Part 2

His kindly handsome face, his enormous size, his laugh, which was ten laughs in one, are among the clear remembrances of my childhood.

And I can hardly close this sketch better than by quoting his old family doctor's words: "Swear, yes, but his swearing was better than some folks' praying."

I should like to "summon from the vasty deep" some of the other old people, both white and black, who lived here in the old days. Just back of where Mr. Flick's stable now stands at Pride's Crossing lived Jacob Brower, a little old man of Dutch descent, with his wife and family. She was a sister of Mrs. Peter Pride, who lived in the first house west of the Pride's Crossing station. I remember Aunt Pride as an extremely handsome, tall, dark, dignified woman. She belonged to the Thissell family. Lucy and Frank Eldredge came of this family, and Willis Pride, and I suppose "Thissell's Market" claims relation too!

The next house east of the station, on the other side of the road was a tumble down old house innocent of paint, and black with age, inhabited by three old African women--named Chloe Turner, Phillis Cave and Nancy Milan, all widows.

The house, after the railroad cut it off from the main road, was so near the track that one could almost step from the rock doorstep to the rails, and the old crazy structure shook every time an infrequent train passed, we had four trains to Boston daily then. I remember how the old house smelt and how the rickety stairs creaked under one's feet.

When my great great-grandfather, David Larcom, married the widow of John West and brought her to his home (now the Gordon Dexter place) she brought with her as part of her dower, a negro woman, a remarkable character, named Juno Freeman. This woman was the mother of a large family. Mary Herrick West's father was a Captain Herrick and he brought Juno, a slave from North Carolina in his ship.

Juno's children took the Larcom name and remained as slave property in the Larcom family, till, in my great-grandfather's time they were sold. My uncle Rufus told me that this ancestor, Jonathan Larcom, was sharp, and, hearing that all slaves in Massachusetts were to be freed, _sold_ his.

The old house I have mentioned was given to Juno Larcom, it being on the land known as the "gate pasture" and in after years, when Mr. Franklin Haven wanted to open an avenue there, he took a land rent from my stepfather, David Larcom, had the old house torn down, and put a little house for Nancy Milan (who was then the only survivor of the three old widows) right by my piazza, on the east side, and there Aunt Milan died peacefully in the spring of 1869.

Aunt Milan's mother, Phillis Cave, was brought to Danvers in the boot of Judge Cave's chaise, and afterwards somehow drifted to Beverly. Judge Cave's daughter, Maria Cummins, wrote the "Lamplighter," a book of great popularity in this region, in her day. Phillis worked in the best Beverly families, the Rantouls, Endicotts, and others, and used to walk to Beverly, work all day, and walk home at night. I remember wondering if all the washing she did had made the palms of her hands so much whiter than the rest of her.

Aunt Chloe and Aunt Milan were pretty lazy old things, but everybody liked them and contributed good naturedly to their support. After Aunt Milan came down to live by us, Mr. Asa Larcom and my step-father furnished a good deal of her living, and the town gave her fifty cents a week. She never could hear of the poor house. Wherever Aunt Chloe got the candy and nuts she always had on hand for children, I cannot imagine. She wore a pumpkin hood (a headgear made of wadded woolen or silk, with a little back frill,) and the Brazil nuts used to be taken out of the back of the hood. My brother David said he used to eat candy from the same receptacle, but then he was a Larcom and had imagination!

The old brick meeting house had a wooden bench built upstairs near the choir, and there these three black persons sat, every Sunday, thro' their peaceful lives. I think that was a pretty low down trick of those old Baptists, particularly as the ladies in question always sat at our tables.

We old dwellers at Beverly Farms,--Obers and Haskells and Woodberrys and Williamses and Larcoms, are pretty well snarled up as to relationship, and I am always coming upon some new relative in an odd way.

For instance, Miss Haven gave me the other day the appraisal of my great grandfather's estate, that same David Larcom of slave times. He died in 1779 possessed of £899 sterling, all in real estate. I found in the appraisal and settlement among his children, that my old friend Mrs. Lee and I have probably a common ancestor, Jonathan Larcom. It amuses us, because we have never before found any trace of commingling blood. I fancy it would be pretty difficult to find any two old Beverly Farmites, who are not related. My principal pride in the old paper is that it sets forth, over the signature of the Judge of Probate in Ipswich, that a Larcom once was worth about $5,000! (His brother's estate was appraised at £219 15s. 6d. Ed.)

My good neighbor, Mrs. Goddard, came in last evening and brought me a fragrant bouquet of thyme and rosemary and marjoram and sage, which makes me remember that I have not yet tried to describe Aunt Betsey Larcom's garden in those ancient days.

The striped grass is still growing in one corner of my garden--the very same roots that were there in my childhood, and up to a year or so ago, the old lilac bush that Uncle Ed. Larcom picked blossoms from when he was a small boy, was there too. Aunt Betsey's garden was a beautiful combination of use and loveliness. All along the stone wall grew red-blossomed barm and in the long beds were hyssop (she called it _isop_) and rue and marigolds and catnip and camomile and sage and sweet marjoram and martinoes. Martinoes were funny things with a beautiful, ill-smelling bloom which looked like an orchid, and when the blossoms dropped there succeeded an odd shaped fruit, with spines and a long tail, which was used for pickles. Then there were king cups, a glorified buttercup, and a lovely little blue flower called "Star of Bethlehem" and four o'clocks. Right here I want to say that Frank Gaudreau has more varieties of four o'clocks than I ever supposed were known to lovers of flowers and I think he deserves the thanks of the village for his pretty garden.

All the different herbs were carefully gathered by Aunt Betsey, and tied in bundles, and hung up to the rafters of the old attic. Sometimes I fancy I can smell them now on a damp day, and I like to recall the dear old lady in her tyer and cap, busy with her simples. I like to think of her as my tutelar divinity for I came to love her dearly, though I am sure that when I was first landed in her house, I was a big trial. Elsie Doane remembered another garden of that time, where, she says, they never picked a flower. I remember it too, but I had forgotten that they didn't pick the flowers. It flourished right where the engine house and those other buildings stand, and Elsie _thinks_ the garden reached way out to the sign post. Uncle Asa Ober owned that garden--the ancestor of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Hooper and Helen Campbell, and many others of our fast fading away villagers. His two stepdaughters were cousins to my mother, and they had a little shop in an ell that ran from the house to the street, where they did dressmaking and millinery.

Right in front of the shop was the garden all fenced in, but I had the right of way for I could sing! And whenever I learned a new _music_ from Joe Low's Singing School, I used to be called in to act as prima donna to the two ladies.

There were cucumbers in the garden extension and artichokes by the old walls.

But my regrets are not for the gardens. We have gardens now, but nobody can bring back the beautiful fields, stretching from the woods to the sea, where cows and oxen grazed. Nobody can bring back the brooks, now polluted and turned into ditches. Nobody can bring back the roadsides bordered with wild roses, now tunneled and bean-poled out of all beauty. I do love some of our summer people, particularly those who have kept their hands off and have not removed the old landmarks, but I find it hard to forgive the bean-poling and the cementing. Look at the lovely old Sandy Hill Road (West Street). Over these happy summer fields of the olden days walked James Russell Lowell and his beautiful betrothed, Maria White. Later he came again,--but without her. Among those old first visitors to our Shore were John Glen King and Ellis Gray Loring. These two gentlemen married sisters, southern women I think; they took kindly to our New England cookery. Mrs. King, one day, asked my aunt, Mrs. Prince, if she could give them a salt fish dinner, with an Essex sauce. Mrs. Prince knew all about a salt fish dinner, but the Essex sauce floored her, and she humbly acknowledged her ignorance. "Oh," said Mrs. King, "it is very simple. You take thin slices of fat pork and fry them out." Mrs. Prince laughed and proceeded to her kitchen to make "pork dip." Mrs. King also liked a steamed huckleberry pudding and she said "And please, Mrs. Prince, make it all huckleberries, with just enough flour to hold them together." We got four or five cents a quart when we picked these same huckleberries. I did not have a very big bank account in that direction, owing to my short sight, and to my preference for making corn stalk fiddles with a jack-knife. I remember making one on a Sunday morning, uninterrupted by the "Sabbathday dog" which was supposed to lie in wait for Sabbath breakers.

Diagonally opposite my house lived Mr. Nathaniel Haskell, a little old gentleman, who wore a cut away blue coat, with buttons on the tail, over which, in cool weather, he put a green baize jacket. How funny he looked. He was interested in what he called the _tar_-iff, and he was awfully afraid of lightning. I remember the whole family filing into our dining room whenever a specially dark cloud appeared. I do not think a single descendant of "Uncle Nat" is left here, tho' there was a large family.

There was a cheese press in our back yard and "changing milk" was a great scheme. One week all the milk from four or five farms would be sent to us and my mother would make delicious sage cheese.

Then, the next week all the milk would go to "Uncle Nat's," and so on, till all the cow owners were supplied with cheeses, which were duly greased with butter and put on shelves to dry, a sight to make the prophet smile.

I wish I could get a picture of Beverly Farms as it looked to my child's eyes. I came over to "the Road," as it was called by my maternal relatives, when I was five years old. They lived in that Paradise now occupied by millionaires, the region that holds the Gordon Dexter place, the Moore place, the Swift place, and part of the Paine place. At that time, the whole section was long green fields bordered by woods, the "log brook" running through it. There were then three roads in Beverly Farms, the road now called Hale Street, the beautiful old Sandy Hill Road (West Street) and the Wenham road (Hart Street). My two homes after my mother's widowhood were at the Gordon Dexter place, and at my father's old homestead, at Mingo's Beach (where Bishop McVickar lived). There were about twenty houses at that time, between Beach Hill and Saw Mill Brook. This was West Farms and the Schoolhouse stood just back of Pride's Crossing station--afterwards removed to where it now stands as a dwelling house, occupied by the heirs of Thomas Pierce.

There was then no railroad and the main road ran by Mr. Bradley's greenhouses, and along where the railroad now is, coming out near the schoolhouse. That part of Hale Street where the Catholic church is, was then Miller's Hill, a pasture, where I have often tried to pick berries. The railroad came in 1845. The little shanties where the laborers who were building the road lived temporarily with their families, were a great curiosity. I used to run away and peep into them and I can remember how they smelled. My mother, who did the work of twenty women every day almost as long as she lived, made knotted "comforters" for these shanties. Our way of getting to Beverly and Salem was by stage coaches between Gloucester and Salem. In my few journeys in these delightful conveyances I used to clamber to the top seat and sit with Mr. Page the kindly driver, who was one of our first conductors on the railroad.

To the house where I now live my happy life, I was brought at five years. I could then read about as well as I can now. I found in this old house a garret, a beautiful garret, where bundles of herbs hung from the rafters, and where books, books galore had collected in old sea chests. Fancy my delight, at finding, one red letter day, Christopher North's, "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life."

There were other books not so well fitted for the education of a child, but it was all fish that came to my net, and I calmly read up to my tenth year, "The Criminal Calendar," "Tales of Shipwrecks," Barber's "Historical Massachusetts," Paley's "Moral Philosophy," Pollock's "Course of Time," Alleine's "Alarm to the Unconverted," Richardson's "Pamela" and the "Spectator!" Some years afterwards, when I had read the covers off this miscellaneous collection of books, some of the earlier summer people, the elder Lorings and Kings, I think, put a small library into Uncle Pride's house and gave us Jacob Abbott's Rollo Stories and a few other delights. Please picture to yourself the "light of other days" by which the reading and sewing and knitting of old Beverly Farms used to go on at night.

Luckily, there was as much daylight then, as now. The lamp that illuminated my childish evenings was a glass lamp, that held about a cup full of whale oil, "sperm oil," it was called. There were two metal tubes at the top of this lamp, thro' which protruded two cotton wicks. These wicks could be pulled up for more light or pulled down for economy, by means of a pin. No protection whatever was afforded from the flame, and my hair was singed in front most of the time, as I crept close with book or stocking, to this illumination. One use of the old oil lamp was medicinal. If there were a croupy child in the house, he might be treated immediately, in the absence of a doctor, to a dose from the lamp on the mantel. I remember my blessed brother David being ministered unto in that way. After this, came the fluid lamp, with an alcoholic mixture that was dangerous, but clean.

In hunting about among ancestors, I am sometimes reminded of the story of Dr. Samuel Johnson's marriage. The lady to whom he proposed, demurred a little. She said she had an uncle who was hanged. Dr. Johnson assured her that that need make no difficulty, for he had no doubt that he had several who ought to have been hanged. I remember my disgust at finding that I was related thro' my maternal grandmother, Molly Standley, to "Aunt Massy." Aunt Massy, (her real name was Mercy) was a mildly insane, gray-haired, stoutish woman, who lived just before you reach the fountain at the top of the hill, on Hale St. There was a well with a windlass and bucket at one side of her old house and Aunt Massy used to lean on the well curb and abuse the passers by. She remembered all the mean things one's relatives ever did, and how she could scold! I was often sent to Mr. Perry's grocery store where Pump Cottage now stands and I used to try to get by without hearing her uplifted voice. But if I had a new gown there was no escape.

The two districts I have mentioned, (East and West Farms) were divided by "Saw Mill Brook," the little half choked stream that now filters under the road between Mr. Hardy's and Mr. Simpkins' places. It was a beautiful brook in those old days, clear water running through fields, with trout in it. The saw mill must have stood about where that collection of tenement houses now is.

The "child in the mill pond" belongs to the legendary history of Beverly Farms.

Coming down the hill towards Beverly, the most terrible shrieks would often be heard, but if one crossed the brook to West Farms, all was silent. I never heard these shrieks, I took good care never to be caught over there after dark. I should have liked to see the little screech owl, who, no doubt, had his quiet home up back of the mill, and sang his evening song, after the miller had closed his gates. We villagers have a question to propose to all our friends of uncertain age,--"Do you remember the saw-mill?" If, inadvertently, they confess to its acquaintance, it settles the question of age. It is as good as a Family Bible.

Miss Culbert showed me the other day, a great find, the remnant of the "Third Social Library of Beverly." I had never heard of such a library and was greatly interested. It is now in our beautiful branch library, in a neat book case made by one of the Obers, in whose house the Library was placed. I mean the old Joseph Ober house which stood where Mrs. Charles M. Cabot's house is.

Elsie did not live opposite that house then, but she was going to live there. I dare say she wouldn't read any one of those books, any more than I would. The books date back to 1810, and many of the honored names I have been mentioning are there, all written down in beautiful handwriting, and with a tax of ten cents opposite their names, for the carrying on of this little library. There are two sermons of the beloved Joseph Emerson, who preached at Beverly before there was any church here, a funeral sermon preached on the occasion of Dr. Perry's grandfather's death, loads of sermons by Jonathan Edwards, great bundles of religious magazines, and other interesting antiquities. Not one story, no fiction of any sort. Those forefathers of ours fed on strong meat. Among the curiosities are several letters from anxious fathers in Boston, making the most vigorous and pathetic protest against a proposed _second_ theatre in Boston on Common Street.

A second theatre in Boston! The souls of young people in peril! One sighs to think what these good fathers would have said if they could have pulled aside the curtain of the future and seen little Beverly with crowds of children accompanied by their fathers and mothers and uncles and aunts and cousins, all pouring into the "movies!" (One of these movies named for Lucy Larcom!) One must go on, and now we are trying to hope that some good may come out of the "movies!" If our little religious library was the "Third Social" there must have been two more in old Beverly.

I want you to go back in your mind to a Sunday of that time when even a walk to the woods or to the beach was wicked, when the only books that were proper to read were religious books, when there were three religious services every Sunday and pretty awfully long services. My cousin and my sister and I crawled up a long ladder to the third floor of our barn, among the pigeons' nests, and, nestling down in the hay, produced a _novel_, a real novel, a wishy washy thing, that no money could hire me to read today, and with quiet whisperings read that _wicked_ book. We were in mortal terror lest "Aunt Phebe" should suspect our deep degradation, and "Aunt Phebe" was not a foe either. She was a beautiful, big, kindly woman, as Mrs. Crowell, her step-daughter, would gladly attest.

One whose memory goes back like Elsie Doane's and mine must remember the old brick meeting house. My memories of it are pretty hazy and I fancy Elsie will have to go farther back than her mother, for information about that fine specimen of architecture. It had neither cupola nor spire and must have been pretty ugly. It must have been the second meeting house, in which I recall the beautiful alto Mrs. Otis Davis's mother used to sing. I shall never forget how affected my childish ears were when she sang "Oh, when thou city of my God shall I thy Courts ascend" as the choir rendered the anthem "Jerusalem."

Speaking of meeting houses, our third and present, one of the most beautiful and "resting" buildings one could worship God in, is a lasting memorial of the taste and genius of our beloved Mrs. Whitman. To her and to Mr. Eben Day, we owe its beauty; and to the generous old church members we owe its existence at all, for they gave freely to its construction.

The first minister I have much recollection of was Mr. Hale, who lived with his family in the house now owned by Miss Lizzie Hull. My step-father bought a horse from him, and named him "Sumner." That was Mr. Hale's Christian name. I have often wondered how Mr. Hale felt to have a horse named for him, but I am sure Uncle David meant it as a compliment.

In those far away days we had a hermit of our own. It would be more damaging to a claim of youthfulness, on the part of my readers to remember "Johnny Widgin," than to remember the saw-mill.

One late afternoon, coming out with my playmates from Mr. Gordon Dexter's avenue, then my grandfather's lane, we saw a most grotesque figure, standing by "Rattlesnake Rock," just across the railroad--a tall man, of perhaps fifty years, to us, of course, "an old man." His trousers, which, thro' all the years I perfectly remember, were of some kind of once white material, with little bows of red ribbon and silk sewed all over them. He spoke to us gently but we were all terrified and ran home as fast as our legs could carry us. This singular being afterwards came and went in the village for several years, cooking his own little vile smelling messes on kindly disposed women's stoves, sleeping in barns, repeating chapter after chapter of the Old Testament for the edification of his hearers, and always gentle and kindly. I recall his recitation of the last chapter of Malachi beginning "And they shall all burn like an oven." He was, no doubt, mildly insane and of Scandinavian descent, but nobody ever knew anything definite about him. He lived a part of his time, in warm weather, in a hole or cave of rocks, on the beach formerly owned by Mr. Samuel T. Morse, below Colonel Lee's. He had a similar retreat at York Beach. He finally faded out of our lives, no one knew how. He may have been taken up in a chariot of fire like his beloved prophet Elijah, for all that any of us ever knew of his departure from these earthly scenes. He was supposed to be Norwegian, hence his name "Johnny Widgin." My grandfather said that if he could not pronounce "the thick of my thumb" in any way but the "tick of my tumb" he was Norwegian. That settled it in my mind, for my grandfather was my oracle. (Andrew Larcom, Grandfather Ober had died, Ed.)

My grandfather did not go much to church but he loved his Bible and Psalm book and from several things that I remember about him, I think he was Unitarian in belief, though in those days I did not know a Unitarian from a black cat, and whenever I heard of one, I supposed he must be a terrible kind of being. I was a grown woman, when one day, speaking of Starr King and his love for the White Hills and his loyalty in keeping California in the Union during the Civil War, the woman to whom I was speaking said "Well, he wasn't a good man." "Not a good man," I said. "Why" said she, "You know he was a Universalist." We have got on a little since that time in toleration, but we need to get on a little more.