancestral plate of a Marblehead family gleams in the tranquil light. It is a small church, in spotless preservation, with many treasures locked within its simple walls: altar clothes embroidered in real pearls and real topazes: an alms basin of solid silver too heavy to be used: a brass chandelier which was presented by the port col- lector of the port of Bristol, England in 1732. One may see the place above the chancel where King 61 THE ROMANTIC SHORE George's Coat of Arms was torn down by excited citi- zens the day when Independance was declared, and the bell that was rung on that same day until it cracked. Like many other old churches in New Eng- land it has its cemetery around it, but unlike the others it has a sepulchre beneath its floor where, for over a hundred years, pew holders were privileged to lay their dead. Up from the precipitous shores of Marblehead jut lofty headlands from which the visitor may catch a sweeping panorama of the most popular yachting port on the Atlantic seaboard. There is Crocker Park and Fort £rlover. Peach's Point and innumerable others, but perhaps there is no place in all Marble- head more poignant and impressive than the old Bury- ing Hill. The ancient gravestones of those earliest inhabitants have been erected, not in a secluded valley such as we associate with the last resting place of those who have toiled hard, but upon the summit and the sides of a flinty hill, windswept and barren. Whitefield, when he visited the brine-drenched village and saw the houses clinging to the ledges and the roads straggling as best they might between the ridges which dissect the town, asked mildly, ''But where do they bury their dead?" For indeed, there 62 QUAINT MARBLEHEAD seems hardly enough earth to cover them! But they were buried on the hill so as to be near the church, and the church on those days needs must be on a hill top so that the sentinels might see the Indians if they approched at time of worship. There is something rather touching in the reflection that those sturdy men of Marblehead might not be granted peace even in death, but must lie forever on a wind lashed hill, from whence a vigilant watch against the enemy could be held. There are venerable gravestones here, carved slate ones against which the rains have beaten for two hundred years, and faintly arabesqued with quaint inscriptions and ornamentation. Perhaps the in- scription on the Great Gale Monument will give us a moment's pause, reminding us how frail are man-made vessels in the fury of the storm. It reads: "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.' " 63 THE ROMANTIC SHORE The site of the Fountain Inn where Agnes Surriage looked up, shy and .startled, at the gold lace and brocade of the youthful customs collector: the Old Brig where Moll Pitcher first opened those eyes which were to see so many sad and strange visions of this world and the next, before they closed in death — these lie to the leeward of the graveyard. One can see the spire of Abbot Hall where the spirited figures of Willard's famous canvas march forever onward, and the spire of the Catholic Church — that ''Star of the Sea," by which many a vessel has steered her course. Out in the harbor are sonder boats and catboats: motor boats, yachts, knockabouts, ferries. From the shore of Marblehead Neck and its summer colony rise the outlines of the Corinthian and Eastern Yacht Clubs. The Boston Yacht Club is across the harbor. A little later a star will twinkle from the twin lights of Baker's Island, from Marblehead Light on the Point, from Hospital Light in Beverly and far to the south from Minot's Ledge. It is all here — the new life and the old. The bones of those rough fisherfolk who swore and drank and pirated and fished two centuries ago, the shreds and patches of the uniforms worn by earnest patriots , who fought so passionately on land and sea, mingle 64 QUAINT MARBLEHEAD without discrimination with the dust of black and faithful slaves. From this Burying Hill one can look down into Marblehead with its streets, spattering against the ridges and flowing jerkily along the lines of least resistance. Those crooked lanes with their crowded houses lead back into the past. But over yonder, to the west, lies the wide state highway, with automo- biles flashing smoothly by — past Marblehead, on to the life of today — on to Beverly and Manchester. 65 CHAPTER VII THE WINGS OF A NEW MORNING Those astonishing advertisements of cities where one may see Cleopatra chatting affably with Daniel Boone, and Aeneas languidly gossiping with Queen Elizabeth and Huckleberry Finn, are not more sur- prising than the phenomenon which the passersby in Marblehead may witness almost any day. For the former is an assemblage of incongruities deliberately composed for the very obvious purpose of the moving picture business: and the latter is one of those un- consciously striking and vivid examples of twentieth century progress in a seventeenth century setting. One of the largest aeroplane factories in this country is at Marblehead, and half an hour from the city of Salem, where two hundred years ago men and women 66 WINGS OF A NEW MORNING were hanged for displaying supernatural powers, men in strangely quivering vehicles are gliding out on the water, rising into the air, and then circling round and round like monstrous birds, flying freely across and forward and back, then decending and alighting with perfect equanimity. Since the outbreak of the European War the aero- plane business has established itself on an entirely practical basis. Even those who have never actually seen one accept the fact of its existence as calmly as that of the telephone or automobile. But in spite of our sophistication there is still something inexplic- able that sends a healthy thrill up our spines, and wrings an involuntary "ah-h" from our lips when we see these latest and most audacious of all man's in- ventions scaling the invisible ladder to the sky — rising up over our heads — and floating out to sea. • This same sense of awe lingers as we are taken through the factory and see the shining linen sails, taut and gleaming, the unassuming little engines, and the immense rudders which are to control the machine. There are a hundred and fifty men working furi- ously on the hydro-aeroplanes in this factory which was once a shipyard. They are stitching the vast pieces of linen on sewing machines that carry incredibly 67 o o m (D > O ;-! O -t-3 O > o o WINGS OF A NEW MORNING huge spools of thread and stitch two rows at a time: they are shaping by hand the graceful mahogany propellers, unholstering the compact bodies, and fastening securely the smooth braces and girders of spruce and ash. It is marvellous to survey the swift construction of these flying machines so ''lightly, beautifully built," with every line made slim for speed, and strong to carry its half a ton of engine, passenger, machinery and fuel. Even the most untechnical observer is struck by the detail with which the principals of strength and lightness are carried out. The smooth frame- work of the wings and of the body is honey-combed with holes to reduce its weight. Here in a shed they are packing the completed machines, laying each perfect piece carefully upon another in a specially prepared box, bracing them with a few strokes with screws and a cleat. These packing boxes will be shipped on transatlantic steamers to witness — who can tell what scenes on the North Sea? Out in the harbor lies the houseboat of an American millionaire waiting to carry home its master's last and most expensive purchase. We are gazing at the final word in private luxury and modern warfare. The quaint town of Marblehead and the ancient 69 THE ROMANTIC SHORE city of Salem to the west settle drowsily into their undisturbed antiquity. But in the buildings of what was once a shipyard is the multifold activity of me- chanics and draughtsmen. What centuries of human inventiveness have gone into the perfection of these machines now being turned out with such speed and sureness! And now, when the thing that was the dream of Leanardo da Vinci has become the instru- ment of warfare, sport and science, it looks so frail that one wonders that the first fierce wind does not crumple it like a broken leaf. But the wings of the modern Icarus withstand both sun and gale. The hum of machinery — the cheerful sound of men at work — the strange parts of the monster bird wait- ing in inarticulate suspense: and far out over the water the whirring flight of an aviator, sailing out and up above, the irregular shoreline of the New Eng- land coast! 70 CHAPTER VIII THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE On entering the Garden City of Beverly one enters the precincts of the fashionable North Shore: the North Shore of shaven lawns and deep bright gardens: of wide driveways curving up through the woods to the great estates hidden beyond: of high stepping horses and smartly painted traps: of limousines with chauffeurs in livery: of elegant victorias with old ladies and pug dogs. And, as is often the way with the most exclusive exclusiveness, the pleasant roads do not glare with ostentation, but, on the contrary, veil themselves in the shadow of apparent simplicity. The sumptuous residences with their sun parlors and loggias and ball rooms are hardly visible from the public highway : one must take a steam launch and 71 THE ROMANTIC SHORE hug the shore, eyes glued to the mainland, to get a glimpse of them, perched on the rocks, hanging above the ocean or set back in lawns that slope down to the edge of the sea. Over two hundred twentieth cen- tury palaces may be seen on the trip from Salem Willows to Magnolia. Millionaires, politicians, belles and beaux come from all over the world, embroider- ing a little more richly every year that line of aristoc- racy which fringes this section of the Essex coast — some to find a summer home, some to build a perma- nent one. The stranger passing through Beverly, Manchester- by-the-Sea and Magnolia will gather an impression of well kept roads, of vine covered fences higher than his head. He will go through a grove of dark hem- locks, catch a glint of a red roof of an unpretentious bungalow set among the trees, pass the imperial gate- way to some lordly "cottage," a rustic wood path down which a group of horseback riders flash, an acre of lawn where a dozen men are reverently kneeling, removing with solicitude a handful of vulgar weeds, a country farmhouse stranded at the crossways, another high fence, and then — suddenly — the sea! For the sea — of sapphire and opals — is the pot of gold at the end of this especial rainbow. To get a piece of 72 THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE ground fronting it would cost you a small fortune — if indeed you could procure it at all. Ten thousand dollars have been paid, more than once, for an acre on this water front. Of course this means that the casual passer-by may not take his wife and six children and picnic basket and find a sunny spot on the beach where they may sprawl and bathe. He may travel for an hour and count himself lucky if he gets a glimpse of old Neptune at all. But the deprivation to the casual passer-by is the advantage of permanent dweller. This combination of woodland and shore, this mingling aroma of pine and brine is not surpassed anywhere in the world. Many an English visitor stands in wonderment sur- veying a country house at the Cove or the Farms or at Prides and then asks puzzled: '-But why do you talk about our English country places?" Beverly — which includes North Beverly, Beverly Farms, Montserrat, Pride's Crossing and Beverly Cove, is the geographical beginning of what many people consider the real North Shore, and may also be considered the chronological beginning of the present North Shore Colony. In the early forties when it began to be sought by Bostonians who wanted a change without travel, it was merely a collection of 73 - . 1 CO g >•« I i (33 ^. ^ O ^ o faC "S B ^ 'a S ft ft 05 •« CO c; T3 c3 O ft O g ft S bD -S «=> ^ THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE rural houses and pastures. Peter Pride's farm stood near where the country road now crosses the railroad track, and there is a story that he received the grant of an immense tract of land on the condition that he willingly direct all passers by. This he did for many years, and the place came to be known as Pride's Crossing. The property passed from one Pride to another until the place came into its popularity as a summer resort. And then the Pride who held it sold his birthright for a song, and afterwards, the story assures us, overcome with remorse, hanged himself. The original summer houses were dull colored, com- fortable edifices surrounded by broad piazzas and sloping roofs. Today there are million dollar man- sions, with pipe organs and private bowling alleys, green houses and tennis courts. One garden stretches down to the very sea, eight hundred feet long and four hundred wide — inexpressably fair in its orna- mental brick walls, shaded walks, raised terraces, a tea house of stone, a peristyle for climbing roses and seats of marble and stone. To be admitted into this guarded circle is like stepping over the page into the reality of a chapter of Henry James, where the heroine drifts across a 75 THE ROMANTIC SHORE garden while a peacock trails its feathers in the sun beside her. You, too, if it vouchsafed you, may step upon tapestried brick, feel the flicker of cool shadow from a marble pergola, and lean on a balus- trade built after the fashion of that at Tivoli where countless men and women have leaned and looked out over the blue Campagna, beautiful in the beauty of level lines. You will not see the Campagna, but another plain, as blue, as misty, with all traces of its mighty traffic as smoothly obliterated. You are surrounded on every side by the luxuries of nature and of civili- zation. Before you glitters the ocean with its rim of pleasure domes and its burden of pleasure craft: on either side woodland and shore melt in harmony or dazzle in contrast. Behind you sparkle the gay towns of Hamilton and Wenham and Topsfield, with their golf links, hunting clubs, polo ponies and all the equisite equipment of costly amusement. It is hard to realize that there were once old breast works back of the lighthouse which gleams so white in the sunshine, and that the land which is now so preciously divided into private domains was a great training camp in the time of the Revolution. Hard to realize that the venerable Roger Conant — he whose gallant statue braves the winds in Salem — petitioned 76 THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE the General Court in 1671 that the name of Beverly- be changed to that of his native town ''Budleigh/' because of ^' the great dislike and discontent of many of our people for this name of Beverly because (we be- ing a small place) it has caused on us the constant nick- name of ^Beggerly.' " Hard to realize that the pretty woods now so fondly tended and so carelessly roamed through were once whispered to be bewitched, such terrifying roars and howls issued from them in time of storm, and such diflB.culties attended the traveller seeking his way on dark nights. In fact it is quite impossible to realize anything but the faultless lovli- ness of the day and the sheer delight of soft living that surrounds us. As you go from Beverly to Manchester you will see the justly celebrated Mingo Beach about which there still echoes the tradition of Robin Mingo — a slave who had been promised his freedom on the day that the ebbing^ tide should leave a dry passage be- tween Mingo's Beach and a rocky promontory called Becky's Ridge. He waited patiently for this great event, and then, one morning in 1773 when the re- ceding tide did actually leave a dry passage, the kindly neighbors ran to tell him of the news. And awed and half terrified by the strange significance, 77 THE ROMANTIC SHORE they found the black man had indeed attained his freedom on that day, for he was lying dead — a smile upon his lips. You will also pass the old fashioned square house where Lucy Larcom lived,* and the one from which Oliver Wendell Holmes dated his letter ''Beverly-by- the-Depot" poking gentle fun at his friends Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields who were the first to use the name of Manchester-by-the-Sea. But Manchester-by-the-Sea it has remained ever since, becoming more proud and handsome every year. Like Alice in Wonderland after eating the mushroom, it has grown prodigiously from its early days, when it was known as ''Jeofferye's Creek." — not taking the name of Manchester until 1645, when it separated from Salem and became a distinct town. But it clung to its provincialism for a long time after that separation, as is testified by the church quarrel of 1809. For when the meeting house in the square was built, with its graceful belfry and steeple, the pro- posal to heat it on Sundays was stubbornly opposed by that conservative element which, like the poor, is ever with us, especially in matters of ecclesiastical dissension. However the progressives won, and duly announced that hereafter the church would be heated ♦What is probably Lucy Larcom's best known poem may be of interest here. Page 179. . 78 THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHORE on the Lord^s day. The next Sunday several of the congregation fainted during worship and others had to leave overcome by the excessive temperature. Presumably they were from the ranks of the recusants, for after service it was discovered that owing to a defect in the heater no fire had been built. But Manchester's peculiar attraction is that beach of ruddy sand — a warm tawny pink — which, when a carriage drives over it or people tread on it gives forth a crisp note, something like snow under foot in dry cold weather. This odd formation of the atoms which makes them triturate together in keen musical vibration has poetically christened it the Singing Beach, a wonder of the world and a never failing SQOurse of entertainment. On through West Manchester — the hidden country seats and tasteful cottages still following in unbroken continuity — to Magnolia, named from the white magnolias, found nowhere else in Massachusetts, which grow profusely here — their ivory blossoms delicately starring the twilight of the pines. Magnolia, the village of hotels, situated on a point almost surrounded with water, is redundant with walks and drives. And why not, when one of the largest unbroken stretches of woodland in Massachusetts, two miles 79 THE ROMANTIC SHORE long and about six wide, extends through here across Cape Ann? There are land views and ocean views: wood walks and sea walks, drives and vistas that offer a perpetual objective to summer strollers. One mayspend a summer here and not exhaust the cor- ners of this leafy shade. But there are three walks which are especially characteristic of Magnolia, and the first, of course, is to the Reef of Norman's Woe. Named early in the seventeenth century for the Norman family who lived near, it was not until the dreadful gale of 1839 when forty dead bodies were washed up on the Gloucester shore, one of them that of a woman lashed to a spar, that Longfellow, deeply impressed by the event, wrote in a single night the ballad which will perpetuate his name long after many of his more ambitious works have been fbrgotten. Thus the rock, which was the scene of a shipwreck, became a literary monument as well, and still rears its head above ''the white and fleecy waves,'' that look ''soft as carded wool," while the surf churns and creams about it. The sound of the wind and the water, and the beating rhythm of the ballad surcharge the place with strange noises, like Prospero's enchanted isle. One may sit in the huckle- berry patch in a long, long revery, while the waves 80 THE FASHIONABLE NORTH SHOUE beat ceaselessly on the rock whose cruelty has sent a vicarious thrill through many a shivering nursery circle. * The next walk in Magnolia is more cheerful: it is no other than through the Colonnade — those ab- surdly Parisian beads strung upon a superfine chain of portico, tiled floor and gleaming window. You are down on Cape Ann with barren sea sand stretching for miles to right and left, to be sure, but you may pur- chase a diamond tiara or peach Melba or any frivolity that occurs to you quite as conveniently here as you might on the Rue de la Paix or Fifth Avenue. En- trancing and quite wickedly seductive little shops — their gem-like wares spread out alluringly behind glass or ranged on spotless shelves and polished tables • — exotics of New York or Newport, securely planted on plain New England soil! Your third walk in Magnolia should be through the almost historic and not at all gorgeous hotel which never advertises and is always beseiged by more of the ^lite than it can accomodate. Here one may meet diplomats and foreigners, smart folk from all over the country, and may witness dances where the toilettes vie with those of opera night. Incidentally of course, there is a view from every window, and always the sweet tang of Cape Ann air. ♦The poem is given in full on page 181. 81 THE ROMANTIC SHORE But the North Shore means more to its wealthy residents than a rendevouz of style, and everywhere are evidences of their sincere attachment to the place and their desire to enhance its value in a broader sense. At Magnolia, for instance, there are two very attractive and complete clubhouses for ''Those who work," chauffeurs and waitresses, bellboys and others of that vast retinue that serves the summer colonists. They are unique and successful social experiments. There is an aviary and a gladiolus farm which is an inspiring adaptation of western ideas to eastern con- ditions, where worn out New England soil has been made to produce acres of superb flowers by proper treatment. Everywhere are tea rooms and club houses and bits of public landscaping initiated and financed by summer people for the advantages of the natives — tangible proofs of a very real interest in Cape Ann. The migratory population is packed from one end of the North Shore to the other from June to November. From Winthrop to Plum Island their cottages and their activities are paramount. But perhaps in no other section have they shown themselves a more intelligent and constructive force than along the ^'Fashionable North Shore." 82 CHAPTER IX GLOUCESTEK — FLOOD TIDE AND EBB A smell of fish and salt and drying boats: a curious, indescribable oily smell, unlike any other and permeat- ing every other: the smell of Gloucester! And why should not this hoary metropolis reek with the flavor of fish when its history is built upon the sign of Pisces, and its prosperity has sprung from it? When we stand in the center of Gloucester town, a quaint and crooked center with hilly streets winding into it and twisting out of it, we stand in a place which, as early as Revolutionary times, had a yearly catch valued at one hundred thousand dollars and in the later part of the nineteenth century was the largest fishery in the world. 83 / THE-ROMANTIC SHORE Even today, with its interests diffused into other channels, a fleet of two hundred or more vessels beats' out of the harbor in season bound for the Banks, for Labrador, Iceland, Greenland and Norway. Those racks, or ''flakes" lining the shore, covered with rippling canvas or glistening with their naked burden, are sagging beneath hundreds of barrow loads of cod and haddock, split and spread to dry in the sun. In those gray sheds they are being boned, shredded, packed in balls, in strips, in boxes to be sent to every conceivable market in Christendom. The factory has come to augment the shed, and the by-products which used to be thought waste are now being made into glue, cod liver oil, and various kinds of fertilizer. The market for these is as certain as the market for the fish itself, and if the workers are no longer^ hale New Englanders but dark skinned Finns and Portuguese, chattering an unintelligible tongue, it is all in the march of progress. If you will stand where the road from Fresh Water Cove curves up into the Stage Fort Park you will see in the harbor a forest of slender masts, and with the puffing of the engines and flapping of the sails a vivid panorama of the old and the new. That brig, which recalls the Cape Ann fleet of square riggers 84 GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB that sailed to the West Indies, probably has salt for curing in her hold, and packed so tightly that it will have to be mined out with pick and shovel. That Schooner — which was developed from the pink — had its origin in Gloucester, like Universalism : the prototype of that motor boat was first used for fishing purposes in 1900. For the rest there are freight steamers plying between the Cape and Cadiz, steam yachts, cruisers and pleasure craft of all description. There is one tall spire against the sky to our right which rises, not from the harbor but from the shore — the spire of the wireless station where experiments are constantly and quietly being carried on. This Stage Fort Park, in which we stand, a lovely rolling tract of pasture on the Western Shore extend- ing from Fresh Water Cove nearly to Blynman Bridge which joins Cape Ann to the Mainland, embraces three beaches and some noble groups of rock. It was originally ''Fisherman's Field" and was the first land cleared in Gloucester. A fishing stage was here, long before any permanent settlement was attempted, and on Stage Head was reared the second fort. Hence the name to distinguish it from the old fort. Gloucester has been called a ''city of sorrow, whose history is written in tears" for, when a whole commun- 85 THE ROMANTIC SHORE ity makes its living on the open sea, death sweeps over it with the sweep of every storm, and that yearly mid- summer ceremonial when the children of the town gather to cast flowers upon the receding tide in memory of the dead, is both symbolic and touching. The pathos of many of the legends and much of the litera- ture of Cape Ann is the integral part of a life where widows and orphans and maids who never will be wives wait continually for a vessel to return with her flag at half mast for those who have been lost at sea. * And yet, oddly enough, Gloucester was not original- ly a fishing village. Standing on a series of narrow ledges, rising like terraces from the harbor, at the back of each terrace was once a swamp, leaving but meagre strips of building land on which the houses were crowded together. Thus it was that when the farms gave out in 1727 the men migrated to Salem. Those who were left made a living by cutting timber and shipping it to Boston in boats made in the harbor. When the timber was used up they utilized the boats for fishing. The Revolution ruined the industry, as it did so many of the towns along the North Shore, but in 1860 the tide turned, the demand re- vived, and since then has continued with superficial fluctuations. *"The Phantom Boat" has a certain value when read in this connection Page 184. §6 GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB Possibly it vfas for this reason that the first settle- ment was not at the harbor, but on "the neck of house-lots" between Mill Creek and Annisquam River — the salt creek which makes Cape Ann an island. At the south end of this neck stood church and par- sonage, while the first "burying ground" — a spot well deserving a visit — lay nearer the harbor. Here the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep under small cubical blocks of undressed stone without inscription. Slate head-stones adorned with winged skulls were imported for the next generation. Influential church members finally procured the removal of the First Church to the harbor. The "West Parish" across the river was the second parish. Then Annisquam was set off, and when the members who remained "up in town" wanted the old meeting house re-opened they had to be the Fourth Parish — much to their chagrin! The great grandsons of some of those who petitioned that re-opening were among those who later frequented the sea captains' reading room in the old Gloucester Bank Building. Here stories which were passed from mouth to mouth in leisurely hours first began to cir- culate and still echo in the annals of the town. Stories of merchants who had sent fish or mules to the 87 mm GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB West Indies, Portugal and Spain, receiving in return molasses, sugar, liquors, strange fruits and old Dutch silver and china. Stories of voyages to Sumatra to buy pepper and weigh it on the beaches, not daring to go a step further inland for fear of the unhealthiness which lurked behind those tropic sands. Stories of the far away Philippines, where the sun-burned voy- agers from the new world had been welcomed into strange and beautiful houses like those in an Arabian Nights' entertainment with windows of mother of pearl to keep out the sun and let in the light, with dark pol- ished floors on which gleamed the cane furniture : and the story — often repeated — of how in the thirties, three vessels coming from three different quarters of the globe all met in Manila harbor. As they exchanged salutes, each vessel ran up the American flag; for those three ships, which had been ploughing the seas from one end of the world to the other, were three Boston ships commanded by three Cape Ann men! Thrill- ing recitals and humorous ones — told again and again to the eager ears of listeners who had heard them many times before. These adventurous sea captains brought back bits of Oriental bric-a-brac, pieces of sumptuous drapery and odd carvings which still ornament their brave home- 89 THE ROMANTIC SHORE steads where their portraits, painted in conscientious exactness, look unyieldingly forth upon the comings and goings of their descendents. Much that was quaint and pleasing in that life is still treasured in the summer colony of East Gloucester where artists love to go, and where the gardens of mea- dow sweet and deutzia, larkspur and roses which once delighted the eyes of men home from sea are still fondly tended. Many of the spar shops and seine lofts, block and sailor shops have been changed to studios, tea rooms and antique shops : and many of the fisherman's cottages, and the places which handled oil clothing and deep sea outfits have been remodeled for the conven- ience of the fleeting summer guest. But the charm of Gloucester has not been lost in the gradual evolution, and the same rambling roads and unexpectedly per- fect colonial doorways with balustraded fences and posts topped with great white balls and back yards nodding with sunflowers have been preciously pre- served. From East Gloucester one may cross to Rocky Neck, where Champlain is said to have landed, and gaze from its ridge out on the inner harbor full of boats and bor- dered with its utilitarian two-story sheds and build- ings, and see the site of the old Fort where children 90 GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB have flown their kites for fifty years, and see, too, where the "western shore" slopes to Half Moon Beach to the left, and the coal wharves and hoists and fish signs close the curve on the right, and see the Christopher Wren spire of the famous first Universalist church. It is worth while to trudge to Eastern Point whence on a clear day the dim streak of Cape Cod is visible. The outer shore of this point stretches toward Thatch- ers Island, and has been the inarticulate witness of thousands of passing sails — sails which must seem in re- membrance like the fluttering wings of sea gulls, wheel- ing in myriads against the limitless sky. But of that in- numerable procession which has floated by, three ships have left behind a wake which will never be obliterated: the Steam Ship Portland whose lights were last sighted from here before she foundered, the boat of Anthony Thatcher which, in 1635, with his children met a tragic ending forever recalled in the name of Thatcher's Island and in Whittier's "Swan Song,"* and another boat more significant than them all— the Mayflower, which, carrying the nucleus of a mighty nation, passed this self same point. Perhaps another boat should be mentioned here, for it was Eastern Point Light which was seen by the interrogative child on the fabled Schooner Hesperus. Fresh Water Cove lies yonder, *Givei4on page 186. 91 THE ROMANTIC SHORE which many people have forgotten and more have never known took its name from a fresh water spring which was covered at high tide. It is a flawless drive or walk around the devious Gloucester shore from the ^'top of the Point" to Bass Rocks with the ocean on the right where gayly clad groups are picnicing, building fires on the rocks from driftwood if the evening is chilly, and with the golf links, summer cottages, hotels and little settle- ments on the left. This joyous atmosphere is quite different from the cruder, darker quaintness of Marblehead: its happy informality quite unlike the patrician dignity of Salem with which there has always been a sisterly rivalry. Gloucester, and par- ticularly East Gloucester, is the colony of all others on the North Shore painted, loved, written about and lived in by artists who have never exhausted its peculiar witchery. On Middle Street there survive several houses of Revolutionary Days: the one which belonged to the widow Judith Stevens — she who married Murray, the founder of Universalism — has two huge chimneys, one of them out of plumb, and the two story extension in the rear is pierced with little port hole windows. One enters through a gate set in a panelled brick wall. 92 GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB Under the gambrel roof of the Babson house is much valuable old furniture and even specimens of the pens once used for the slaves. The Ellery house, the Stan- wood house at West Gloucester, Byle's tavern at the entrance to Beachbrook Cemetery and the Briggs house at Anni^quam are all of interest to the hunter of antiques. Should the sturdy builders of these homes return for a day to their earthly habitat, what woujd surprise them most? The scattering golfers on the well-kept links where there was once only barreness and waste? The populous summer hotels with their laughing girls and white trousered youths? The artist with his easel and box of paints? The Italians and the Finns who are doing the work which the Gloucester boys once did? Or the Portugese settlement on the high hill above the "head of the harbor" where, in the late fifties, a simple voluble folk, fleeing from famine at the Azores, found a spot which closely resembled their old home? A matchless view may be had from this hill, given an oddly foreign touch by the glimpse of the church far below. It is, perhaps, at this new Portugese church, bearing an image of Our Lady with a ship in her hands, that the staunch old Puritans returning to earth would gaze at most long and curiously. This church of "Our 93 THE ROMANTIC SHORE Lady of Good Voyage'' where on Whit Sunday the blessing of the loaves and the covering of the Madonna takes place, strikes us as very prettily naive, reminding us of that other fishing village of Amalfi, where St. Andrew the fisherman is duly reverenced. But doubt- less those stern non-conformists would see only idolatry here, and would be willing enough to stalk back to their graves, where they would be undisturbed by any vision of popery. And yet those first comers might better survey in pride that one time fishing settlement to which comes now an annual school more profitable than any earlier catch — men and women in holiday humor and with memories of foreign travel and a taste for what is fit- ting to repaint the falling houses and replant the neg- lected gardens. Gloucester has changed hands, it is true, but it is in good hands, nevertheless. There is no conflict between those transitory groups who come for the summer months and those gracious "natives" who still maintain their spacious homesteads, and dispense a hospitality far famed and justly founded. And yet, with all its evolutions, one fancies there are two threads woven into the woof of what is called the "atmosphere'' of Gloucester, which will never change: the flowers, in window boxes and in small / 94 GLOUCESTER— FLOOD TIDE AND EBB gardens and big ones — blue and white and lavender and rose, ''flavored by the sea," as Lucy Larcom says, "and colored by the salt winds and the sun into the healthiest intensity of bloom" — ^thesfe will climb over the rustic gateways and the beckoning doors so long as lovers of the beautiful return to this loved spot. They typify the joy of Gloucester. And that other thread which will always carry its dark shadow in spite of the increasing care and safety devices of modern days — the sense of sorrow which is a part of every place which makes its living on the sea. Well may ''Our Lady of Good Voyage" tenderly protect the ship upon her arm. For all her care many women for many years will weep tears as salt as the waves which have buried their husbands, sweethearts and sons. For the sad dirge that men must work and women must weep is chanted in every fishing village by the rhythm of the ocean "The night has fallen and the tide Now and again comes drifting home, Across those aching barrens wide A sigh like driven wind and foam In grief the flood come bursting home." 95 X^'"'/*'<?' --■*■■'' .■ ••.-.".7 CHAPTER X A DESERTED VILLAGE A deserted village — so utterly forsaken and for so long that there is nothing left except a few goose- berry bushes and lilac trees by the cellars, a tumbling stone wall and an overgrown clearing: nothing — ^not a stick — that was ever part of man's habitation. This curious plateau between Rockport and Glou- cester— roughened by huge boulders, its unnatural solitude forever undisturbed except for an adven- turous cow or a stray berry picker, its streets and yards so completely obliterated that if you were not looking for it you might pass through and never 96 A DESERTED VILLAGE realize that this was the place — this is Dogtown Common. Ruined cities are very rare in America, especially those that were inhabited by white people whose decendents are living today. But Dogtown not only has a history, but one which is fairly well authenti- cated, for archeologists and geologists and local his- torians, fascinated by the very blankness of the spot, have investigated and ferreted about and reconstructed and compared gossip and ancient records until they have pieced together a very comprehensible account. To get to Dogtown from Gloucester is the thir- teenth labor of Hercules. The few maps and written directions usually add truthfully: ^'but the roads do not quite intersect," and the oral directions which one gleams from colloquial advisors run something like the playful information which Launcelot Gobbo offered his father, and not infrequently end; ''keep on after the road gets rotten, but when it gets so rotten you can't keep on any more — that's Dogtown Common." Needless to say, this devious way is impassa- ble for a carriage or an automobile, and in cer- tain weathers for pedestrians. Swamps and thick- ets and blind paths surround it as zealously as a 97 THE ROMANTIC SHORE vigilant mother guarding an unalluring daughter whom she is sure some one will try to kidnap. No one wants to do anything to Dogtown except look at it, but that innocuous desire is fanned into an in- tense passion for achievement in the process of plowing through a swamp or two, climbing fences, tearing clothes on bushes and snags and scratching hands and faces on briars and losing the barely perceptible thread of a path a dozen times over. But if you are anything of an explorer by the time you have fathomed the intricacies of Dennison's road and Whale's Jaw (if you come from Annisquam) or Webster Street, Lamb Ledge, Railcut Hill and Parting Path (if you come from East Gloucester) or the old Sandy Bay road (if you come from Pigeon Cove) you will emerge upon the hidden village with the triumphant thrill of Cortez when he stood upon that peak in Darien. And it is an oddly impressive spot — a rock strfewn waste encircled by a girdle of woodland and a more distant one of sea — revealing no trace, until one examines it minutely, of the hundred families who lived here two centuries ago. If you are meticulous you will draw a fine distinction between Dogtown Village and Dogtown Common, but if you are merely curious you will be quite content with any arrival at any section of what was once Dogtown. It was 98 A DESERTED VILLAGE never a prosperous community. It got the latter part of its name from the custom of the inhabitants to hold land in common, and the first part from the dogs which the widows — there was an unconscionable number of widows — kept for company and protec- tion. But in spite of its humbleness some of the most respected families in Gloucester and Cape Ann are proud to trace their ancestry back to it — the Boyn- tons, Youngers, Milletts, Stanwoods, Wilsons and Friends among them. For although in its declining days a somewhat unsavory reputation attached itself to the dying village, it was the degeneration of what had doubtless been as sturdy and decent as any other New England settlement. Standing on this homely Salisbury Plain, we find ourselves wondering why any one ever built in such an inaccessible spot, or why, having done so, they abandoned so completely the work of their hands. And yet neither the origin nor the decay of Dogtown is mysterious. Before the bridge was built at Riverdale the main road from Rockport to Gloucester ran by Dogtown, and the settlement sprang up as naturally as a mush- room by a foot path. Then when the traffic began going the other way the little village declined like 99 THE ROMANTIC SHORE a ''boom town" in the West when the railroad turns elsewhere. Fragments of gossip still linger about the place: gossip about ''Tammy Younger," "queen of the witches," sharp-tongued and profane, she whose cellar is the first one as you enter by Fox Hill. Tam- my, whose real name was nothing less impressive than Thomazine, smoked as well as swore, and the handsome snuff box which was found in the cellar not so very long ago seems to indicate that she also took snuff. Gossip about Old Ruth, a mulatto who called herself John Woodman and dressed like a man and built stone walls and whose name is commemo- rated in Ruth's Ledge: about Easter Carter, aristo- cratic and poor, who lived in the only two-story house in Dogtown and picked berries and told fortunes for her scanty living. Toward the end of her life and the end of Dogtown days her house was an objective for picnickers, for she would boil them a cabbage for their dinner. Thus the origin of the "cabbage dinner picnic" which is still a Cape Ann institution. Molly and Judy Rhimes were not at all respectable: Peter Lurvey was a revolutionary patriot of no mean order: Johnny Morgan, whose real name was Morgan Stanwood, made a living cobbling shoes in a hut under a rock, and his "Boo", or Booth, was one of 100 A DESERTED VILLAGE Dogtown's most familiar sights. Captain Isaac Dade, after a life of adventure, came back to Gloucester with a charming Southern wife. Fancy lingers a moment about the woman who had been a friend of the Washingtons and whose youth had opened on the wide acres of a Virginia Plantation, and whose final days closed here in the little village of Dogtown. There are records of most of the Dogtown inhabit- ants: who they married and when they died: there are scraps of rumors about the most picturesque of them — more or less irrelevant or pertinent — which have persisted through the years. But nevertheless, there is in this deserted tableland an indescribable sense of desolation. It is a singular thing to stand in a place from which every trace of life has been obliterated. The smooth hills of Carthage over which the sheep graze peacefully is not swept cleaner of human impress than this. For although we can never reproduce the life of two hundred years ago, yet in towns and cities where that life has gone on without a break, the past has fused with the present as a current runs into the sea. But here there has been no continuation, only a decay and then a vanishing. There is a sadness in this complete oblivion, "Where once the cottage stood and hawthorne grew" — an infinite pathos in the gray solitude from which the flush of life has fled. 101 CHAPTER XI THE ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT A network of black wires against a serene sky: the hardly perceptible tremor of the arm of a mighty derrick: and the sheer cold sides of a granite quarry not unsuggestive of the concrete sides of the Panama Canal in its smoothness and its strength. We are in Rockport, that little town on the North Eastern tip of Cape Ann whose quiet fields have been split wide and forced to deliver up their tons of tons of granite — gray and red and green. As we stand here on the brink of this cold precipice, so cleanly, deeply hewn, we seem to be looking down into another world, 102 ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT rigid and unreal. The puff of engines and the shout of workmen — small as ants from this stern eminence — seem puny in that bleak excavation. Even the sev- enty-five ton shaft of granite, which the immense derrick hoists clumsily into the air, looks infinites- imal in the hollowed and stark expanse. There are more than six hundred acres of quarry land, finishing, cutting and polishing sheds in Rockport; there are wharves and sloops and schooners and barges and tow boats and lighters to assist in carrying away the vast output; there are about a thousand men working in these blank airy pits, and yet in spite of all this activity there is a strange silence in the air. When one has stripped the living verdure from the breast of nature, the stiff and bloodless realm which is exposed to view possesses qualities as different from those of the friendly rocks and trees of the earth as the bones of a skeleton from the yielding curves and breathing pores of the human frame. One stands in silence before a granite quarry! Across the fields of Rockport — against the sky — against the sea — there by the side of the road, and here by the turn of the wood, everywhere are evidences of quarries — being worked, or long since deserted. Here is a flooded one. The workmen cut too deep, 103 There are more than six hundred acres of quarry land, finishing, cutting and polishing sheds in Rockport: there are wharves and sloop0s and tow boats to assist in carrying away the vast output. ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT and now the water, clear ■ as air and bitterly deep, lies forever in its changeless prison. There is some- thing inexpressibly sombre about this immutable, sharp-cornered pool with rough bushes fringing the harsh edge where it meets the green of the pastures. One cannot help but wondering whether this majestic mass of stone — helpless under the machinations of man, being dumbly hacked and hewed into a million paving blocks — did not feel an inarticluate relief that its grandeur had been spared, when, silently and irresistibly, the water came ebbing in and drove the men and their machinery out. Many reflections pass before ones fancy here in this little sea bound town, for Rockport has a pathetic history. Sandy Bay Harbor, passed by seventy thous- and vessels annually and on the route of practically all the ships that ply between Maine and the Pro- vinces and Boston, is never ice bound and has excellent holding ground. There are no bars or intricate channels, as in Boston and Gloucester harbors: if the ocean liners should come in here they could save the time of the trip on to Boston or New York and could dock easily in the deep water. Why not, therefore, make this convenient refuge the transatlantic termin- us, into which the great vessels should steam, and out 105 THE ROMANTIC SHORE of which should spread a network of railroads carrying passengers and freight all over the coun- try? This was the idea which fixed itself close to Rock- port's heart. As far back as 1835 a petition was pre- sented to the Government begging for a survey. It was sixty years before the Government took steps in the matter, and then, in 1885 after some discreet prodding, it commenced work on the five million dollar breakwater. Rockport, after her half century of pa- tient waiting, blossomed forth into brilliant expec- tation and tremendous effort. Railroads, wharves, and piers were planned; the first transatlantic cable was brought in here; the little Cape Ann town pic- tured itself as a port of international significance. And then the appropriations began to dribble off; the interest began to flag. Now after thirty years, the appropriations have stopped altogether and the breakwater is only one third done. People smile at Rockport. How ridiculous for a little village to flour- ish such grandiloquent ambition! What if the break- water were built and did make the harbor safe? Who would want to start, or stop, from such an inaccessi- ble place ? The vision faded, as visions do, and only the unfinished breakwater, a painful reminder of a 106 ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT period of high hope and a terrible menace to navi- gation— stretches for five thousand feet. A few men still cherish the hope of completing it and vindicating Rockport's claim of a harbor wider than any other port on our coast and larger than Plymouth and Portland in England and almost as large as Cherbourg in France. Pamphlets are still circulated and petitions sent upon the languid round, but the world has lost interest. Rockport reminds one of some impetuous lad, confident of his great message, who sets forth to carry the lamp of know- ledge through the darkness of the world. He works with the fierceness of youth and the fervor of assurance, until, at middle age, neglected and poor, his message ignored, he turns himself silently to the hack work by which he must earn his daily bread. Thus the little vil- lage which was to have been the great transatlantic terminus no longer permits itself to float out on the golden dream of wharves and piers that would wel- come the commerce of the world, and railroads which would thread their way across the length and breadth of the continent. Grave in its lesson of disillusion- ment it turns resolutely and unremittingly to its toil in the granite quarries of its native fields. 107 CHAPTER XII IN AN ANNISQUAM GARDEN It is morning — it is springtime — in Annisquam! Through the frame of a gray-barked pergola, scantily veiled by a faintly budding creeper, deepens a picture : a slope of green turf, a tumbling stone wall with a clump of rough shrubbery in the crook of its arm, the pleasant roof and white chimneys of a house half way down the cliff, and far, far below the blue and opalescent calm of Ipswich Bay. To the West across the water, swell the white irregular sand dunes of Essex: dark moors lie like the shadows of clouds 108 ROMANCE OF ROCKPORT upon their shifting steeps. To the North and to the East the sky vault arches in a vast low sweep above the watery plain. There is a mystical expectancy in the intense tranquility of the sea and the celestial lavender of the heavens. We hold our breath lest the radiance be stirred. Where are there other gardens like these seaside gardens of Annisquam? Where else may the wanderer push his unmolested way through swinging gates, across front yards and back yards, half grass and half boulder, between gaps of stone walls, across a narrow, dusty road, under a wisteria-hung arbor, along a dim tangle of little paths that twist and turn and lead at last into secret shy inclosures where a bird bath or a weatherstained marble sundial stands half sunken in the green grass? Somewhere — somewhere — a vague vision forms and fades. What do these crudely hewn stepping stones beneath our feet, this strip of narrow verdure on each side, bordered — not too straightly — by narrow beds, guarded by tall ever- greens and walled in by a leisurely hedge — what do they suggest? This thin parterre of Lombardy popu- lars standing between us and the dazzling blue of sea and sky; these violets clinging close to the shaggy rocks and the pale tan mushrooms that glimmer in 109 A slope of green turf, the pleasant roof and white chimneys of a house half way down the cliff, and, far below, the blue and opalescent calm of Ipswich Bay. ANNISQUAM GARDENS the grass — what other place and clime do they recall? Capri! Capri! The Mediterranean luminousness of the bay: the graceful outline of a marble bench which stood in another garden where perhaps some buried Caesar bled, and where poets have tenderly gathered the hyacinths that dropped from a once lovely head — bring back waves of memory, haunting and fugitive. Only here there is none of the subtle decadence of that distant and beguiling spot. The clean Cape Ann air is not too heavily scented or too warmly luxurious. The remembrance of those wan exotic exiles of that other garden spot pales before the reality of these brisk American girls in trim white, with buoyant step, and these men with keen faces and unjaded hearts. Here is the charm of the Bay of Naples without its voluptuousness: its crystalline color without its too tropical bloom. Annisquam possesses the cool virginity of a country that is still young: the delicate aloofness that hangs like a silver mist about an untouched maid. Cottages are scattered with happy informality along shore and cliff and cove. There is nothing stately, nothing pretentious about the half casual pergolas and little plots of flowers. Here, where a few gray steps straggle up from one garden to another, 111 THE ROMANTIC SHORE two gray amphorae stand in drowsy dignity, and be- fore us in a half frame of rustic post and unfolding Virginia creeper hangs a foreground of sea, a back- ground of sky, separated only by the white line of Essex sand. The picture sweeps out beyond the confines of its frame: out — out — to East — to West, over our heads and under our feet — we are in the pearly center of a blue and dreaming sphere. The picture is more than a picture : it is a revelation to be mirrored forever on the soul. The wholesome smell of fresh cut grass: the flash of a vireo: the hushed rhythm of the waves upon the Lighthouse Beach : lilacs purpling and apple trees flowering white — no we are not in Capri, but on the high shore of Cape Ann. It is morning — it is spring- time— in Annisquam! 112 CHAPTER XIII ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH The main street sparsely lined with small un- feverish shops, circumspect houses and neat low buildings, curves around a corner, climbs at leis- ure up an irregular New England hill, and then stops, as if to draw a contemplative breath, at the foot of the Green. It is not merely the for- mation of the town which brings us to the foot of the Green and to the base of that gray rocky ledge upon which perches with gentle and som- bre dominance the First Church. It is more than topography, it is more than history; it is romance and sentiment. For this Green, with the smooth pretty patches of grass at the intersection of the cross roads, bearing the ancient monuments and still more ancient cannon, and the abrupt old crag which has 113 THE ROMANTIC SHORE carried upon its crest a church for nearly three hun- dred years, comprise the symbolic center of the town. It is impossible to glance even casually over the history of Ipswich without being impressed by its ecclesiasticism : indeed the history of the town seems sometimes hardly more than the history of the church, for all other developments — social, political and in- dustrial— flowed to and from this central motive during its formative years. The old days when the preacher was timed by an hour glass, and his salary shortened in proportion to the shortening of the dis- course: of deacons and tithing men: of men seated on one side of the center aisle and women on the other, and muskets stacked outside the door: the old days when praying, voting, publishing of marriages, notices of town interest, requests for prayer and expressions of thanksgiving were all carried on in the single build- ing which was town house and meeting house in one: the old days when ministers in bands and gowns, judges in scarlet, prisoners in cuffs and chains and people in Sunday clothes or weekday ones entered and departed in pursuit of their various business — these days which held the essence of the life of the community waxed and waned on this very spot which still stands — the self same outline of half bare, half 114 ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH grass grown crag against the temperate sky, sustain- ing upon its summit the ''First Church." Of course it is not really the first church. That was built about a year after John Winthrop and his dozen companions settled here in 1633. Agawam, it was called, and the name may still be seen on various buildings. The Indians sold the place for twenty pounds, and, having struck this advantageous bargain, the Englishmen promptly proceeded to build a place to worship. It was a rough affair and about ten years later was sold for fifty shillings, and new one erected. The town records are scrupulously exact as regards these details. They tell us that Edmund Gardner took care of the first building and ''covenated to keep it water tight as well as warm and took his pay in summer wheat." The second meeting house was more pretentious. It was square with a turret in the center, and windows in leaden sashes, and when it was enlarged, and the bell donated to the school house, fifty-three citizens empowered John Appleton, a merchant, to buy a larger one in London, and their names are inscribed upon the town books to this day. The third church, built about fifty years later, was /'banked with stone and gravill" from the old fort on the Green, for the community was acquiring a 115 THE ROMANTIC SHORE sense of security and there was no longer a need for a garrison house. In 1749, still another meeting house was raised upon this spot — a spacious new one with a needle spire and double doors — with bobbined pews and a sounding board. This was used until a century ago when the present building was decided upon — a brave little meeting house, maintaining the ancient traditions in excellent spirit and holding its spire steady and high, visible for miles around. There is hardly a foot of this Green but recalls the past. Where the monument now stands in modest aloofness was once enacted the homely custom of collecting the hogs in the morning so that Abraham War and Goodman Symond might drive them to the Commons. At sunrise Daniel Bosworth blew his horn and the village cows were gathered in similar fashion and were thence conducted to the public pasture lands, outside the town limits — evidence that Ipswich even at that early date had grasped the ad- vantage of some of the features of communism. On the South East corner of the Green was the town pound, where those animals which were not placed under Daniel Bosworth's chaperonage were impaled. There was a watch house on the south side of the First Church, ten feet square, and bearing the im- 116 ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH pressive name of "The Old Meeting House Fort/' This was built as a defence against the Indians, and the town records state with clearness that every male adult over eighteen, of every family, including ''sons, servants and sojourners'' was liable to watch house duty. Some one was obliged to be there every moment, both to guard the small stock of ammunition and to keep an eye out for the prowling Indians, who, however, were a very peaceable lot — so peaceable, in fact, that no occasion for the fort ever arose, and in 1702 it was voted that the rocks should be sold, and the proceeds used toward buying a town clock. As they had a sundial, and as the sexton, Simon Pindar, was instructed to ring the church bell every morning at five, the good people of Ipswich had every oppor- tunity to know and improve each shining hour. Although the settlement was left in peace it did not relax its vigorous standards. There was no pressure from without, but the stern dictates from within never faltered. No town offices were given to any but church members. A man could not be a hog reeve until he had experienced a change of heart: fence viewers had to be in good and regular standing, and the town crier must be sound on the question of original sin. Today as one surveys the tranquil ham- 117 THE ROMANTIC SHORE let, unstirred by the stampede of progress, it is not difficult to understand the pure simplicity of two centuries ago. Many fine old houses still stand in dignified sobriety, expressions now and then of self respecting inhabitants : the same wide pleasant streets elm shaded, trail, diverge, meet, cross and separate in the old leisurely way: the same lovely hills still hold the village in their cup, and the same river winds slowly under the bridges. Yes, it is easy to recon- struct the Ispwich of long ago, for the Ipswich of today retains much of its lingering charm. Should you make the easy ascent to the Town Hill and look South you will see the soft hills in an irre- gular semi-circle to your right, with the village safely tucked into the valleys, the river winding from the sea, turning the wheels of the great hosiery mills which not only bring Ipswich commerce, but bring het, too, the very modern problems of immigration; for the mills are filled with Greeks and Armenians and Poles, with their own settlements on the other side of town, their own standards of living, their own forms of worship and their own ideas of recreation. The river which one can see so clearly from here is salt at high tide up to tlie point where it goes under the Choate Bridge — the first stone arch bridge built in 118 ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH this country. The eye leaves the village, the mills and the river and sweeps out to sea, the white of the sand mingling with the gray of the marsh hay and the green of the pastures, as the rhythmic beat of the ocean mingles with the sound of the wind; to Ipswich Lighthouse shining white in the sun; to Little Neck, quite ridiculously rounded and neatly dotted with dwellings that look as uniform as those in a child's cardboard village from this distance, and to the bar beyond where the legend of Harry Main still vi- brates with the vibrations of the surf. He was a pirate and a smuggler and, worse yet, a ship wrecker, and used to build fires on the sand to decoy the vessels in among the breakers. But his sins, though pictur- esque, were damnable, so Harry Main was damned, and at his death was chained to Ipswich bar to coil for ever and ever a rope of sand. When the cable broke with the dash of the waves, his yells of fury could be heard for miles around. We can hear them today when the wind is still, and doubtless mothers who have not learned the new psychology still try to terrif}^ their children into obedie^nce by threatening them with the rage of Harry Main, as their mothers threatened them. The eye sweeps further. The distant roofs of some of the summer cottages on the 119 ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH dunes are visible: Plum Island, the inspiration of much that is tuneful in the verse of this section of the country, stretches gray and white and green to the left. One can see from Cape Ann to the dim Isle of Shoals on a clear day, and the conformation of the shore curiously suggests Dorsetshire. That bar on which the surf is foaming will always be a thorn in the side of remembrance, for wjthout it Ipswich might have had the prestige of Salem as a shipping port, and might even — so earnest antiquarians insist — have been the capital of Massachusetts.* One cannot appreciate the beach road — the Argilla Road — from here: it is best to take a carriage. The South Congregational Church and the Common are at the other end of town — a handsome pillared build- ing and a handsome wide common, and the road which winds from here to the summer settlement is handsome, too. For summer people are coming to Ipswich now, and the big old farm houses and the little ones are being remodeled, sometimes with bad taste but generally with good, to meet the new de- mands. There are cottages quite simply enlarged by a veranda and a dormer or two: there are mansions with two chimneys and gambreled roofs which needed no enlargement but only a fresh coat of white paint, *A delightfully appropriate spot to turn to Morgan's weU known lines on Ipswich. Page 189. 121 THE ROMANTIC SHORE and there are new houses, half hidden by the woods or set boldly out upon the plains. A Boston archi- tect has even built a windmill, closely following the hexagonal outlines of those quaint specimens occasion- ally seen on Cape Cod. These same summer resi- dents have planted Lombardy poplars beside the winding road from town, and the long distances between the dwellings is pleasantly broken by the thin and graceful shade. One must not leave this section of Ipswich without stopping to stare at the great new estate of a Chicago millionaire, conspicuous upon a hill overlooking the sea. It stretches out in admirable proportions, with its many rooms and gardens, its stables and servants quarters and its swimming pool — a far cry indeed from the day when even the best houses were two stories high. In those days the large white oak timbers showed inside the finished rooms, and the windows were three feet long and two feet wide, with little three-inch diamond panes set in lead. They opened out, either in halves or in a solid piece. The doors of the wealthy had diagrams marked upon them set in lead lines with brass nails driven at the points of the angles. Lime was unknown: the walls were daubed with clay mixed with straw, or plastered with a sort of 122 ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH lime made from clam shells. Whitewash took the place of paper until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and paint was little used. The walls were of brick laid on the inner partition, covered with clay, which was in turn covered with what were called clayboards, and from which our clapboards derived their name. The better houses were shingled, but the cottages were thatched until almost 1700. And where these primitive homes once stood, one may stand and gaze upon a complete example of the luxurious and the beautiful — a palace with lights and warm water, with shining floors and easily moving windows: with servitors and automobiles and high bred horses. Thus the cycle of years revolves, and by its revolution cuts the wake of change. On the way back to town one repasses Heartbreak Hill, the most romantically named of eminences. Here it was that an Indian girl, deserted by a white sailor, used to climb and scan the ocean to see if a returning sail brought also a returning lover. But the dark eyes looked out through their tears in vain. He never came back, although she daily trudged the path to the top of the hill to search the wide horizon. She died, at last — slipping another bead upon the long chain of romance — and poets have written 123 THE ROMANTIC SHORE about her ever since, the hill still bears a name in memory of her, and lovers climb in the springtime to sit upon the ledge where she used to stand, and pledge their faith. * The legends, which draw a shining ring about the whole North Shore, cluster thickly here. At the Green they will show you the very spot where the Devil, enraged, disgusted or alarmed — it does not specify — at hearing Whitefield thunder out his terrible sermon to a vast outdoor audience, leaped down from the church roof where he had been perch- ing, and his cloven foot struck deep into the rock. You may put your foot in the very print if you are not convinced. The story brings us back to the Meeting House and the Green, as Ipswich stories are apt to do. And, having come back, we see half a dozen places of interest which we overlooked before. Where the gray Meth- odist Church now stands was the Court House, where Daniel Webster and Choate and Story made their eloquent pleas, and where two town houses have lived out their days of usefulness. A few doors down is the Seminary, made famous by the labors of that ardent educator, Mary Lyons, before she went to Mt. Holyoke. It was a fashionable Celia Thaxter tells the story more prettily in verse. Page 191. 124 ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH school sixty-five years ago: one of the very first to offer serious and scholarly courses to young ladies, whose parents hithertofore had considered it quite sufficient for them to lisp a little French, paint velvet and tinkle on the piano. Many of the present in- habitants of Ipswich remember the Seminary in its halycon days, when pupils came from Canada, from the middle west and the south to attend, and the most exclusive families in town felt honored to re- ceive them as boarders. If their childish impression of a most amazingly modern place still lingers, to us the curriculum of those days sounds quite whimsically the reverse. What Female Seminary — if we had Female Seminaries in the twentieth century — would announce 'The Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion to the Constutitional Course of Nature" and *'The Evidences of Christianity" and "Intellectual Philosophy" among its prescribed courses? And what Female Seminary, fashionable or not, could state today with truthfulness that its weekly price of board, including lights and washing, would be $1.75? How- ever, in its day this was one of the most highly res- pected institutions in the country, where Lucy Lar- com and Mary Lyons taught with zeal, and which many distinguished women, including Gail Hamilton 125 THE ROMANTIC SHORE and Mrs. James G. Blaine, have been proud to call their Alma Mater. Just above the seminary was the home of Elizabeth Brown, who made black bobbin lace for a living, and who combined religion and comfort so ingeniously that she deserves commemoration. On cold Sundays it was her wont to carry a tin foot stove to church, filled with turf coals. She buried two potatoes in it, and while Mr. Frisbie preached his long and wintry sermon, the turfs accomplished the two fold purpose of baking the potatoes and keeping her feet warm. In the intermission between the morning and after- noon services, Elizabeth Brown placidly extracted her potatoes, ate them at leisure and was ready for the next session. The site where Aaron Cogswell found the whipping post and pillory which were once the integral part of every well ordered New England community, is marked by the elms which he planted — a gentler monument to history than those grim relics. Not far beyond is the place where Anthony Potter lived, he whose wife was fined for wearing a silk bonnet to church. At the bottom of the hill is the tavern where Washington and Lafayette once stayed. Thus the half dreaming town of Ipswich still dreams on, for the mills and their employees are quite 126 ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH removed from this drowsy center of the past. The ancient houses standing close to the old roads, seem to gather to themselves a sort of personality. This one on High Street, near the home of Simon Brad- street, once governor of Massachusetts and husband of Ann Dudley, the first American poetess — has a thin high shouldered look, suggestive of the meagre angularity we associate with New England spinsters. But it holds itself erect nevertheless, scorning to sag beneath its weight of years or lose one jot or title of its inflexibility. That prim gray painted one across the street reminds us of a pious Deaconess who hy- pocritically conceals her age beneath a false gray front. And surely, that demure white cottage is an old lady who is content to be a grand- mother and does not blush to be dainty. There is quite a different atmosphere about Ye Rogers Manse, now an Inn, but still retaining its old time aristocracy. Like a well groomed woman of the world in its gleaming white and dark green, it is all the more impressive for its decades of experience. The comfortable square buildings at the corner re- mind one irresistibly of good natured old women who have lost both the slimness of youth and the neat contours of maturity, and now sprawl out untidily in 127 THE ROMANTIC SHORE every direction. They were always rather common, of course, but substantial and hospitable, and there is something jolly about their shabby outlines. As we walk the quiet streets, we feel as if we were in a congregation of old ladies, fashionable or dowdy, down at the heel or smartly remodeled, but undeniably old ladies. The antique shops, the summer people and the Historical Society have claimed some of them — reclaimed in the last instance as the old Whipple House, built before 1638 and now the head- quarters of a progressive Historical Society, testifies. This weather-beaten landmark, the first of Ipswich's historical objects to catch the eye of the passing or alighting tourist, and containing a museum worth a thoughtful survey, is the patriarch of that congrega- tion of venerable dames, which we may picture as coming to life again, sedately going to church and discussing with discreet cheerfulness whether or not one might attain to sanctification and yet be damned, whether immersion here will save from fire hereafter, and whether God made Hell when He made the rest of the Universe. For the old Ipswich was a godly Ipswich: a theo- logical, sternly orthodox community. No lure of meadows in spring time, no beckoning of the river or 128 '■\t*&i'y-''^--^-r' nfV^-- ECCLESIASTICAL IPSWICH call of the sea turned their faces away from the Church founded literally upon a rock, worshipped in, married in and buried from, and placed with prayerful solem- nity in the high center of the town. 129 CHAPTER XIV THE WHITTIER COUNTRY There are certain personalities which seem as char- acteristic of the soil from which they sprung as do native fruit and flowers. And there are certain regions which have been so enshrined in the life and art of a poet or painter that always afterwards they bear the impress of that poet or painter. One cannot pass through that fairest of all the New England country — Essex County, along the banks of the Merrimac — without a permeating realization of what this lovely and yet virile scenery might mean in the development of a sensitive nature. And if the beauty of Kenoza Lake and the sweet, 130 THE WHITTIER COUNTRY strong benediction of Ayers^and Job^s Hills found a calm reflection in the life of their most cherished child, he in his turn repaid them by impressing upon them forever the high and tranquil interpretation of his verse and of his career. There are few journey ings in all New England that will bring one more deep and quiet pleasure than a day spent in meditative pilgrimage through what is fondly called the Whittier Land. For it is not only the abstract beauty of meadow, sky and upland that is commemorated in the words which have made their writer dear to many hearts, but the fact that his picturing was so accurate that even t£e stranger re- cognizes today, and sees with a thrill of familiarity the ''gap in the old wall," ''the stepping stones in the shallow brook" — "the hills of Gold and Silver Rimming round the little town." No detail was too insignificant, no trifle too homely to be caught in the photographic mirror of a mind which was in complete harmony with its environment. What Burns did for the banks and braes of Ayr and Doon, the Quaker poet has done for the wooded hills of this "rich 8.nd many watered land," and those who have a day to let slip like a smooth chain through fingers, tired from the feverish turning of 131 THE ROMANTIC SHORE leaves, cranking of machines and the handhng of money and all the paraphernalia of modern life can not do better then to fare forth to the birthplace of one whose spirit even more than his poetry is one of the purest products and one of the finest heritages of Massachusetts. Haverhill is a busy modern city, and although there are places in it connected with the early days of Whittier, such as the Academy from which he grad- uated, yet it is not here that we find his true habitat. Three miles from the city hall in what is called the East Parish of Haverhill is the birthplace — three miles of curving road with a trolley every half hour or so — three miles of woodland and hills with contours as soft as any Italian mountain, and yet with the singular strength which distinguishes the New World from the old. What is it that makes this charming country with its highlands and lowlands, its lakes and streams not enervating but crisply, beautifully fair? Is it the sturdiness of the evergreens, the rough sides of the boulders, the not too languid ripple of the water? As we take the pleasant road toward East Haverhill we understand how the forces of Nature molded the aspiration and formed the taste of the lad who walked here often, his eyes upon the "opulence of hill and 132 THE WHITTIER COUNTRY lakes" and his heart musing on the wonders of creation. He who would approach the Whittier country in a mood of sympathy should not whizz through it in an automobile, but walk at leisure and at leisure pause to dream. The lake on the right is Kenoza, so christened by Whittier, and the bright sheet of water and the idyllic hills — one of them crowned with a castle more suggestive of the romance of Europe than that of America — now a public park, have all been caught and held in his rhyme. The smaller lake on the left is a hundred feet higher than Kenoza and far above most of the houses in the city. The valley in which the birthplace stands is almost dramatically picturesque. The slope is gentle, the splashing brook twists and darts in ripples, and the farmhouse through the trees gleams white as a farmhouse should. Peace broods over the spot on dreaming wings, and all the visitors that come cannot disturb her deep tranquility. The New England farmhouse has become a phrase in our vocabularies connoting the simplicity that is comely and the plainness that is refreshing. The square house in which Whittier was born in 1807 was built by his great grandfather in 1688, and with the lilacs blooming by the front door, the white well- 133 THE ROMANTIC SHORE sweep near, the old fashioned garden, the wall of native stone, and the screen of maple, walnut, pine and ash trees, it is as delightfully and wholesomely- typical as the imagination could desire. The barn is across the street, longer than it was in the poet's day, but the same distance from the house that it was when the boys tunnelled their way through it to the snow drifts. "Our buskins on our feet we drew; With mittened hands and caps drawn low, To guard our nefcks and ears from snow. We cut the solid whiteness through. And where the drift was deepest, made A tunnel, walled and overlaid With dazzling crystal.'' And through this they " reached the barn with merry din. And roused the prisoned brutes within." One enters the house by a side door, through a small entry into a long, old fashioned kitchen, low ceilinged, rough beamed, a braided mat on the wide boarded floor before the huge fireplace; straight backed chairs beside the well scrubbed table, a spin- ning wheel and an ancient desk — one which belonged 134 THE WHITTIER COUNTRY to Whittier's great grandfather and upon which he scribbled his first childish verses — in a corner by a square paned window. This is the room made memorable by ''Snowbound." Here was piled ''The oaken log, green, huge and thick, And on its top the stout back stick; The knotty forestick laid apart. And filled between with curious art The ragged brush; then hovering near, We watched the first red blaze appear, Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam. On whitewashed wall and sagging beam. Until the rude, old fashioned room Burst flower-like into rosy bloom. ' ' The generous well worn hearth about which the family gathered, the bricks where simmered the mug of cider and where "the apples sputtered in a row," even the plump bull's eye watch hanging over the mantel are all here; and as we survey this clean and decorous place with its staunch timbers and decent furnishings, there forms before our eyes a picture of the simplicity and industry of those days of which such a room was the background, and the honest ideals and unaffected tastes of which it was the cradle. There is something inexplicably touching in the 135 00 00 CO > 03 W EC 03 nd 03 di GO a o W .§ ^^4i THE WHITTIER COUNTRY scrupulous exactness with which this room has been preserved, and it has produced a hushed air of ex- pectation, as if the man who lived there for twenty- nine years might be coming in any moment, and would hang up his coat on a nail by the entry door, pull out one of the wooden bottomed chairs toward the fire- place, and change his boots, country fashion. There even stand a pair of his shoes on the hearth, unfashion- able, solidly made, typical of the place and of the rustic boy who wore them.* In a little room at the western end of the kitchen ; up two steps higher than the kitchen, is the small cabin- like chamber — ''Mother's Room." Here again is that touching preservation of detail which makes us sensi- ble of an atmosphere which is neither past nor present, but curiously embalmed between. For although upon the four-post bed there are still spread the sheets and blankets woven by Whittier's mother, some of them bearing her maiden name, although the bureau is the self same piece which has stood here for so many gen- erations, and the little shaving glass is that which was used by Whittier throughout his life both here and at Amesbury — although the small chamber still retains the Quaker artlessness of arrangement, yet we do not feel the pulse of life. Perhaps it is the fragments of *The visitor who wishes to recall some of the best of Snowboiind will find it on page 194. 137 THE ROMANTIC SHORE baby clothes, which once were worn by Whittier's father and then were thriftily passed on to his son and are now carefully pressed beneath glass and hanging on the wall, which infuse something of the air of a museum to the apartment. A sense of solemnity gathers within us as we stand in the midst of these things expressive of a deeply established mode of life, while that life itself has vanished. In the room where Whittier was born we notice the quaintly modest pieces of furniture which were part of his mother's bridal outfit. The unpretentious little mahogany card table, the demure red painted chest, the cabinets containing intimate mementos of the family. Brass andirons, candle sticks and whale oil lamps still shine as in the day of the energetic house- keeper, and on the shelves the books which Whittier handled as a boy stand where thej^ stood then. It is all very neat, very substantial, almost amusingly free from ornamentation of any kind — a fitting environ- ment indeed for the youth of the man to whom there was no beauty so excellent as moral beauty, no lure so strong as the beckoning of duty. There are several portraits of him here, interesting as portraits of inter- esting people must be in showing the gradual changes which years work upon them. There is something al- 138 THE WHITTIER COUNTRY most psychic in the deep eyes of the young man, some- thing of disappointment in the curve of the mobile mouth. The serene face of the old man has lost the shadow of melancholy. The eyes have faced the suc- cesses and defeats of his life and are looking forward without apprehension toward the experiences of the life which is to come. There are any number of places near here which will be of significance in proportion to one's knowledge of the poet's life and work. At the foot of the western hill is a small lot inclosed by a stone wall which was the earliest burying ground of the family. The two houses where the boy went to school still remain, and on the site of the house in "School Days" the brown sumachs grow and the blackberry vines are creeping. The grave of the ''Countess" — that romantic and pathetic exile — is visited by hundreds every year, and Rocks village still fits the description it received so long ago : "Over the wooded northern ridge, Between its houses brown. To the dark tunnel of the bridge The street comes straggling down. You catch a glimpse through birch and pine Of gable roof and porch, The tavern with its swinging sign, The sharp horn of the church." 139 THE ROMANTIC SHORE On the Country Bridge road on the way to Rocks village is the old Peaslee, or Garrison, house, the home of Whittier's great grandmother — the one who brought Quakerism into the family. It was built with bricks brought from England before 1675, and in the time of King Phillip's war was used as a refugee shelter, as the port-holes in its thick sides and the compartments in the cellar still testify. Its walls are of white oak, sixteen inches thick, and the bricks are fastened with iron bolts. There is a touch of romance about it, with its deep win- dow seats and closets and attics. Tradition has it that the Quakers used to hold their quarterly meetings here, as they were not allowed to worship in Haverhill. All the nine miles from here to Amesbury have been often travelled by the poet, — as a little boy when he was driven chattering with the cold to the meeting house on Po Hill — as a lad when he traversed these miles on foot, and as man when he reproduced the Newbury hills, the glimpses of Ipswich Bay and the southern ranges of the New Hampshire Mountains, going back in his memory over the well known road. Amesbury , where the last fifty -six years of his life were spent, has not the charm of Haverhill, and neither has the house where he lived the direct appeal of his birth- place. It is an ordinary sort of building, interesting 140 THE WHITTIER COUNTRY only because of many mementos which are on exhi- bition within. Here is a cane made from the wood of his office in Philadelphia which was burned by a pro- slavery mob in 1858, and of all the canes given him — some of them valuable and one of them made from the wood of the house where Barbara Freitchie lived — ^this was the only one he ever carried. In the drawer of the desk on which ''Snowbound" was written is an album presented him on his eightieth birthday. It contains the autographs of every member of the United States Sen- ate and the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court of the United States, the Governor, Ex-Gover- nor and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts and many other distinguished names. One likes to notice that not one single Southern Congressman or Senator failed to sign his name to a tribute designed for the most ardent of abolitionists. In what he called his ''Garden Room" practically nothing has been altered. The portraits of his friends hang here — Garrison, Thom- as Starr King, Emerson, Longfellow, Sturge, Chinese Gordon and others, and the books he placed there still stand upon their accustomed shelves. The carpet he selected, the chair he sat in, the stove, the various pieces of furniture, are all as he last saw them. The house is not elegant — hardly attractive. The zeal for 141 THE ROMANTIC SHORE righteousness which so often goes hand in hand with indifference to external delights is quite apparent in the commonplace accessories with which the Quaker bard surrounded himself. In the town of Amesbury are many places made famous by the writings of one who was known from ocean to ocean in his day. **The Captain's Well'^ is down the road half a mile; if you read the poem by that name you will learn how Captain Valentine Bagley who had been shipwrecked had vowed that if he were ever rescued from the miseries of hunger and thirst that he would dig a well by the roadside so that all thirsty passersby might quench their thirst. The story is a true one, and the well stands there to this day. The Friends Meeting house — severely unembel- lished — is in the other direction, and a silver plate marks the seat which the poet usually occupied. Salisbury Beach — the scene of "A Tent on the Beach," now covered with cottages, is not far away, nor is Pleasant Valley, a favorite walk of Whittier and his sister and commemorated in the "River Path." The fountain on Mundy Hill may be visited, although the fountain is a fspring and a willow takes the place of the oak mentioned in the verse. Whittier Hill,— locally called Whitcher Hill, and 142 THE WHITTIER COUNTRY named not for John Greenleaf but for his first Amer- ican ancestors; the Macy house, built before 1654: by- Thomas Macy who was driven from town for harbor- ing a proscribed Quaker, as told in ''The Exiles'^ stand as they have for many generations. The cemetery in which Whittier lies is on the high slope of a hill, in the section reserved for the Friends. A low hedge of Arbor Vitae surrounds the family lot, and here under plain little white headstones — all pre- cisely alike except for the poet's which is a trifle larger — lies every member of the family mentioned in ''Snow bound." Two cedars mark his brother's grave and his, and the sun rests cheerfully upon the quiet and united family. There is none of that sad and rhapsodic dis- hevellment that lingers about the solitary grave of Shelley at Rome: none of the impressive pomp which stands guardian to the tomb of Tennyson in West- minister Abbey. The last resting place of this sincere democrat lies in the chaste and tempered sunlight of a country hillside, under the wide clouds of the sky he loved. In the distance one may see the hills of New- buryport, that fine old town against which the last ripples of his life, like the ever-widening circles on an unruffled surface, broke in gentleness. Newburyport, where he often visited in the later years, even yet reflects 143 THE ROMANTIC SHORE something of the personality of one who gathered with- in himself the most intense expression of what is best in the New England character. For it is as a personality more than as a poet that Whittier will be longest remembered. His verse is more valuable as a faithful document of a fair land than as literature. His message was of spiritual rather than artistic import : and his life more mysterious than his art. And is this not true of all who have a spark of the divine genius? Only as a human life is in tune with tlie infinite is that life beautiful, and only as its work expresses that harmony shall that work endure. The words that Whittier wrote will be dear to New England hearts for many generations, but his life of consecrated idealism, of resolute, reverent self sacrifice, passing into the stream of all human consciousness and elevating it by just as much as it bore within itself of spiritual rather than material reality, must — if we believe in the deep- er meaning of existence — be of imperishable signifi- cance. For a pure soul deepening under the griefs and sweetening under the joys of earthly experience is the supreme poem of mankind, and that poem, humbly and patiently wrought through Whittier' s long and useful years of struggle, is written invisibly, ineradicably upon these hills forever. 144 CHAPTER XV CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT A serene and ancient town with square white man- sions ranged on either side of the long elm -shaded streets: a town with a drowsy Mall and a placid pond: behind it level land, the flat Rowley marshes, the peaceful prairies of old Newbury: on one side the Merrimac River, and beyond, the quiet sands and sea. How still it is! how leisurely! how undis- turbed! A horse waits at the station without champing: the driver strolls across the street and takes the reins 145 THE ROMANTIC SHORE loosely in a casual hand. You lean forward from the back seat and pop a dozen curious questions, to which the drawling answer serves rather as a sedative than a stimulant. You are in Newburyport — the end of the North Shore — a town which has increased only about ten per cent in twenty five years: whose history has long since been made, but a history of such vigor that the dignified somnolence of today must be respected ^s the slumber of a warrior. As you see the people moving without haste, the immemorial elms interweaving their mild shade across High Street which paces for six miles parallel with the river: as you see the big three-story houses with their wide halls running from end to end, not much altered since the days when their merchants and West India captains issued grandly forth from them, it is hard to believe that this was once the most vital and passionate of New England towns: burning British tea in the public square before the Bostonians even Parted on their tea party : refusing to use or pay for or touch a British stamp: sending out our first privateers which raked in British commerce to the tune of many millions: building the first ship that ever flew an American flag on the Thames, carrying a broomstick on her peak — after Van Tromp's fashion 146 CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT — to tell how we had swept the seas: mustering the first volunteer company of the Revolution and build- ing fighting frigates that were the pride of the colonies. The history of Newburyport is one of such fervor and initiative that it makes mechanical modern war- fare seem wan and joyless. The whole town was carried up and out on a wave of patriotism that broke on shores across the Atlantic. Incredible feats were performed. The little sloop ''Wasp" captured thir- teen merchantmen in three months, and finally engaging four ships in the line went down gloriously, with every man at the guns and all her colors flying. Captain William Nichols — the famous privateersman — capped a most spectacular career by bringing into port in three weeks, four prizes, sixty-four prisoners and half a million dollars worth of booty. Those were vehement days, when in the flush of her energy Newburyport produced not only fighters but the progenitors of men who have made the United States a world power; the Sewall family who occupied the judical bench in the supreme court for eighty-four years: Theophilus Parsons who helped draft the Constitution and drew to his native town Robert Treat Paine, Rufus King and John Quincy Adams to study law with him. The Lowell family sprang from 147 THE jaOMANTJC SHORE here, as did the Springs, the Tyngs, the Chases. Caleb Cushing, first mayor of the town, attorney general of the United States and commissioner to China, Nicholas Pike, author of the first American arithmetic; William Lloyd Garrison, whose birth- place may still be seen; William Wheelright, author of the great South American railroad system; Josiah Bartlett, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence — the name of her distinguished sons is a legion, and many of those names still continue on their native heath. It is difficult to realize that this uneventful town, sleeping under the summer sun or mufiled in the winter snow, emerged from a history of extraordinary violence. They even had earthquakes here in the early days — over two hundred of them — -with roarings, and flash- ings of fire running along the ground, fissures rending the rocks, cellars splitting open, chimneys and walls fall- ing, floating islands forming, tons of white sand being flung out to burn like brimstone, and springs drying up and breaking out in a single night. These cataclysms were so frequent that the town chronicle mentions them quite incidentally, as it might refer to a full moon or a flood tide. Their religious history was as exciting as their 148 CHARMING OLD NEWBURYPORT seismatic. George Whitefield, the magnetic and eloquent English revivalist who crossed the ocean fourteen times and delivered over eighteen thousand sermons, preached more than once in the First Pres- byterian Meeting House, now called the Old South Church on Federal Street. Dramatic as all his advents were, it was on his last visit to the town — thirty years to a day from the first— that he was the central figure in as impressive a scene as can well be imagined. He arrived very tired on Saturday night and as he was going upstairs to his room the people who had gathered to greet him crowd- ed about the foot of the stairway. He stood there above them, weary and breathing painfully, his candle in his hand. And then he began to speak. He addressed them with difficulty but with intense earnestness. They listened, hushed and expectant, their faces upturned to his, the candle light illuminat- ing his worn countenance. The candle flickered, burned out and went into its socket. The great evangelist's voice stopped, as a bell that ceases ringing. The next morning he was dead. The house in which he died, his tomb, the bible he used, and the church where he preached are preserved to this day.* The church is worth ♦Whittier has transmitted something of this extraordinary magnetic per- sonality into his "Preacher." Page 196. 149 THE ROMANTIC SHORE seeing, not only because of its architecture — the whispering gallery where the black slaves of the sea captains used to sit is equalled only by St. Paul's in London: the straight backed pews have been here since 1802 and the communion seat and vener- able haircloth sofa are worth more in money than the original edifice when it was built, and the bell was cast in 1802 by Paul Revere and Son — but because of its stirring historical associations. Here Whitefield preached and is buried: here Arnold's expedition to Quebec, officered by the dashing Aaron Burr, marched oh the Sunday before its departure with drums beat- ing and colors flying and stacked its muskets in the side aisle while the citizens packed the gallery and the stairs : and here the great Revolutionary preacher, John Murray, on whose head the Britis
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