Part 7

Such was the building of Newburyport, and such is the romance of memory that comes in to her on every wind of the sea to-day, though the ships have sailed away never to return and even the foundations of the old ship yards are hard to find. The wealth and dignity of the old sea-faring days remain. The custom house bravely hoists its flag each morning and waits in gray silence for the cargoes that rarely come. Old age comes to it, though, and to climb the worn stairs to its top is to walk with the men of other years, hearing their footfalls in the echo of your own and seeing them vanish, phantoms of gray dust, through dark doorways into the forgotten past. Piled in the corners as they pass you see the outworn flags of other years, as if draping huddled heaps of the achievements of these phantom shipmasters. Perhaps in some dark corner lies another story like that of the Scarlet Letter.

Along the street on which the custom house faces passed the sea-faring traffic of the day, and the buildings suggest Wapping Old Stairs or some such quaint corner of old London near the Thames. The smell of the sea lingers round all corners, and in the little shop windows are crowded for sale pictures of ships and fragments of ship chandlery and curios from ports once a half-year’s sail away; wares that one fancies have waited a century for customers. The street itself loves the sea so well that it is always trying to reach it, swerving toward the water line often and making detours when blocked, and always sending down little messenger side streets to bring it news from the very shore, thus winding its way always eastward till it gets an unobstructed view of the harbor entrance across Joppa flats and is no doubt content, strolling there along the very margin with a blear eye turned seaward for the ships that come no more.

In the debris the centuries have dropped along this once busy street the quaint and curious mingling of useless utilities and unvalued treasures, one is reminded of the quaint and curious characters such surroundings seem to evolve. Among such Dickens finds an Old Curiosity Shop and its keeper and makes them immortal. Yet it is not often that the queer character himself goes into print and leaves his name and pokes his personality into the dusty corners of literary fame, to be picked out and wondered at centuries after. Newburyport had one such, the story of whose amazing eccentricities still lasts, linked with the dignified reputation of the old seaport. These stories in time may be forgotten, though they have lasted more than a century, but his astounding book, “Pickles for the Knowing Ones,” bids fair to last far longer, as long in fact as libraries collect and hold absurdities of print as well as literature. It is one of the ironies of fame that Newburyport, which can rightfully boast of being the town in which William Lloyd Garrison established his Free Press and wrote his anti-slavery broadsides, the town where Whittier’s first poem was published, where Whitefield preached and John Pierpont wrote the best of his patriotic verse, where Richard Hildreth began his work as a historian, where many another author of good repute was born, or lived, or died, where Harriet Prescott Spofford still lives and adds to her literary fame, should recall to the minds of many of us only the name of the preposterous “Lord” Timothy Dexter. After all, perhaps it is style alone which survives. Dexter’s style was like nothing which ever went before or has yet come after, in print. It takes an inventive mind to find any meaning at all in what he wrote, sense being as scarce as punctuation, of which there was none. Yet the trail of Lord Timothy Dexter is still eagerly followed through Newburyport annals by people who forget that John Pierpont ever lived, and we all gloat over the punctuation marks added in a solid page at the end of his second edition, to be used as the reader’s fancy dictates.

Lord Dexter lived in the solid, dignified upper portion of the town. His mind and character belonged in the queer junk in the little shop windows down near the water front. I can fancy John Pierpont drawing the clear, denunciatory fire of his verses from the keen sea winds that blow on the top of the ridge where High Street is lined with the noble, square, stately old houses of the one-time magnates of the place. It is not a far cry from the shacks of Joppa and the clutter shops of the lower regions to this atmosphere of worth and dignity along the higher levels of Newburyport. I have an idea that more than one youth who climbed first to reef topsails later climbed to a master’s berth and an owner’s financial security, his abode climbing with him from the jumbled, characterless houses of the lower regions to one of these mansions in the skies: It may be that there is equal opportunity now, but it is not so easy to see. Sea-faring and shipbuilding could not make men, but it did train them to wide outlooks and large experience in self-control and self-reliance; larger, I believe, than do the shoe factories and other industries that have taken their places in this town that the sea once made its own.

Newburyport does not grow in population, but it holds its own with a peaceful dignity and a quiet beauty that seem to belong to it as much as do its surrounding marshes. Leisure, peace, and an assured prosperity seem to mark the one as well as the other, whether ships come or go. There is little bustle, even at its busiest points, and you have but to go a little way from these to find as sweet a country as any part of New England has to offer. Passing up the river bank where the marsh grasses grow over the rotting stocks of the old shipyards, you find the hills coming down to meet the marshes and mingling with them in friendly converse. The town drops behind you, and gentle hillocks offer kindly asylum on the placid levels of the river bank, beauty spots full of half-wild life.

Here and there on these is an apple tree that has strolled down from suburban orchards as if to view the beauty of the river, and liked the place so well that it stayed, glad to escape the humdrum of ordered life, sending out wild shoots at will and producing fruit that has a half-wild vigor of flavor that puts the orchard apples to shame for their insipidity. They riot in lawless growth, these runaway trees, and welcome their boon companions, crows and jays, spreading an autumnal feast for their delectation and holding the fragments far into the winter that none may go away from a visit hungry. The pasture cedars, that love the river air, but may not live on the marsh, have built seaside colonies on these hillocks and spread a feast of blue cedar berries for all passing flocks. Here the robins, now gathering for their winter flight south, flock and feed, holding their ground at the approach of man, crying “Tut, tut!” to his intrusion. With them are the cedar wax-wings, also very fond of the cedar berries, the soft gray-browns of the bird’s plumage blending most pleasantly with the olive greens of the cedars. There is a dainty, sleek beauty about this bird that harmonizes wonderfully well with the cedar trees which it frequents, and the little red sealing-wax tips on its wing feathers make one think that the flock is bringing Christmas decorations of holly berries to each tree to deck it for the holiday season. In wild apple trees the robins seem less than half-wild and in the cedars the wax-wings more than half-tame. The two give a friendly spirit to the spot and at once make you feel that you are welcome. To sit quietly in such a place for five minutes is to make it your own home, and you go away with regret and a certain homesickness. Huckleberry bushes, maples, beach plums and birches stand admiringly round, and wild grasses and pasture flowers crowd in and add to the cosiness.

Of these wild flowers the seaside goldenrod is most profuse. Pasture-born like the cedars, it too loves the sea and crowds to its very edge like the people at Revere and Nantasket, so close indeed that at high tides the smelt and young herring, swimming in silver shoals, nibble at the bare toes the plants dabble in the water. You may know this even if you do not see the nibblers, for the plants quiver and shake with suppressed laughter at being thus tickled. The seaside goldenrod is prettier now in the cool winds and under the pale October sun’s slant rays than it was in the heyday of August, when it burgeoned with yellow racemes of rather coarse bloom. Its head-gear is in the full autumn style, and it bows beneath the weight of ostrich-plume pappus and softens all the foreground of the view with gray fluff.

From these sea margins where tide and river mingle and meet the borders of Newburyport one gets glimpses of higher hills up-river, dark with pines and gorgeous with autumn scarlet and gold, and among them the picturesque towers and cadenced sweep of the old chain bridge that takes you across the river to Amesbury. Down river to the old chain bridge the rough rocks of the New Hampshire hills, wandering far, come to get a taste of salt, and put their lips to the water at the island home of Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose sparkling verse and piquant prose has made the name of Newburyport known in literary annals for more than half a century. Hills and sea meet there, and all the beauty of marsh, pasture and woodland surround the spot. It is no wonder that romance, vivid life and rich atmosphere inform her work.

The herring gulls which go up and down with the tides no longer follow the Newburyport sails to sea and escort them back again to port, pensioners on the bounty which ships always scatter in their wake. Instead they have reverted to their original, more noble trade of fishing. Every time the smelt or the young herring come in to make game of the seaside goldenrod by tickling their toes they risk their lives. The gulls soar and wheel over the shallows and tide rips, their wings and bodies set and quiet like soaring monoplanes, their heads hanging loosely on supple necks and turning this way and that as they peer with far-sighted eyes at all beneath the surface. Suddenly the stays of the monoplane seem to break, the wings crumple, and the bird falls to water as if shot, going often beneath the surface. In a second he emerges with lifted bill and you see the silvery flash of some unlucky fish disappearing down the capacious gullet. Often this is a polite morsel, but not always. The gull is not over particular in his mouthfuls, and I have seen one take a herring as long as his own body, head first, swallowing the fish as far as circumstances would permit, then sitting placidly on the water with several inches of shiny tail protruding, waiting, like continuous performance table d’hôte diners, for the first course to be digested so that there should be room to swallow the last one. Birds of the sea meet birds of the land here, and birds of the marsh join them. Over the river the fish hawk soars as well as the gulls, and the marsh hawk crosses from one mouse-hunting ground to another. Out of the sky a Wilson’s snipe fell like a gray aerolite, while I was there, a lightning-like plunge ended by an alighting as soft as the fall of a thistledown on the marsh grass. This was proof that the drought has been long, for the Wilson’s snipe likes the fresh water meadows best and rarely comes to the salt marsh grass unless his familiar stabbing ground is too dry to be thrust with comfort. He came like a visitor from another sphere. In the second of his lighting I caught a flash of his mottle gray and brown, then he vanished as if his plunge had after all taken him far into the ground and all you need expect to find was the hole by which he entered. Yet neither bird nor hole could I find by diligent search in the marsh grass. Never a top waved with his progress among the culms, and only by scent could he have been followed.

On the other side of Newburyport you come to the marshes again, great level stretches of them, silvered with winding threads of the sea that seek far through the slender creeks, marshes dotted at this time of year as far as eye can see with the rounded domes of many-footed haystacks, a place where the full sky is yours for the seeing, where all winds blow free, and blowing bring to your lungs the rich, life-giving scent of the deep sea tides, caught and concentrated in the tangled grasses and touched with a faint essence of their own perfume. Beyond again lies Plum Island. Here the sea beats in savage vigor, and I seem to get in its voice an echo of the sonorous poems in which John Pierpont denounced slavery. Pierpont was one of the great writers of his day, and his work lasts. He may well have got the culture, depth and dignity of his multitudinous sermons from the atmosphere he found among the great square houses built by the old-time shipmasters and shipbuilders on the ridge which is the backbone of the city. In the laughing beauty of the up-river scenery I can fancy him finding light-winged fancies such as the couplet he wrote in Miss Octavia’s album:

“Octavia; what, the eighth! If bounteous heaven Hath made eight such, where are the other seven?”

Only in the deep sea thunder of the waves on Plum Island beach could he have heard such notes as echoed in “The Tocsin”:

“Ay--slaves of slaves. What, sleep ye yet, And dream of freedom while ye sleep? Ay, dream while slavery’s foot is set So firmly on your necks, while deep The chain her quivering flesh endures Gnaws likes a cancer into yours!”

It is easy to see him striding home from a session with the Plum Island waves and pausing to see the snow settle on and blot out the outlines of the peaceful marshes, drawing from the sight his best-remembered, most-quoted verse:

“A weapon that comes down as still As snowflakes fall upon the sod, But executes the freeman’s will As lightnings do the will of God; And from its force nor doors nor locks Can shield you; ’tis the ballot box.”

I do not know if he wrote these lines here or later when he had become one of Boston’s famous preachers, but I do know that he saw these things in the years that he lived in the fine old town and carried the memory of them long with him, just as all of us who visit the place carry away lasting impressions of its quaintness, dignity and wholesome quiet, and the beauty of its surrounding country.

X

PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS

_Adventures of a Spring Day in Pilgrim Land_

The first day on which one might hope for mayflowers came smilingly to Plymouth in late April. The day before a bitter northeaster had swept through the town, a gale like the December one in which the Pilgrim’s shallop first weathered Manomet head and with broken mast limped in under the lee of Clark’s Island. No promise of May had been in this wild storm that keened the dead on Burial Hill, yet this day that followed was to be better than a promise. It was May itself, come a few days ahead of the calendar, so changeful is April in Pilgrim land. The gale, ashamed of itself, ceased its outcry in the darkness of full night and the chill of a white frost followed on all the land.

In the darkest hour of this night I saw a thin point of light rise out of the mystery of the sea far to the eastward, the tiny sail of the shallop of the old moon, blown landward by little winds of dawn, making port on the shore of “hither Manomet.” In the velvety blackness of this ultimate hour of night the slender sail curved sweetly backward toward the sea, and the shallop seemed drawn to the land by a lodestone, as was the ship of Sinbad the Sailor, and when it magically climbed the dark headland and sailed away into the sky above it drew out of the sea behind it the first light of glorious morning. From Manomet head to the Gurnet the horizon showed a level sea line of palest garnet that deepened, moment by moment, till the coming sun arched it with rose and bounded from it, a flattened globule of ruby fire. I like to think that the path of gold with which the sun glorified the stippled steel of the sea was the very one by which the first Mayflower came in from Provincetown, the sails nobly set and the ship pressing onward to that memorable anchorage within the protecting white arm of the sandspit.

I like to think that the sweet curve of the old moon’s slender sail sways in by Manomet each month in loving remembrance of that other shallop that so magically won by the roar of the breakers on the dark point and brought the simple record of faith and courage for our loving remembrance. But whether these things are so or not I know that the very first rays of the morning sun pass in level neglect over the bay and the town to lay a wreath of light on the brow of Burial Hill and touch with celestial gold the simple granite shaft that stands over the grave of William Bradford, historian of Plymouth Colony and writer of the first American book. Such is the unfailing ceremony of sunrise in Plymouth, and such it has been since the first Pilgrim was laid to rest on the hill which lifts its head above the roofs and spires to the free winds of the world.

Plymouth is fortunate in this hill. It bears the very presence of its founders above the enterprise and ferment of a modern town which grows rapidly toward city conditions, a hill which is set upon a city and cannot be hid. Factories and city blocks and all the wonders of steam and electrical contrivance which would have astounded and amazed Bradford and his fellows are common in Plymouth to-day as they are common to all cities and towns of a vast country, yet the graves of the simple pioneers rise above them as the story of their lives transcends in interest that of all others that have come after them. The book that Bradford wrote, as the tales that Homer told, will last as long as books are read. Plymouth may pass, as Troy did, but the story of its heroes will remain. Bradford’s book, which was our first, may well, at the end of time, be rated our greatest.

The trailing arbutus is peculiarly the flower of Plymouth. Not that it grows there alone, indeed within easy reach of the landing place of the Pilgrims it is not easy now to find it. Once, no doubt, it blossomed about the feet of the pioneers, sending up its fragrance to them as they trod sturdily along their first street and through their new-found fields that first spring after their arrival. My, but their hearts must have been homesick for the English May they had left behind! and in memory of the pink and white of the hawthorn hedges they called this pink and white flower which peered from the oval-leaved vines trailed about their feet, mayflower. It surely must have grown on the slopes of Burial Hill, down toward Town Brook, but now one will look in vain for it there. I found my first blossom of the year by following the brook up to its headwaters in Billington Sea. The brook itself is greatly changed since Bradford’s day. Its waters are now held back by dams where it winds through the sand hills, and one mill after another sits by the side of the ponds thus formed. Yet the “sea” itself must be much the same in itself and its surroundings as it was in Billington’s time. Nor do I wholly believe the legend which has it that Billington thought it was a sea in very truth. It is too obviously a pond to have deceived even this unsophisticated wanderer. It covers but a little over three hundred acres including its islands and winding coves.

I think, rather, its name was given in good-natured derision of Billington and his idea of the importance of his discovery, a form of quaint humor not unknown in the descendants of the Pilgrims to this day. Yet the waters of the little winding pond are as clear as those of the sea which breaks on the rocks of Manomet or the Gurnet, and the hilly shores, close set with deciduous growth, are almost as wild as they were then. The robins that greeted the dawn on Burial Hill sang here at mid-day, blackbirds chorused, and song sparrows sent forth their tinkling songs from the shrubby growths. Plymouth woods, here at least, are a monotony of oaks. Yet here and there in the low places a maple has become a burning bush of ruby flame, and along the bog edges the willows are in the full glory of their yellow plumes. The richest massed coloring one can see in the region to-day, though, is that of the cranberry bogs. Looking away from the sun the thick-set vines are a level floor of rich maroon, not a level color but a background showing the brush marks of a master painter’s hand. Toward the sun this color lightens and silvers to tiny jewel points where the light glances from glossy leaf tips. The later spring growth will fleck the bogs with green, but the maroon background will still be there.

The arbutus does not trail in all spots beneath the oaks, even in this secluded wilderness. Sometimes one thinks he sees broad stretches green with its rounded leaves only to find last year’s checkerberries grinning coral red at him, instead of the soft pink tints and spicy odor of the Epigæa blooms. Sometimes the pyrola simulates it and cracks the gloss on its leaves with a wan wintergreen smile at the success of the deception. But after a little the eye learns to discriminate in winter greens and to know the outline of the arbutus leaf and its grouping from that of the others. Then success in the hunt should come rapidly. After all Epigæa and Gaultheria are vines closely allied, and it is no wonder that there is a family resemblance. The checkerberry’s spicy flavor permeates leaves, stem and fruit. That of the arbutus seems more volatile and ethereal. It concentrates in the blossom and rises from that to course the air invisibly, an aromatic fragrance that the little winds of the woods sometimes carry far to those who love it, over hill and dale. Given a day of bright sun and slow-moving soft air and one may easily hunt the Plymouth mayflowers by scent. Even after the grouped leaves are surely sighted the flowers are still to be found. The winds of winter have strewn the ground deep with oak leaves and half buried the vines in them for safety from the cold. Out from among these the blossoms seem to peer shyly, like sweet little Pilgrim children, ready to draw back behind their mother’s aprons if they do not like the appearance of the coming stranger. Perhaps they do withdraw at discretion, and this is very likely why some people who come from far to hunt find many mayflowers, while others get few or none.

Just as the Mayflower in which the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth seems to have been but one of many English ships of that name, so the trailing arbutus is not the only flower to be called mayflower in New England. The mayflower of the English fields and hedgerows was pre-eminently the hawthorn, known often just as “the may.” But there is a species of bitter cress in England with showy flowers, Cardamine pratensis, which is also called mayflower, and the name is given to the yellow bloom of the marsh marigold, Caltha palustris, often known, less lovingly, as “blobs.” The Caltha is common to both Europe and America, and, though it is often hereabout known by the nickname of “cowslip” which the early English settlers seem to have given it, I do not hear it called mayflower. In localities where the arbutus is not common the name mayflower is here most commonly given to the pink and white Anemone nemorosa, the wind flower of the meadow margins and low woods, and to the rock saxifrage, Saxifraga virginiensis, both of which are among the earliest blossoms of the month.