"And when I had more seriously considered the bewty of the place, with all her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd. For so many goodly groves of trees: dainty fine round rising hillocks: delicate faire large plaines: sweete crystal fountains, and clear running streams, that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweet a murmuring noise to heare, as would even lull the senses with delight asleep, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meet; and hand in hand run down to Neptune's court, to pay the yearly tribute which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the Springs."



CHAPTER V

ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM



Should you walk along the highway from Quincy to Hingham on a Sunday morning you would be passed by many automobiles, for the Old Coast Road is now one of the great pleasure highways of New England. Many of the cars are moderately priced affairs, the tonneau well filled with children of miscellaneous ages, and enlivened by a family dog or two—for this is the way that the average American household spends its modern Sabbath holiday. Now and then a limousine, exquisite in workmanship within and without, driven by a chauffeur in livery and tenanted by a single languid occupant, rolls noiselessly past. A strange procession, indeed, for a road originally marked by the moccasined feet of Indians, and widened gradually by the toilsome journeyings of rough Colonial carts and coaches.

It is difficult to say which feature of the steadily moving travel would most forcibly strike the original Puritan settlers of the town: the fact that even the common man—the poor man—could own such a vehicle of speed and ease, or the fact that America—such a short time ago a wilderness—could produce, not as the finest flower on its tree of evolution, but certainly as its most exotic, the plutocrat who lives in a palace with fifty servants to do his bidding, and the fine lady whose sole exercise of her mental and physical functions consists in allowing her maid to dress her. Yes, New England has changed amazingly in the revolutions of three centuries, and here, under the shadow of this square plain building—Hingham's Old Ship Church—while we pause to watch the Sunday pageant of 1920, we can most easily call back the Sabbath rites, and the ideals which created those rites, three centuries ago.



It is the year of 1681. This wooden meeting-house, with the truncated pyramidal roof and belfry (to serve as a lookout station), has just been built. A stage ahead, architecturally, of the log meeting-house with clay-filled chinks, thatched roof, oiled-paper windows, earthen floor, and a stage behind the charming steeple style made popular by Sir Christopher Wren, and now multiplied in countless graceful examples all over New England, the Old Ship is entirely unconscious of the distinction which is awaiting it—the distinction of being the oldest house for public worship in the United States which still stands on its original site, and which is still used for its original purpose. In the year 1681 it is merely the new meeting-house of the little hamlet of Hingham. The people are very proud of their new building. The timbers have been hewn with the broad-axe out of solid white pine (the marks are still visible, particularly in those rafters of the roof open to the attic). The belfry is precisely in the center of the four-sided pitched roof. To be sure this necessitates ringing the bell from one of the pews, but a little later the bellringer will stand above, and through a pane of glass let into the ceiling he will be able to see when the minister enters the pulpit. The original backless benches were replaced by box pews with narrow seats like shelves, hung on hinges around three sides, but part of the original pulpit remains and a few of the box pews. In 1681 the interior, like the exterior, is sternly bare. No paint, no decorations, no colored windows, no organ, or anything which could even remotely suggest the color, the beauty, the formalism of the churches of England. The unceiled roof shows the rafters whose arched timbers remind one that ships' carpenters have built this house of God.

This, then, is the meeting-house of 1681. What of the services conducted there?

In the first place, they are well attended. And why not, since in 1635 the General Court decreed that no dwelling should be placed more than half a mile away from the meeting-house of any new "plantation"—thus eliminating the excuse of too great distance? Every one is expected, nay, commanded, to come to church. In fact, after the tolling of the last bell, the houses may all be searched—each ten families is under an inspector—if there is any question of delinquents hiding in them. And so in twos and threes, often the man trudging ahead with his gun and the woman carrying her baby while the smaller children cling to her skirts, sometimes man and woman and a child or two on horseback, no matter how wild the storm, how swollen the streams, how deep the whirling snow—they all come to church: old folk and infants as well as adults and children. The congregation either waits for the minister and his wife outside the door, or stands until he has entered the pulpit. Once inside they are seated with the most meticulous exactness, according to rank, age, sex, and wealth. The small boys are separated from their families and kept in order by tithing-men who allow no wandering eyes or whispered words. The deacons are in the "fore" seats; the elderly people are sometimes given chairs at the end of the "pues"; and the slaves and Indians are in the rear. To seat one's self in the wrong "pue" is an offense punishable by a fine.

"Here is the church, and here are the people," as the old rhyme has it. What then of the services? That they are interminable we know. The tithing-man or clerk may turn the brass-bound hourglass by the side of the pulpit two and three times during the sermon, and once or twice during the prayer. Interminable, and, also, to the modern Sunday observer, unendurable. How many of us of this softer age can contemplate without a shiver the vision of people sitting hour after hour in an absolutely unheated building? (The Old Ship was not heated until 1822.) The only relief from the chill and stiffness comes during the prayer when the congregation stands: kneeling, of course, would savor too strongly of idolatry and the Church of Rome. They stand, too, while the psalms and hymns are lined out, and as they sing them, very uncertainly and very incorrectly. This performance alone sometimes takes an hour, as there is no organ, nor notes, and only a few copies of the Bay Psalm Book, of which, by the way, a copy now would be worth many times its weight in gold.

After the morning service there is a noon intermission, in which the half-frozen congregation stirs around, eats cold luncheons brought in baskets, and then returns to the next session. One must not for an instant, however, consider these noon hours as recreational. There is no idle talk or play. The sermon is discussed and the children forbidden to romp or laugh. One sometimes wonders how the little things had any impulse to laugh in such an abysmal atmosphere, but apparently the Puritan boys and girls were entirely normal and even wholesomely mischievous—as proved by the constantly required services of the tithing-man.

These external trappings of the service sound depressing enough, but if the message received within these chilly walls is cheering, maybe we can forget or ignore the physical discomforts. But is the message cheering? Hell, damnation, eternal tortures, painful theological hair-splittings, harrowing self-examinations, and humiliating public confessions—this is what they gather on the narrow wooden benches to listen to hour after hour, searching their souls for sin with an almost frenzied eagerness. And yet, forlorn and tedious as the bleak service appears to us, there is no doubt that these stern-faced men and women wrenched an almost mystical inspiration from it; that a weird fascination emanated from this morbid dwelling on sin and punishment, appealing to the emotions quite as vividly—although through a different channel—as the most elaborate ceremonial. When the soul is wrought to a certain pitch each hardship is merely an added opportunity to prove its faith. It was this high pitch, attained and sustained by our Puritan fathers, which produced a dramatic and sometimes terrible blend of personality.

It has become the modern fashion somewhat to belittle Puritanism. It is easy to emphasize its absurdities, to ridicule the almost fanatical fervor which goaded men to harshness and inconsistency. The fact remains that a tremendous selective force was needed to tear the Puritans away from the mother church and the mother country and fortify them in their struggle in a new land. It was religious zeal which furnished this motive power. Different implements and differently directed force are needed to extract the diamond from the earth, from the implements and force needed to polish and cut the same diamond. So different phases of religious development are called forth by progressive phases of development. It has been said about the New England conscience: "It fostered a condition of life and type of character doubtless never again possible in the world's history. Having done its work, having founded soundly and peopled strongly an exceptional region, the New England conscience had no further necessity for being. Those whom it now tortures with its hot pincers of doubt and self-reproach are sacrificed to a cause long since won."

The Puritans themselves grew away from many of their excessive severities. But as they gained bodily strength from their conflict with the elements, so they gained a certain moral stamina by their self-imposed religious observance. And this moral stamina has marked New England ever since, and marked her to her glory.

One cannot speak of Hingham churches—indeed, one cannot speak of Hingham—without admiring mention of the New North Church. This building, of exquisite proportions and finish, within and without, built by Bulfinch in 1806, is one of the most flawless examples of its type on the South Shore. You will appreciate the cream-colored paint, the buff walls, the quaint box pews of oiled wood, with handrails gleaming from the touch of many generations, with wooden buttons and protruding hinges proclaiming an ancient fashion; but the unique feature of the New North Church is its slave galleries. These two small galleries, between the roof and the choir loft, held for thirty years, in diminishing numbers, negroes and Indians. The last occupant was a black Lucretia, who, after being freed, was invited to sit downstairs with her master and mistress, which she did, and which she continued to do until her death, not so very long ago.

Hingham, its Main Street—alas for the original name of "Bachelors Rowe"—arched by a double row of superb elms on either side, is incalculably rich in old houses, old traditions, old families. Even motoring through, too quickly as motorists must, one cannot help being struck by the substantial dignity of the place, by the well-kept prosperity of the houses, large and small, which fringe the fine old highway. Ever since the days when the three Misses Barker kept loyal to George IV, claiming the King as their liege lord fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, the town has preserved a Cranford-like charm. And why not, when the very house is still handsomely preserved, where the nameless nobleman, Francis Le Baron, was concealed between the floors, and, as we are told in Mrs. Austen's novel, very properly capped the climax by marrying his brave little protector, Molly Wilder? Why not, when the Lincoln family, ancestors of Abraham, has been identified with the town since its settlement? The house of Major-General Benjamin Lincoln, who received the sword of Cornwallis at Yorktown, is still occupied by his descendants, its neat fence, many windows, two chimneys, and its two stories and a half proclaiming it a dwelling of repute. Near by, descendants of Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham, occupy part of another roomy ancient homestead. The Wampatuck Club, named after the Indian chief who granted the original deeds of the town, has found quarters in an extremely interesting house dating from 1680. In the spacious living-room are seventeen panels, on the walls and in the doors, painted with charming old-fashioned skill by John Hazlitt, the brother of the English essayist. The Reverend Daniel Shute house, built in 1746, is practically intact with its paneled rooms and wall-paper a hundred years old. Hingham's famous elms shade the house where Parson Ebenezer Gay lived out his long pastorate of sixty-nine years and nine months, and the Garrison house, built before 1640, sheltered, in its prime, nine generations of the same family. The Rainbow Roof house, so called from the delicious curve in its roof, is one of Hingham's prettiest two-hundred-year-old cottages, and Miss Susan B. Willard's cottage is one of the oldest in the United States. Derby Academy, founded almost two centuries and a half ago by Madam Derby, still maintains its social and scholarly prestige through all the educational turmoil of the twentieth century. One likes to associate Hingham with Massachusetts's stanch and sturdy "war governor," for it was here that John Albion Andrew, who proved himself so truly one of our great men during the Civil War, courted Eliza Jones Hersey, and here that the happy years of their early married life were spent. Later, another governor, John D. Long, was for many years a mighty figure in the town.

With its ancient churches and institutions, its pensive graveyards and lovely elms, its ancestral houses and hidden gardens, Hingham typifies what is quaintest and best in New England towns. Possibly the dappling of the elms, possibly the shadow of the Old Ship Church, is a bit deeper here than in the other South Shore towns. However it may seem to its inhabitants, to the stranger everything in Hingham is tinctured by the remembrance of the stern old ecclesiasticism. Even the number of historic forts seems a proper part of those righteous days, for when did religion and warfare not go hand in hand? During the trouble with King Philip the town had three forts, one at Fort Hill, one at the Cemetery, and one "on the plain about a mile from the harbor"; and the sites may still be identified.

Not that Hingham history is exclusively religious or martial. Her little harbor once held seventy sail of fishing vessels, and between 1815 and 1826, 165,000 barrels of mackerel were landed on their salty decks. For fifty years (between 1811 and 1860) the Rapid sailed as a packet between this town and Boston, making the trip on one memorable occasion in sixty-seven minutes. We read that in the War of 1812 she was carried up the Weymouth River and covered, masts and hull, with green bushes so that the marauding British cruisers might not find her, and as we read we find ourselves remembering that camouflage is new only in name.

How entirely fitting it seems that a town of such venerable houses and venerable legends should be presided over by a church which is the oldest of its kind in the country!

Hingham changes. There is a Roman Catholic Church in the very heart of that one-time Puritan stronghold: the New North is Unitarian, and Episcopalians, Baptists, and Second Adventists have settled down comfortably where once they would have been run out of town. Poor old Puritans, how grieved and scandalized they would be to stand, as we are standing now, and watch the procession of passing automobilists! Would it seem all lost to them, we wonder, the religious ideal for which they struggled, or would they realize that their sowing had brought forth richer fruit than they could guess? It has all changed, since Puritan days, and yet, perhaps, in no other place in New England does the hand of the past lie so visibly upon the community. You cannot lift your eyes but they rest upon some building raised two centuries and more ago; the shade which ripples under your feet is cast by elms planted by that very hand of the past. Even your voice repeats the words which those old patriarchs, well versed in Biblical lore, chose for their neighborhood names. Accord Pond and Glad Tidings Plain might have been lifted from some Pilgrim's Progress, while the near-by Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem Road are from the Good Book itself.

"Which way to Egypt?" Is this an echo from that time when the Bible was the corner-stone of Church and State, of home and school?

"What's the best road to Jericho Beach?" Surely it is some grave-faced shade who calls: or is it a peal from the chimes in the Memorial Bell Tower—chimes reminiscent of old Hingham, in England? No, it is only the shouted question of the motorist, gay and prosperous, flying on his Sunday holiday through ancient Hingham town.



CHAPTER VI

COHASSET LEDGES AND MARSHES[1]



A sickle-shaped shore—wild, superb! Tawny ledges tumbling out to sea, rearing massive heads to search, across three thousand miles of water, for another shore. For it is Spain and Portugal which lie directly yonder, and the same tumultuous sea that crashes and swirls against Cohasset's crags laps also on those sunnier, warmer sands.

Back inland, from the bold brown coast which gives Cohasset her Riviera-like fame, lie marshes, liquefying into mirrors at high tide, melting into lush green at low tide.

Between the ledges and the marshes winds Jerusalem Road, bearing a continual stream of sight-seers and fringed with estates hidden from the sight-seers; estates with terraces dashed by spindrift, with curving stairways hewn in sheer rock down to the water, with wind-twisted savins, and flowers whose bright bloom is heightened by the tang of salt. For too many a passing traveler Cohasset is known only as the most fashionable resort on the South Shore. But Cohasset's story is a longer one than that, and far more profound.

Cohasset is founded upon a rock, and the making of that rock is so honestly and minutely recorded by nature that even those who take alarm at the word "geology" may read this record with ease. These rocky ledges that stare so proudly across the sea underlie, also, every inch of soil, and are of the same kind everywhere—granite. Granite is a rock which is formed under immense pressure and in the presence of confined moisture, needing a weight of fifteen thousand pounds upon every inch. Therefore, wherever granite is found we know that it has not been formed by deposit, like limestone and sandstone and slate and other sedimentary rocks, but at a prodigious depth under the solid ground, and by slow crystallizing of molten substances. There must have been from two to five miles of other rock lying upon the stuff that crystallized into granite. A wrinkling in the skin of the earth exposed the granite, a wrinkling so gradual that doubtless if generations of men had lived on top of the wrinkle they would have sworn it did not move. But move it did, and the superimposed rock must have been worn off at a rate of less than a hundredth part of an inch every year in order to lose two or three miles of it in twenty-five million years. As the granite was wrinkled up by the movement of the earth's crust, certain cracks opened and filled with lava, forming dikes. The geologist to-day can glance at these dikes and tell the period of their formation as casually as a jockey looking at a horse's mouth can tell his age. He could also tell of the "faulting," or slipping down, of adjacent masses of solid rock, which has occurred often enough to carve the characteristic Cohasset coast.

The making of the rock bottom is a story which extends over millions of years: the making of the soil extends over thousands. The gigantic glacier which once formed all over the northern part of North America, and which remained upon it most of the time until about seven thousand years ago, ground up the rock like a huge mill and heaped its grist into hills and plains and meadows. The marks of it are as easy to see as finger prints in putty. There are scratches on the underlying rock in every part of the town, pointing in the southerly direction in which the glacier moved. The gravel and clay belts of the town have all been stretched out in the same direction as the scratches, and many are the boulders which were combed out of the moving glacier by the peaks of the ledges, and are now poised, like the famous Tipping Rock, just where the glacier left them when it melted. Few towns in America possess greater geological interest or a wider variety of glacial phenomena than Cohasset—all of which may be studied more fully with the aid of E. Victor Bigelow's "Narrative History of the Town of Cohasset, Massachusetts," and William O. Crosby's "Geology of the Boston Basin."

This, then, is briefly the first part of Cohasset's ledges. The second part deals with human events, including many shipwrecks and disasters, and more than one romantic episode. Perhaps this human section is best begun with Captain John Smith.

Captain John Smith was born too early. If ever a hero was brought into the world to adorn the moving-picture screen, that hero of the "iron collar," of piratical capture, of wedlock with an Indian princess, was the man. Failing of this high calling he did some serviceable work in discovering and describing many of the inlets on the coast of New England. Among these inlets Cohasset acted her part as hostess to the famous navigator and staged a small and vivid encounter with the aborigines. The date of this presentation was in 1614; the scenario may be found in Smith's own diary. Smith and a party of eight or more sailors made the trip between the ledges in a small rowboat. It is believed that they landed somewhere near Hominy Point. Their landing was not carried out without some misadventure, however, for in some way this party of explorers angered the Indians with whom they came in contact, and the result was an attack from bow and arrow. The town of Cohasset, in commemorating this encounter by a tablet, has inscribed upon the tablet Smith's own words:

"We found the people on those parts very kind, but in their fury no less valiant: and at Quonhaset falling out there with but one of them, he with three others crossed the harbour in a cannow to certain rocks whereby we must pass, and there let flie their arrowes for our shot, till we were out of danger, yet one of them was slaine, and the other shot through the thigh."

History follows fast along the ledges: history of gallant deeds and gallant defense during the days of the Revolution and the War of 1812; deeds of disaster along the coast and one especial deed of great engineering skill.

The beauty and the tragedy of Cohasset are caught in large measure upon these jagged rocks. The splinters and wrecks of two and a half centuries have strewn the beaches, and many a corpse, far from its native land, has been found, wrapped in a shroud of seaweed upon the sand, and has been lowered by alien hands into a forever unmarked grave. Quite naturally the business of "wrecking"—that is, saving the pieces—came to be the trade of a number of Cohasset citizens, and so expert did Cohasset divers and seamen become that they were in demand all over the world. One of the most interesting salvage enterprises concerned a Spanish frigate, sunk off the coast of Venezuela. Many thousand dollars in silver coin were covered by fifty feet of water, and it was Captain Tower, of Cohasset, with a crew of Cohasset divers and seamen, who set sail for the spot in a schooner bearing the substantial name of Eliza Ann. The Spanish Government, having no faith in the enterprise, agreed to claim only two and one half per cent of what was removed. The first year the wreckers got fourteen thousand dollars, and the second they had reached seven thousand, when the Spaniards became so jealous of their skill that they had to flee for their lives (taking the seven thousand, however). The clumsy diving-bell method was the only one known at that time, but when, twenty years later, the Spaniards had to swallow their chagrin and send again for the same wrecking party to assist them on the same task, modern diving suits were in use and more money was recovered—no mean triumph for the crew of the Eliza Ann!

As the wrecks along the Cohasset coast were principally caused by the dangerous reefs spreading in either direction from what is known as Minot's Ledge, the necessity of a lighthouse on that spot was early evident, and the erecting of the present Minot's Light is one of the most romantic engineering enterprises of our coast history. The original structure was snapped off like a pikestaff in the great storm of 1851, and the present one of Quincy granite is the first of its kind in America to be built on a ledge awash at high tide and with no adjacent dry land. The tremendous difficulties were finally overcome, although in the year 1855 the work could be pursued for only a hundred and thirty hours, and the following year for only a hundred and fifty-seven. To read of the erection of this remarkable lighthouse reminds one of the building of Solomon's temple. The stone was selected with the utmost care, and the Quincy cutters declared that such chiseling had never before left the hand of man. Then every single block for the lower portion was meticulously cut, dovetailed, and set in position on Government Island in Cohasset Harbor. The old base, exquisitely laid, where they were thus set up is still visible, as smooth as a billiard table, although grass-covered. In addition to the flawless cutting and joining of the blocks, the ledge itself was cut into a succession of levels suitable to bear a stone foundation—work which was possible only at certain times of the tide and seasons of the year. The cutting of each stone so that it exactly fitted its neighbor, above, below, and at either side, and precisely conformed to the next inner row upon the same level, was nothing short of a marvel. A miniature of the light—the building of which took two winters, and which was on the scale of an inch to a foot—was in the United States Government Building at the Chicago Exposition, and is stone for stone a counterpart of the granite tower in the Atlantic. Although this is an achievement which belongs in a sense to the whole United States, yet it must always seem, to those who followed it most closely, as belonging peculiarly to Cohasset. A famous Cohasset rigger made the model for the derrick which was used to raise the stones; the massive granite blocks were teamed by one whose proud boast it was that he had never had occasion to shift a stone twice; a Cohasset man captained the first vessel to carry the stone to the ledge, and another assisted in the selection of the stone.

It is difficult to turn one's eyes away from the spectacular beauty of the Cohasset shore, but magnificent as these ledges are, and glittering with infinite romance, yet, rather curiously, it is on the limpid surface of the marshes that we read the most significant episodes of Colonial and pioneer life.

One of the needs which the early settlers were quick to feel was open land which would serve as pasturage for their cattle. With forests pressing down upon them from the rear, and a barrier of granite in front of them, the problem of grazing-lands was important. The Hingham settlement at Bare Cove (Cohasset was part of Hingham originally) found the solution in the acres of open marshland which stretched to the east. Cohasset to-day may ask where so much grazing-land lay within her borders. By comparison with the old maps and surveying figures, we find that many acres, now covered with the water of Little Harbor and lying within the sandbar at Pleasant Beach, are counted as old grazing-lands. These, with the sweep of what is now the "Glades," furnished abundant pasturage for neighboring cattle and brought the Hingham settlers quickly to Cohasset meadows. Thus it happens that the first history of Cohasset is the history of this common pasturage—"Commons," as it was known in the old histories. Although Hingham was early divided up among the pioneers, the marshes were kept undivided for the use of the whole settlement. As a record of 1650 puts it: "It was ordered that any townsman shall have the liberty to put swine to Conohasset without yokes or rings, upon the town's common land."

But the Massachusetts Bay Colony was hard-headed as well as pious, and several naive hints creep into the early records of sharers of the Commons who were shrewdly eyeing the salt land of Cohasset. A real estate transfer of 1640 has this potential flavor: "Half the lot at Conehasset, if any fall by lot, and half the commons which belong to said lot." And again, four years later, Henry Tuttle sold to John Fearing "what right he had to the Division of Conihassett Meadows." The first land to come under the measuring chain and wooden stake of surveyors was about the margin of Little Harbor about the middle of the seventeenth century. After that the rest of the township was not long in being parceled out. One of the curious methods of land division was in the Beechwood district. The apportionment seems to have had the characteristics of ribbon cake. Sections of differing desirability—to meet the demands of justice and natural conditions—were measured out in long strips, a mile long and twenty-five feet wide. Many an old stone wall marking this early grant is still to be seen in the woods. Could anything but the indomitable spirit of those English settlers and the strong feeling for land ownership have built walls of carted stone about enclosures a mile long and twenty-five feet wide?

Having effected a division of land in Cohasset, families soon began to settle away from the mother town of Hingham, and after a prolonged period of government at arm's length, with all its attendant discomforts, the long, bitter struggle resolved itself into Cohasset's final separation from Hingham, and its development from a precinct into an independent township.

While the marshes to the north were the cause of Cohasset being first visited, settled, and made into a township, yet the marshes to the south hold an even more vital historical interest. These southern marshes, bordering Bound Brook and stretching away to Bassing Beach, were visited by haymakers as were those to the north. But these haymakers did not come from the same township, nor were they under the same local government. The obscure little stream which to-day lies between Scituate Harbor and Cohasset marks the line of two conflicting grants—the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In the early days of New England royal grants from the throne or patents from colonial councils in London were deemed necessary before settling in the wilderness. The strong, inherited respect for landed estates must have given such charters their value, as it is hard for us to see now how any one in England could have prevented the pioneers from settling where they pleased. The various patents and grants of the two colonies (indefinite as they seem to us now, as some granted "up to" a hundred acres to each emigrant without defining any boundaries) brought the two colonies face to face at Bound Brook. The result was a dispute over the harvesting of salt hay.

All boundary streams attract to themselves a certain amount of fame—the Rio Grande, the Saint Lawrence, and the Rhine. But surely the little stream of Bound Brook, which was finally taken as the line of division between two colonies of such historical importance as the Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay, is worth more than a superficial attention. The dispute lasted many years and occasioned the appointing of numerous commissioners from both sides. That the salt grass of Bassing Beach should have assumed such importance reveals again the sensitiveness to land values of men who had so recently left England. The settling of the dispute was not referred back to England, but was settled by the colonists themselves.

The author of the "Narrative History of Cohasset" calls this an event of only less historical importance than that of the pact drawn up in the cabin of the Mayflower. He declares that the confederation of states had its inception there, and adds: "The appointment for this joint commission for the settlement of this intercolonial difficulty was the first step of federation that culminated in the Colonial Congress and then blossomed into the United States." We to-day, to whom the salt grass of Cohasset is little more than a fringe about the two harbors, may find it difficult to agree fully with such a sweeping statement, but certainly this spot and boundary line should always be associated with the respect for property which has ennobled the Anglo-Saxon race.

Between the marshes, which were of such high importance in those early days, and the ledges which have been the cause and the scene of so many Cohasset adventures, twists Jerusalem Road, the brilliant beauty of which has been so often—but never too often—remarked. This was the main road from Hingham for many years, and it took full three hours of barbarous jolting in two-wheeled, springless ox carts to make the trip. Even if a man had a horse the journey was cruelly tedious, for there were only a few stretches where the horse could go faster than a walk—and the way was pock-marked with boulders and mudholes. With no stage-coach before 1815, and being off the highway between Plymouth and Boston, it is small wonder that the early Cohasset folk either walked or went by sea to Hingham and thence to Boston.

It has been suggested that the "keeper of young cattle at Coneyhassett," who drove his herd over from Hingham, was moved either by piety or sarcasm to give the trail its present arresting name. However, as the herdsman did not take this route, but the back road through Turkey Meadows, it is more probable that some visitors, who detected a resemblance between this section of the country and the Holy Land, were responsible for the christening of this road and also of the Sea of Galilee—which last has almost dropped into disuse. There does not seem to be any particular suggestion of the land of the Pharaohs and present-day Egypt, but tradition explains that as follows: Old Squire Perce had accumulated a store of grain in case of drought, and when the drought came and the men hurried to him to buy corn, he greeted them with "Well, boys, so you've come down to Egypt to buy corn." Another proof, if one were needed, of the Biblical familiarity of those days.

It is hard to stop writing about Cohasset. There are so many bits of history tucked into every ledge and cranny of her shore. The green in front of the old white meeting-house—one of the prettiest and most perfect meeting-houses on the South Shore—has been pressed by the feet of men assembling for six wars. It makes Cohasset seem venerable, indeed, when one thinks of the march of American history. But to the tawny ledges, tumbling out to sea, these three hundred years are as but a day; for the story of the stones, like the story of the stars, is measured in terms of milliards. To such immemorial keepers of the coast the life of man is a brief tale that is soon told, and fades as swiftly as the fading leaf.



FOOTNOTES:

[1] For much of this chapter I am indebted to my friend Alice C. Hyde.



CHAPTER VII

THE SCITUATE SHORE



Scituate is different: different from Cohasset, with its superbly bold coast and its fashionable folk; different from Hingham, with its air of settled inland dignity. Scituate has a quaintness, a casualness, the indescribable air of a land's-end spot. The fine houses in Scituate are refreshingly free from pretension; the winds that have twisted the trees into Rackham-like grotesques have blown away falsity and formality.

Scituate life has always been along the shore. It is from the shore that coot-shooting used to furnish a livelihood to many a Scituate man, and still lures the huntsmen in the fine fall weather. It is the peculiar formation of the shore which has developed a small, clinker-built boat, and made the town famous for day fishing. It is along the shore that the unique and picturesque mossing industry is still carried on, and along the shore that the well-known colony of literary folk have settled.

Scituate's history is really a fishing history, for as early as 1633 a fishing station was established here, and in course of time the North River, winding twenty miles through green meadows to the sea, was once the scene of more shipbuilding than any other river in New England.

There is nothing more indicative of the Yankees' shrewd practicality than the early settlers' instant appreciation of the financial and economic potentialities of the fishing-trade. The Spaniard sought for gold in the new country, or contented himself with the fluctuating fur trade with its demoralizing slack seasons. But the New Englander promptly applied himself to the mundane pursuit of cod and mackerel. Everybody fished. As John Smith, in his "Description of New England," says: "Young boyes and girles, salvages or any other, be they never such idlers, may turne, carry, and returne fish without shame or either great pain: he is very idle that is past twelve years of age and cannot doe so much: and shee is very old that cannot spin a thread to catch them."

It began when Squanto the Indian showed the amazed colonists how he could tread the eels out of the mud with his feet and catch them with his hands. This was convenient, to be sure, but the colonists did not long content themselves with such primitive methods. They sent to England for cod hooks and lines; mackerel hooks and lines; herring nets and seines; shark hooks, bass nets, squid lines, and eel pots; and in a short time they had established a trade which meant more money than the gold mines of Guiana or Potosi. The modern financier who makes a fortune from the invention of a collar button or the sale of countless penny packages of gum is the lineal descendant of that first thrifty New Englander who did not scorn the humble cod because it was cheap and plentiful (you remember how these same cod "pestered" the ships of Gosnold in 1602), but set to work with the quiet initiative which has distinguished New Englanders ever since, first to catch, then to barter, and finally to sell his wares to all the world. For cheap as all fish was—twopence for a twelve-pound cod, salmon less than a penny a pound, and shad, when it was finally considered fit to eat at all, at two fish for a penny—yet, when all the world is ready to buy and the supply is inexhaustible, tremendous profits are possible. The many fast days of the Roman Catholic Church abroad opened an immense demand, and in a short time quantities of various kinds of fish (Josselyn in 1672 enumerates over two hundred caught in New England waters) were dried and salted and sent to England.

This constant and steadily increasing trade radically affected the whole economic structure and history of New England for two centuries. Ships and all the shipyard industries; the farm, on which fish was used not only as a medium of exchange, but also as a valuable fertilizer; the home, where the many operations of curing and salting were carried on—all of those were developed directly by the growth of this particular trade. Laws were made and continually revised regarding the fisheries and safeguarding their rights in every conceivable fashion; ship carpenters were exempt from military service, and many special exemptions were extended to fishermen under the general statutes.

The oyster is now a dish for the epicure and the lobster for the millionaire. But in the old days when oysters a foot long were not uncommon, and lobsters sometimes grew to six feet, every one had all he wanted, and sometimes more than he wanted, of these delicacies. The stranger in New England may notice how certain customs still prevail, such as the Friday night fish dinner and the Sunday morning fish-cakes; and also that New Englanders as a whole have a rather fastidious taste in regard to the preparation of both salt- and fresh-water products. The food of any region is characteristic of that region, and to travel along the Old Coast Road and not partake of one of the delicious fish dinners, is as absurd as it would be to omit rice from a menu in China or roast beef from an English dinner.

While the fishing trade was highly important in all the South Shore towns, yet it was especially so in Scituate. In 1770 more than thirty vessels, principally for mackerel, were fitted out in this one village, and these vessels not infrequently took a thousand barrels in a season. In winter they were used for Southern coasting, carrying lumber and fish and returning with grain and flour. The reason why fishing was so persistently and exclusively followed in this particular spot is not hard to seek. The sea yielded a far more profitable and ready crop than the land, and, besides, had a jealous way of nibbling away at the land wherever it could. It is estimated that it wastes away from twelve to fourteen inches of Fourth Cliff every year.

But in spite of the sea's readily accessible crop it was natural that the "men of Kent" who settled the town should demand some portion of dry land as well. These men of Kent were not mermen, able to live in and on the water indefinitely, but decidedly gallant fellows, rather more courtly than their neighbors, and more polished than the race which succeeded them. Gilson, Vassal, Hatherly, Cudworth, Tilden, Hoar, Foster, Stedman, and Hinckley had all been accustomed to the elegancies of life in England as their names testify. The first land they used was on the cliffs, for it had already been improved by Indian planting; then the salt marshes, covered with a natural crop of grass, and then the mellow intervales near the river. When the sea was forced to the regretful realization that she could not monopolize the entire attention of her fellows, she was persuaded to yield up some very excellent fertilizer in the way of seaweed. But she still nags away at the cliffs and shore, and proclaims with every flaunting wave and ripple that it is the water, not the land, which makes Scituate what it is.

And, after all, the sea is right. It is along the shore that one sees Scituate most truly. Here the characteristic industry of mossing is still carried on in primitive fashion. The mossers work from dories, gathering with long-handled rakes the seaweed from the rocks and ledges along the shore. They bring it in, a heavy, dark, inert mass, all sleek and dripping, and spread it out to dry in the sun. As it lies there, neatly arranged on beds of smoothest pebbles, the sun bleaches it. One can easily differentiate the different days' haul, for the moss which is just spread out is almost black and that of yesterday is a dark purple. It shimmers from purple into lavender; the lavender into something like rose; and by the time of the final washing and bleaching it lies in fine light white crinkles, almost like wool. It is a pretty sight, and the neatness and dispatch of the mossers make the odd sea-flower gardens attractive patches on the beach. Sometimes a family working together will make as much as a thousand dollars in a season gathering and preparing the moss. One wonders if all the people in the world could eat enough blancmange to consume this salty product, and is relieved to be reminded that the moss is also used for brewing and dyeing.

It is really a pity to see Scituate only from a motor. There is real atmosphere to the place, which is worth breathing, but it takes more time to breathe in an atmosphere than merely to "take the air." Should you decide to ramble about the ancient town you will surely find your way to Scituate Point. The old stone lighthouse, over a century old, is no longer used, and the oil lantern, hung nightly out at the end of the romantic promontory, seems a return to days of long ago. You will also see the place where, in the stirring Revolutionary days, little Abigail and Rebecca Bates, with fife and drum marched up and down, close to the shore and yet hidden from sight, playing so furiously that their "martial music and other noises" scared away the enemy and saved the town from invasion. You will go to Second Cliff where are the summer homes of many literary people, and you will pass through Egypt, catching what glimpse you can of the stables and offices, paddocks and cottages of the immense estate of Dreamwold. And of course you will have pointed out to you the birthplace of Samuel Woodworth, whose sole claim to remembrance is his poem of the "Old Oaken Bucket." The well-sweep is still where he saw it, when, as editor of the New York Mirror, it suddenly flashed before his reminiscent vision, but the old oaken bucket itself has been removed to a museum.

After you have done all these things, you will, if you are wise, forsake Scituate Harbor, which is the old section, and Scituate Beach, which is the newer, summer section, and find the way to the burial ground, which, after the one in Plymouth, is the oldest in the State. Possibly there will be others at the burial ground, for ancestor worshipers are not confined to China, and every year there springs up a new crop of genealogists to kneel before the moss-grown headstones and, with truly admirable patience, decipher names and dates, half obliterated by the finger of time. One does not wonder that their descendants are so eager to trace their connection back to those men of Kent, whose sturdy title rings so bravely down the centuries. To be sure, what is left to trace is very slight in most cases, and quite without any savor of personality. Too often it is merely brief and dry recital of dates and number of progeny, and names of the same. Few have left anything so quaint as the words of Walter Briggs, who settled there in 1651 and from whom Briggs Harbor was named. His will contains this thoughtful provision: "For my wife Francis, one third of my estate during her life, also a gentle horse or mare, and Jemmy the negur shall catch it for her."

The good people who came later (1634) from Plymouth and Boston and took up their difficult colonial life under the pastorate of Mr. Lathrop, seem to have done their best to make "Satuit" (as it was first called, from the Indians, meaning "cold brook") conform as nearly as possible to the other pioneer settlements, even to the point of discovering witches here. But religion and fasting were not able to accomplish what the ubiquitous summer influx has, happily, also failed to effect. Scituate remains different.

Perhaps it was those men of Kent who gave it its indestructibly romantic bias; perhaps it is the jealousy of the ever-encroaching sea. The gray geese flying over the iridescent moss gleaming upon the pebbled beaches, the solitary lantern on the point are all parts of that differentness. And those who love her best are glad that it is so.



CHAPTER VIII

MARSHFIELD, THE HOME OF DANIEL WEBSTER



Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free! Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge, and good out of infinite pain, And sight out of blindness, and purity out of a stain.

It was these mighty marshes—this ample sweep of grass, of sea and sky—this vast earthly and heavenly spaciousness that must forever stand to all New Englanders as a background to the powerful personality who chose it as his own home. Daniel Webster, when his eyes first turned to this infinite reach of largeness, instinctively knew it as the place where his splendid senses would find satisfaction, and his splendid mind would soar into an even loftier freedom. Webster loved Marshfield with an intensity that made it peculiarly his own. Lanier, in language more intricate and tropical, exclaimed of his "dim sweet" woods: "Ye held me fast in your heart, and I held you fast in mine." Webster wielded the vital union between his nature and that of the land not only by profound sentiment, but by a vigorous physical grappling with the soil.

Is it that vivid natures unconsciously seek an environment characteristic of them? Or are they, perhaps, inevitably forced to create such an environment wherever they find themselves? Both facts seem true in this case. This wide world of marsh and sea is not only beautifully expressive of one who plunged himself into a rich communion with the earth, with her full harvests and blooded cattle, with her fruitful brooks and lakes; but it is still, after more than half a century, vibrant with the spirit of the man who dwelt there.

We of another generation—and a generation before whom so many portentous events and figures have passed—find it hard to realize the tremendous magnetism and brilliancy of a man who has been so long dead, or properly to estimate the high historical significance of such a life. The human attribute which is the most immediately impelling in direct intercourse—personality—is the most elusive to preserve. If Webster's claim to remembrance rested solely upon that attribute, he would still be worthy of enduring fame. But his gifts flowered at a spectacular climax of national affairs and won thereby spectacular prominence. That these gifts were to lose something of their pristine repute before the end infuses, from a dramatic point of view, a contrasted and heightened luster to the period of their highest glory.

Let us, casual travelers of a later and more careless day, walk now together over the place which is the indestructible memorial of a great man, and putting aside the measuring-stick of criticism—the sign of small natures—try to live for an hour in the atmosphere which was the breath of life to one who, if he failed greatly, also succeeded greatly, and whose noble achievement it was not only to express, but to vivify a love for the Union which, in its hour of supreme trial, became its triumphant force.

Could we go back—not quite a hundred years—a little off the direct route to Plymouth, on a site overlooking the broad marshes of Green Harbor and the sea, where there now stands a boulder erected in 1914 by the Boston University Law School Association, we would find a comfortable, rambling house, distinguished among its New England neighbors by an easy and delightful hospitality—the kind of hospitality we call "Southern." There are many people in the house, on the veranda and lawns: a hostess of gentle mien and manners; children attractive in the spontaneity of those who continually and happily associate with their elders; several house guests (yonder is Audubon the great naturalist, here is an office-seeker from Boston, and that chap over there, so very much at home, can be no other than Peter Harvey, Webster's fond biographer). Callers there are, also, as is shown by the line of chaises and saddle horses waiting outside, and old Captain Thomas and his wife, from whom the place was bought, and who still retain their original quarters, move in and out like people who consider themselves part of the family. It is a heterogeneous collection, yet by no means an awkward one, and every one is chatting with every one else with great amiability. It is late afternoon: the master of the house has been away all day, and now his guests and his family are glancing in the direction from which he may be expected. For although every one is comfortable and properly entertained, yet the absence of the host creates an inexpressible emptiness; it is as if everything were quiescent—hardly breathing—merely waiting until he comes. Suddenly the atmosphere changes; it is charged with a strong vibrant quality; everything—all eyes, all interest—is instantly focused on the figure which has appeared among them. He is in fisherman's clothes—this newcomer—attired with a brave eye for the picturesque, in soft hat and flowing tie; but there are no fisherman's clothes, no, nor any other cloakings which can conceal the resilient dignity of his bearing, his impressive build, and magnificent, kingly head. Sydney Smith called Webster a cathedral; and surely there must have been something in those enormous, burning eyes, that craglike brow, that smote even the most superficial observer into an admiration which was almost awe.

Many men—perhaps even the majority—whatever their genius in the outer world, in their own houses are either relegated to—or choose—the inconspicuous role of mere masculine appendages. But here we have a man who is superbly the host: he knows and welcomes every guest and caller; he personally supervises the disposal of their baggage and the selection of their chambers; he himself has ordered the dinner—mutton which he has raised, fish which he has caught—and it is being cooked by Monica, the Southern slave whose freedom he purchased for her. He carves at table, priding himself on his dispatch and nicety, and keeps an eye on the needs of every one at the long board. Everything, every one in the house is irresistibly drawn about this magnetic center which dominates by its innate power of personality more than by any deliberate intention. His children worship him; his wife idolizes him; each man and woman on the place regards him with admiring affection. And in such congenial atmosphere he expands, is genial, kindly, delightful. But devoted as he is to his home, his family, and his friends, and charming as he shows himself with them, yet it is not until we see him striding over the farm which he has bought that we see the Daniel Webster who is destined to live most graphically in the memories of those who like to think of great men in those intimate moments which are most personally characteristic of them.

We must rise early in the morning if we would accompany him on his day's round. He himself is up at sunrise, for the sunrise is to him signal to new life. As he once wrote: "Among all our good people not one in a thousand sees the sun rise once a year. They know nothing of the morning. Their idea of it is that part of the day which comes along after a cup of coffee and a beefsteak or a piece of toast. With them morning is not a new issuing of light, a new bursting forth of the sun, a new waking up of all that has life from a sort of temporary death, to behold again the works of God, the heavens and the earth.... The first faint streak of light, the earliest purpling of the east which the lark springs up to greet, and the deeper and deeper coloring into orange and red, till at length the 'glorious sun is seen, regent of the day'—this they never enjoy, for they never see it."

So four o'clock finds Webster up and dressed and bound for the little study in his garden (the only building spared by the fire which destroyed the house in 1878) and beginning his correspondence. If he has no secretary he writes himself, and by time breakfast is announced twenty letters, all franked and sealed, are ready to be posted.

"Now," he says, smiling benignantly down the long breakfast table of family and friends, "my day's work is done—I have nothing to do but fish."

Although this is, indeed, his favorite sport, and there is hardly a brook or lake or pond within a radius of twenty miles which does not bear the charmed legend of having been one of his favorite fishing grounds, he does not spend his days in amusement, like the typical country gentleman. Farming to him, the son of a yeoman, is no mere possession of a fine estate, but the actual participation in ploughing, planting, and haying. His full animal spirits find relief in such labor. We cannot think of any similar example of such prodigious mental and physical energy. Macaulay was a great parliamentary orator, but he was the most conventional of city men; Burke and Chatham had no strength for such strenuousness after their professional toil. But Webster loved to know and to put his hand to every detail of farming and stock-raising. When he first came to Marshfield the soil was thin and sandy. It was he who instituted scientific farming in the region, teaching the natives how to fertilize with kelp which was easily obtainable from the sea, and also with the plentiful small herring or menhaden. He taught them the proper care of the soil, and the rotation of crops. This passionate love of the earth was an integral part of the man. As the force of his mind drew its power, not from mere rhetorical facility, but from fundamental principles, so his magnificent body, like that of the fabled Antaeus, seemed to draw perennial potency from contact with the earth. To acquire land—he owned nearly eighteen hundred acres at the time of his death—and to cultivate it to the highest possible degree of productiveness was his intense delight. The farm which he purchased from Captain Thomas grew to an estate of two or three dozen buildings, outhouses, tenant houses, a dairyman's cottage, fisherman's house, agricultural offices, and several large barns. We can imagine that he shows us all of these things—explaining every detail with enthusiasm and accuracy, occasionally digressing upon the habits of birds or fish, the influence of tides and currents, the changes of sky and wind. All natural laws are fascinating to him—inspiring his imagination and uplifting his spirit—and it is these things, never politics or business, which he discusses in his hours of freedom. He himself supervises the planting and harvesting and slaughtering here and on his other farm at Franklin—the family homestead—even when obliged to be absent, or even when temporarily residing in Washington and hard pressed with the cares of his office as Secretary of State.

Those painters who include a parrot in the portrait of some fine frivolous lady do so to heighten their interpretation of character. We all betray our natures, by the creatures we instinctively gather about us. One might know that Jefferson at Monticello would select high-bred saddle horses as his companions; that Cardinal Richelieu would find no pet so soothing, so alluring, as a soft-stepping cat; that Charles I would select the long-haired spaniel. So it is entirely in the picture that of all the beasts brought under human yoke, that great oxen, slow, solemn, strong, would appeal to the man whose searching eyes were never at rest except when they swept a wide horizon; whose mind found its deepest satisfaction in noble languages, the giant monuments of literature and art, and whose soul best stretched its wings beside the limitless sea and under the limitless sky. Webster was fond of all animal life; he felt himself part of its free movement. Guinea hens, peacocks, ducks, flocks of tamed wild geese, dogs, horses—these were all part of the Marshfield place, but there was within the breast of the owner a special responsiveness to great herds of cattle, and especially fine oxen, the embodiment of massive power. So fond was he of these favorite beasts of his, that often on his arrival home he would fling his bag into the hall without even entering the house, and hasten to the barn to see that they were properly tied up for the night. As he once said to his little son, as they both stood by the stalls and he was feeding the oxen with ears of corn from an unhusked pile lying on the barn floor: "I would rather be here than in the Senate," adding, with his famous smile, "I think it is better company." So we may be sure as we walk in our retrospect about the farm with him—he never speaks of it as an "estate" but always as a farm—he will linger longest where the Devon oxen, the Alderneys, Herefordshire, and Ayrshire are grazing, and that the eyes which Carlyle likened to anthracite furnaces will glow and soften. Twenty years from now he will gaze out upon his oxen once again from the window before which he has asked to be carried, as he lies waiting for death. Weariness, disease, and disappointment have weakened the elasticity of his spirit, and as they pass—his beloved oxen, slowly, solemnly—what procession of the years passes with them! Years of full living, of generous living; of deep emotions; of glory; years of ambition; of bereavement; of grief. It is all to pass—these happy days at Marshfield; the wife he so fondly cared for; the children he so deeply cherished. Sycophants are to fill, in a measure, the place of friends, the money which now flows in so freely is to entangle and ensnare him; the lofty aspiration which now inspires him is to degenerate into a presidential ambition which will eat into his soul. But to-day let us, as long as we may, see him as he is in the height of his powers. Let us walk with him under the trees which he planted. Those large elms, gracefully silhouetted against the house, were placed there with his own hands at the birth of his son Edward and his daughter Julia, and he always refers to them gently as "brother" and "sister." To plant a tree to mark an event was one of his picturesque customs—an unconscious desire, perhaps, to project himself into the future. I am quite sure, as we accompany him, he will expatiate on the improvement in the soil which he has effected; that he will point out eagerly not only the domestic but the wild animals about the place; and that he will stand for a few moments on the high bluff overlooking the sea and the marshes and let the wind blow through his dark hair. He is carefully dressed—he always dresses to fit the occasion—and to-day, as he stands in his long boots reaching to the knee and adorned with a tassel, his bell-crowned beaver hat in his hand, and in his tight pantaloons and well-cut coat—a magnificent specimen of virile manhood—the words of Lanier, although written at a later date, and about marshes far more lush than these New England ones, beat upon our ears:



"Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? Somehow my soul seems suddenly free From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin, By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn."

On the way back he will show us the place where three of his favorite horses are buried, for he does not sell the old horses who have done him good service, but has them buried "with the honors of war"—that is, standing upright, with their halters and shoes on. Above one of them he has placed the epitaph:

"Siste Viator! Viator te major his sistit."

I do not know if, as we return to the house where already a fresh group of visitors has arrived, he will pause by a corner of the yard set off by an iron fence. He has chosen this spot as the place where he shall lie, and here, in time, are to repose under the wide and simple vault of sky the wife and children whose going before is to bring such desolation. It is a place supremely fitting for that ample spirit which knew for its own the nobility of large spaces, and the grandeur of repose.

The life of Daniel Webster is one of the most dramatic and touching of any of our great men. He was an orator of such solid thought and chaste eloquence that even now, without the advantage of the marvelously rich and flexible voice and the commanding presence that made each word burn like a fire, even without this incalculable personal interpretation, his speeches remain as a permanent part of our literature, and will so long as English oratory is read. He was a brilliant lawyer—the foremost of his day—and his statesmanship was of equal rank. In private life he was a peculiarly devoted and tender son, husband, father, and friend. That he should have become saddened by domestic losses and somewhat vitiated by flattery were, perhaps, inevitable. He was bitterly condemned—more bitterly by his contemporaries than by those who now study his words and work—for lowering his high standard in regard to slavery. It is impossible to refute the accusation, at the end of his life, of a carelessness approaching unscrupulousness in money matters. His personal failings, which were those of a man of exceptional vitality, have been heavily—too heavily—emphasized. He ate and drank and spent money lavishly; he had a fine library; he loved handsome plate and good service and good living. He was generous; he was kind. That he was susceptible to adulation and, after the death of his first wife, drifted into associations less admirable than those of his earlier years, are the dark threads of a woof underrunning a majestic warp. He adored his country with a fervor that savors of the heroic, and when he said, "There are no Alleghanies in my politics," he spoke the truth. The intense passion for the soil which animated him at Marshfield was only a fragment of that higher passion for his country—feeling never tainted by sectionalism or local prejudice. It was this profound love for the Union, coupled with his surpassing gift of eloquence in expressing that love and inspiring it in all who heard him, that distinguishes him for all time.

There are other memorable things about Marshfield. Governor Edward Winslow, who was sent to England to represent the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, and whose son Josiah was the first native Governor of the Colony, may both be called Marshfield men. Peregrine White, the first white child born in this country, lies in the Winslow Burying Ground. One of the most singular changes on our coast occurred in this vicinity when in one night the "Portland Breeze" closed up the mouth of the South River and four miles up the beach opened up the mouth of the North River, making an entrance three quarters of a mile wide between Third and Fourth Cliff.

These and many other men and events of Marshfield are properly given a place in the history of New England, but the special glory of this spot will always be that Daniel Webster chose to live, chose to die, and chose to be buried under the vast vault of her skyey spaces, within the sound of her eternal sea.



CHAPTER IX

DUXBURY HOMES



There are certain places whose happy fortune seems to be that they are always specially loved and specially sought by the children of men. From that memorable date in 1630 when a little group of the Plymouth colonists asked permission to locate across the bay at "Duxberie" until now, when the summer colony alone has far surpassed that of the original settlers, this section of the coast—with its lovely six-mile beach, its high bluffs, and its pleasant hills and pasture lands, upon which are found quite a southern flora, unique in this northern latitude—has been thoroughly frequented and enjoyed.

There is no more graphic index to the caliber of a people than the houses which they build, and the first house above all others which we must associate with this spot is the Standish cottage, built at the foot of Captain's Hill by Alexander Standish, the son of Myles, partly from materials from his father's house, which was burned down, but whose cellar is still visible. This long, low, gambrel-roofed structure, with a broad chimney showing the date of 1666, was a long way ahead of the first log cabins erected by the Pilgrims—farther than most of us realize, accustomed as we are to glass instead of oiled paper in windows; to shingles, and not thatch for roofs. It is fitting that this ancient and charming dwelling should be associated with one of the most romantic, most striking, names in the Plymouth Colony. There are few more picturesque personalities in our early history than Myles Standish. Small in stature, fiery in spirit, a terror to the Indians, and a strong arm to the Pilgrims, there is no doubt that his determination to live in Duxbury—which he named for Duxborough Hall, his ancestral home in Lancashire—went far in obtaining for it a separate incorporation and a separate church. This was the first definite offshoot from the Plymouth Colony, and was accompanied by the usual maternal fears. While he could not forbid them going to Duxbury to settle, yet, when they asked for a separate incorporation and church, Bradford granted it most unwillingly. He voiced the general sentiment when he wrote that such a separation presaged the ruin of the church "& will provoke y^e Lord's displeasure against them."

However, such unkind predictions in no wise bothered the sturdy little group who moved over to the new location, needing room for their cattle and their gardens, and most of all a sense of freedom from the restrictions of the mother colony. The son of Elder Brewster went, and in time the Elder himself, and so did John Alden and his wife Priscilla, whose courtship has been so well told by Longfellow that it needs no further embellishing here. On the grassy knoll where John and Priscilla built their home in 1631, their grandson built the cottage which now stands—the property of the Alden Kindred Association. John Alden seems to have been an attractive young fellow—it is easy to see why Priscilla Mullins preferred him to the swart, truculent widower—but from our point of view John Alden's chief claim to fame is that he was a friend of Myles Standish.

Let us, as we pay our respects to Duxbury, pause for a moment and recall some of the courageous adventures, some of the brave traits and some of the tender ones, which make up our memory of this doughty military commander. In the first place, we must remember that he was never a member of the church of the Pilgrims: there is even a question if he were not—like the rest of his family in Lancashire—a Roman Catholic; and this immediately places him in a position of peculiar distinction. From the first his mission was not along ecclesiastical lines, but along military and civil ones. The early histories are full of his intrepid deeds: there was never an expedition too dangerous or too difficult to daunt him. He would attack with the utmost daring the hardest or the humblest task. He was absolutely loyal to the interest of the Colony, and during that first dreadful winter when he was among the very few who were not stricken with sickness, he tended the others day and night, "unceasing in his loving care." As in many audacious characters this sweeter side of his nature does not seem to have been fully appreciated by his contemporaries, and we have the letter in which Robinson, that "most learned, polished and modest spirit," writes to Bradford, and warns him to have care about Standish. He loves him right well, and is persuaded that God has given him to them in mercy and for much good, if he is used aright; but he fears that there may be wanting in him "that tenderness of the life of man (made after God's image) which is meet." This warning doubtless flattered Standish, but Robinson's later criticism of his methods at Weymouth hurt the little captain cruelly. He seems to have cherished an intense affection for the Leyden pastor, such as valorous natures often feel for meditative ones, and that Robinson died before he—Standish—could justify himself was a deep grief to the soldier to whom mere physical hardships were as nothing. We do not know a great deal about this relationship between the two men: in this as in so many cases the intimate stories of these men and women, "also their love, and their hatred, and their envy is now perished." But we do know that thirty years later when the gallant captain lay dying he wrote in his will: "I give three pounds to Mercy Robinson, whom I tenderly love for her grandfather's sake." Surely one feels the touching eloquence of this brief sentence the fitting close of a life not only heroic in action, but deeply sensitive in sentiment.

He died on his farm in Duxbury in 1656 when he was seventy-three, and the Myles Standish Monument on Captain's Hill, three hundred and ten feet above the bay, is no more conspicuous than his knightly and tender life among the people he elected to serve. His two wives, and also Priscilla and John Alden, for whom he entertained such lively love and equally lively fury, all are buried here—the Captain's last home fittingly marked by four cannon and a sturdy boulder.

Not only for Standish and Alden is Duxbury famous. The beloved William Brewster himself moved to this new settlement, and up to a few years ago the traces of the whitewood trees which gave the name of "Eagle's Nest" to his house could be distinguished. One son—Love—lived with the venerable elder, who was a widower, and his other son Jonathan owned the neighboring farm. In the sight of the Plymouth Colony—their first home in the new land—the three men often worked together, cutting trees and planting.

Others of the original Mayflower company came too, leaving traces of themselves in such names as Blackfriars Brook, Billingsgate, and Houndsditch—names which they brought from Old England.

The homes which these pioneers so laboriously and so lovingly wrought—what were they? How did they compare with the modern home and household? In Mr. Sheldon's "History of Deerfield" we find such a charming and vivid picture of home life in the early days—and one that applies with equal accuracy to Duxbury—that we cannot do better than copy it here:

"The ample kitchen was the center of the family life, social and industrial. Here around the rough table, seated on rude stools or benches, all partook of the plain and sometimes stinted fare. A glance at the family gathered here after nightfall on a winter's day may prove of interest.

"After a supper of bean porridge or hasty pudding and milk of which all partake in common from a great pewter basin, or wooden bowl, with spoons of wood, horn or pewter; after a reverent reading of the Bible, and fervent supplications to the Most High for prayer and guidance; after the watch was set on the tall mount, and the vigilant sentinel began pacing his lonely beat, the shutters were closed and barred, and with a sense of security the occupations of the long winter evening began. Here was a picture of industry enjoined alike by the law of the land and the stern necessities of the settlers. All were busy. Idleness was a crime. On the settle, or a low armchair, in the most sheltered nook, sat the revered grandam—as a term of endearment called granny—in red woolen gown, and white linen cap, her gray hair and wrinkled face reflecting the bright firelight, the long stocking growing under her busy needles, while she watched the youngling of the flock in the cradle by her side. The good wife, in linsey-woolsey short-gown and red petticoat steps lightly back and forth in calf pumps beside the great wheel, or poising gracefully on the right foot, the left hand extended with the roll or bat, while with a wheel finger in the other, she gives the wheel a few swift turns for a final twist to the long-drawn thread of wool or tow. The continuous buzz of the flax wheels, harmonizing with the spasmodic hum of the big wheel, shows that the girls are preparing a stock of linen against their wedding day. Less active and more fitful rattled the quill wheel, where the younger children are filling quills for the morrow's weaving.

"Craftsmen are still scarce, and the yeoman must depend largely on his own skill and resources. The grandsire, and the goodman, his son, in blue woolen frocks, buckskin breeches, long stockings, and clouted brogans with pewter buckles, and the older boys in shirts of brown tow, waistcoat and breeches of butternut-colored woolen homespun, surrounded by piles of white hickory shavings, are whittling out with keen Barlow jack-knives implements for home use: ox-bows and bow-pins, axe-helves, rakestales, forkstales, handles for spades and billhooks, wooden shovels, flail staff and swingle, swingling knives, or pokes and hog yokes for unruly cattle and swine. The more ingenious, perhaps, are fashioning buckets or powdering tubs, or weaving skeps, baskets or snowshoes. Some, it may be, sit astride the wooden shovel, shelling corn on its iron-shod edge, while others are pounding it into samp or hoiminy in the great wooden mortar.

"There are no lamps or candles, but the red light from the burning pine knots on the hearth glows over all, repeating, in fantastic pantomime on the brown walls and closed shutters, the varied activities around it. These are occasionally brought into higher relief by the white flashes, as the boys throw handfuls of hickory shavings onto the forestick, or punch the back log with the long iron peel, while wishing they had as 'many shillings as sparks go up the chimney.' Then, the smoke-stained joists and boards of the ceiling with the twisted rings of pumpkin strings or crimson peppers and festoons of apple, drying on poles hung beneath; the men's hats, the crook-necked squashes, the skeins of thread and yarn hanging in bunches on the wainscot; the sheen of the pewter plates and basins, standing in rows on the shelves of the dresser; the trusty firelock with powder horn, bandolier, and bullet pouch, hanging on the summertree, and the bright brass warming-pan behind the bedroom door—all stand revealed more clearly for an instant, showing the provident care for the comfort and safety of the household. Dimly seen in the corners of the room are baskets in which are packed hands of flax from the barn, where, under the flaxbrake, the swingling knives and the coarse hackle, the shives and swingling tow have been removed by the men; to-morrow the more deft manipulations of the women will prepare these bunches of fiber for the little wheel, and granny will card the tow into bats, to be spun into tow yarn on the big wheel. All quaff the sparkling cider or foaming beer from the briskly circulating pewter mug, which the last out of bed in the morning must replenish from the barrel in the cellar."

* * * * *

One notices the frequent reference to beer in these old chronicles. The tea, over which the colonists were to take such a dramatic stand in a hundred years, had not yet been introduced into England, and neither had coffee. Forks had not yet made their appearance. In this admirable picture Mr. Sheldon does not mention one of the evening industries which was peculiarly characteristic of the Plymouth Colony. This was the making of clapboards, which with sassafras and beaver skins, constituted for many years the principal cargo sent back to England from the Colony. Another point—the size of the families. The mother of Governor William Phips had twenty-one sons and five daughters, and the Reverend John Sherman had six children by his first wife and twenty by his second. These were not uncommon figures in the early life of New England; and with so many numbers within itself the home life was a center for a very complete and variegated industrial life. Surely it is a long cry from these kitchen fireplaces—so large that often a horse had to be driven into the kitchen dragging the huge back log—these immense families, to the kitchenette and one-child family of to-day!

This, then, was the old Duxbury: the Duxbury of long, cold winters, privations, and austerity. Down by the shore to-day is the new Duxbury—a Duxbury of automobiles, of business men's trains, of gay society at Powder Point, where in the winter is the well-known boys' school—a Duxbury of summer cottages, white and green along the shore, green and brown under the pines. Of these summer homes many are new: the Wright estate is one of the finest on the South Shore, and the pleasant, spacious dwelling distinguished by its handsome hedge of English privet formerly belonged to Fanny Davenport, the actress. Others are old houses, very tastefully, almost affectionately remodeled by those for whom the things of the past have a special lure. These remodeled cottages are, perhaps, the prettiest of all. Those very ancient landmarks, sagging into pathetic disrepair, present a sorrowful, albeit an artistic, silhouette against the sky. But these "new-old" cottages, with ruffled muslin curtains at the small-paned, antique windows, brave with a shining knocker on the green-painted front door, and gay with old-fashioned gardens to the side or in the rear—these are a delight to all, and an honor to both past and present.

Surely the fair town of Duxbury, which so smilingly enticed the Pilgrims across the bay to enjoy her sunny beach and rolling pasture lands, must be happy to-day as she was then to feel her ground so deeply tilled, and still to be so daintily adorned with homes and gardens and with laughing life.



CHAPTER X

KINGSTON AND ITS MANUSCRIPTS



On a charming eminence at two crossroads, delicately dappled by fine elm shade and clasped by an antique grapevine, rests the old Bradford house. From the main road half a mile away you will see only the slanting roof, half concealed by rolling pasture land, but if you will trouble to turn off from the main road, and if you will not be daunted by the unsavoriness of the immediate neighborhood, you will find it quite worth your while. The house presents only a casual side to the street—one fancies it does not take much interest in its upstart neighbors—but imagination makes us believe that it regards with brooding tenderness the lovely tidal river which winds away through the marshes to the sea. Interesting as the house is for its architectural features and for its delightful location—despite the nearness of the passing train—yet it is on neither of these points that its fame rests.

In this house, built in 1674, and once belonging to Major John Bradford, the grandson of the Governor, was preserved for many years one of the most valuable American manuscripts in existence, and one fated to the most romantic adventures in the annals of Lost and Found.

Bradford's "History of the Plymouth Plantation" is our sole source of authentic information for the period 1606-46. It is the basis for all historical study of the early life of the Pilgrims in this country, and when we look at the quiet roof of the Bradford house to-day and realize how narrowly the papers—for they remained in manuscript form for two hundred years—escaped being lost forever, our minds travel again over the often told story.

The manuscript, penned in Governor Bradford's fine old hand, in a folio with a parchment back, and with some childish scribblings by little Mercy Bradford on the cover, passed at the Governor's death to his son, and at his death to his son. It reposed in the old house at which we are now looking until 1728, doubtless regarded as something valuable, but not in the least appreciated at its full and peculiar worth. When Major John Bradford lent it to the Reverend Thomas Prince to assist him in his "Chronological History of New England," he was merely doing what he had done many times before. In these days of burglar-proof safes and fire protection it makes us shiver to think of this priceless holograph passed from hand to hand in such a casual manner. But it seems to have escaped any mishap under Dr. Prince, who deposited it eventually in the library of the Old South Church. Here it remained for half a century, still in manuscript form and frequently referred to by scholars. Thomas Hutchinson used it in compiling his "History of Massachusetts Bay," and Mather used it also. At the time of the Revolution the Old South was looted, and this document (along with many others) disappeared absolutely. No trace whatever could be found of it: the most exhaustive search was in vain, and scholars and historians mourned for a loss that was irreparable. And then, after half a century, after the search had been entirely abandoned, it was discovered, quite by chance, by one who fortunately knew its value, tucked into the Library of Fulham Palace in London. After due rejoicing on the American side and due deliberation on the English side of the water, it was very properly and very politely returned to this country in 1897. Now it rests after its career of infinite hazard, in a case in the Boston State House, elaborately protected from fire and theft, from any accidental or premeditated harm, and Kingston must content itself with a copy in Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth.

Kingston's history commences with a manuscript and continues in the same form. If you would know the legends, the traditions, the events which mark this ancient town, you will have to turn to records, diaries, memoranda, memorial addresses and sermons, many of them never published.

It is rather odd that this serene old place, discovered only two or three days after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, is so devoid of a printed career. As soon as the Pilgrims had explored the spot, they put themselves on record as having "a great liking to plant in it" instead of in Plymouth. But they decided against it because it lay too far from their fishing and was "so encompassed with woods," that they feared danger from the savages. It was very soon settled, however, and remained as the north end of Plymouth for a hundred and six years, until 1726. Governor Bradford writes, in regard to its colonization:

"Y^e people of y^e plantation begane to grow in their outward estate ... and as their stocks increased and y^e increase vendible, ther was no longer any holding them togeather, but now they must of necessitoe goe to their great lots: they could not otherwise keep catle; and having oxen grown they must have land for plowing and tillage. And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deal of ground to keep them: all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over y^e bay, quickly, and y^e towne, in which they had lived compactly till now [1632] was left very thine, and in a short time almost desolate."

Governor Bradford seems to deplore this moving out of Plymouth, but as a matter of fact he was among the first to go, and his estate on Jones River comprised such a goodly portion of what is now Kingston that when he died he was the richest man in the Colony! A boulder marks the place which he, with that unerring eye for a fine view which distinguished the early settlers, chose for his estate. From here one catches a glimpse of water, open fields, trees, the Myles Standish Monument to the left, the sound of the passing automobiles behind. The distant smokestacks would be unfamiliar to Governor Bradford's eye, but the fragrant Kingston air which permeates it all would greet him as sweetly to-day as it did three hundred years ago.

Governor Bradford, who was Governor for thirty-seven years, was a man of remarkable erudition. Cotton Mather says of him: "The Dutch tongue was become almost as vernacular to him as the English; the French tongue he could also manage; the Latin and the Greek he had mastered; but the Hebrew he most of all studied." Therefore if the curious spelling of his history strikes us as unscholarly, we must remember that at that time there was no fixed standard for English orthography. Queen Elizabeth employed seven different spellings for the word "sovereign" and Leicester rendered his own name in eight different ways. It was by no means a mark of illiteracy to spell not only unlike your neighbor, but unlike yourself on the line previous.

But it is more than quaint diction and fantastic spelling which fascinates us as we turn over, not only the leaves of Bradford's famous history, but the pile of fading records of various kinds of this once prosperous shipbuilding town. The records of Kingston are valuable, not only because they tell the tale of this particular spot, but because they are delightfully typical of all the South Shore towns. The yellowing diaries mention crude offenses, crude chastisements; give scraps of genealogies as broken as the families themselves are now broken and scattered; lament over one daughter of the Puritans who took the veil in a Roman Catholic convent; sternly relate, in Rabelaisian frankness, dark sins, punished with mediaeval justice. In fact, these righteous early colonists seemed to find a genuine satisfaction in devising punishments, and in putting them into practice. We read that the stocks (also called "bilbaos" because they were formerly manufactured in Bilbao, in Spain) were first occupied by the man who had made them, as the court decided that his charge for the work was excessive! There were wooden cages in which criminals were confined and exposed to public view; whipping-posts; cleft sticks for profane tongues. Drunkenness was punished by disfranchisement; the blasphemer and the heretics were branded with a hot iron.

Let us look at some of these old records, not all of them as ferocious as this, but interesting for the minutiae which they preserve and which makes it possible for us to reconstruct something of that atmosphere of the past. It was ninety-six years after the settlement at Plymouth that Kingston made its first request for a separation. It was not granted for almost a decade, but from then on the ecclesiastical records furnish us with a great deal of intimate and chatty material. For instance, we learn in 1719 that Isaac Holmes was to have "20 shillings for sweeping, opening and shutting of the doors and casements of the meeting house for 1 year," which throws some light upon sextons' salaries!

The minute directions as to the placing of the pews in the meeting-house (1720) contain a pungent element of personality. Major John Bradford is "next to the pulpit stairs"; Elisha Bradford on the left "as you go in"; Benjamin Eaton's place is "between minister's stairs and west door"; while Peter West is ingloriously, and for what reason we know not, relegated to the gallery "in the front, next to the stairs, behind the women."

It is significant to note (1728) that seats are built at each end above the galleries for the Indians and negroes.

Fish laws, rewards for killing wild cats, bickerings with the minister, and brief mention of the death of many women at an early age—after having given birth to an incredible number of children—fill up pages and pages.

The eye rests upon a resolution passed (1771) to "allow Benjamin Cook the sum of 8 shillings for a coffin, and liquor at the funeral of James Howland." They might not believe in prayers for the dead in those days, but there was evidently no reason why the living should not receive some cheer!

How is this for the minister's salary? The Reverend Doctor Willis (1780) is to receive eighty pounds a year, to be paid partly in Indian corn, rye, pork, and beef. Ten cords of wood yearly are allowed him "until he have a family, then twenty cords, are to be allowed, the said wood to be delivered at his door."

Mr. Levi Bradford agrees to make the whipping-post and stocks for nine shillings, if the town will find the iron (1790).

The wage paid for a day's labor on the highway (1791) was as follows: For a day's labor by a man, 2 shillings, 8 pence; for a yoke of oxen, 2 shillings; for a horse, 1 shilling, 6 pence; for a cart, 1 shilling, 4 pence. One notes the prices are for an eight-hour day.

However, the high cost of living began to make itself felt even then. How else account for the statement (1796) that Mr. Parris, the schoolmaster, has been allowed fifty shillings in addition to his salary "considering the increase in the price of provisions"?

There seems to have been a great celebration on the occasion of raising the second meetinghouse in Kingston (1798). One old account reads: "Booths were erected on the field opposite, and all kinds of liquor and refreshment were sold freely." After the frame was up a procession was formed of those who were employed in the raising, consisting of carpenters, sailors, blacksmiths, etc., each taking some implement of his trade such as axes, rules, squares, tackles and ropes. They walked to the Great Bridge and back to the temporary building that had been used for worship (the Quail Trap) while the new one was being planned. Here they all had punch and an "hour or so of jollity."

If the women's lives were conspicuously short, it was not so with the men. Ebenezer Cobb, who died in 1801 in the one hundred and eighth year of his age, had lived in no less than three centuries, having seen six years in the seventeenth, the whole of the eighteenth, and a year of the nineteenth.

The minister's tax is separated from the other town taxes in 1812—thus even in this little village is reflected the great movement of separation of Church and State. In 1851 when we read of a Unitarian church being built we realize that the Puritan regime is over in New England.

Thus with the assistance of the Pelegs and Hezekiahs, the Zadocks, Ichabods, and Zenases—names which for some absurd and irreverent reason suggest a picture puzzle—we manage to piece together scraps of the Kingston of long ago.

We must confess to some relief at the inevitable conclusion that such study brings—namely, that the early settlers were not the unblemished prigs and paragons tradition has so fondly branded them. They seem to have been human enough—erring enough, if we take these records penned by themselves. However, for any such iconoclastic observation it is reassuring to have the judgment of so careful a historian as Charles Francis Adams. He says:

"That the earlier generations of Massachusetts were either more law-abiding or more self-restrained than the later is a proposition which accords neither with tradition nor with the reason of things. The habits of those days were simpler than those of the present: they were also essentially grosser...."

He then gives a dozen pages or so of hitherto unpublished church records, gathered from as many typical Massachusetts towns, which throw an undeniable and unflattering light on the social habits of that early period. As explicit and public confession before the church congregation was enforced, these church records contain startlingly graphic statements of drunkenness, blasphemy, stealing, and immorality in all its various phases.

There are countless church records which duplicate this one of the ordination of a Massachusetts pastor in 1729: "6 Barrels and a half of Cyder, 28 gallons of wine, 2 gallons of Brandy, and 4 of rum, loaf sugar, lime juice and pipes," all, presumably, consumed at the time and on the spot of the ordination. Even the most pessimistic must admit that long before our prohibition era we had traveled far beyond such practices.

The immorality seems to have been the natural reaction from morbid spiritual excitement induced by religious revivals. Poor Governor Bradford never grasped this, and we find him lamenting (1642): "Marvilous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickedness did grow and break forth here in a land where the same was much witnessed against, and so narrowly looked on and severely punished when it was known."

We hear the same plaint from Jonathan Edwards a century later.

It is well to honor the Pilgrims for their many stanch and admirable qualities, but it is only fair to recall that the morbidity of their religion made them less healthy-minded than we, and that many of their practices, such as the well-recognized custom of "bundling," were indications of a people holding far lower moral standards than ours.

The old sermons, diaries, biographies, and records lie on dusty shelves now, and few pause to read them, and in Kingston no one yet has gathered them into a local history. There are other records traced, not in sand, but on the soil that may also be read by any who pass. Some remnants of the trenches and terraces dug by the quota of Arcadian refugees who fell to Kingston's share after the pathetic flight from Nova Scotia may still be seen—claimed by some to be the first irrigation attempt in America.

The old "Massachusetts Payth" which follows the road more or less closely beyond Kingston is traced with difficulty and uncertainty in Kingston itself, but there is another highway as clear to-day as it was three hundred years ago. And this is the lovely tidal river, named after the master of the Mayflower, up which used to come and go not only many ships of commerce, but, in the evenings after life had become less austere, boatloads of merry-makers from Plymouth and Duxbury to attend the balls given at what was originally the King's Town.

It has carried much traffic in its day, that river which now winds so gracefully down to the sea, and which we see so well from the yard of the old Bradford house. Down it floated the vessels made by Kingston men, and out of it was dug much bog iron for the use of Washington's artillery.

Monk's Hill—which the old records call Mont's Hill Chase, a name supposed to have been applied to a hunt in England—could tell a story too, if one had ears to hear. The highest land in Kingston, during the Revolution it was one of the points where a beacon fire was lighted to alarm the town in case of invasion by the enemy.

Kingston is not without history, although its manuscripts lie long untouched upon library shelves, and its historic soil is tramped over by unheeding feet. That the famous manuscript which was its greatest historical contribution has been taken away from it, is no loss in the truest sense of the word, for this monumental work, which belongs to no one place, but to the country as a whole, is properly preserved at the State House.