SHELLS FROM THE BEACH.
Our summer-house is a cottage at East Hampton, Long Island, overlooking the
sea. Seventeen vessels in sight, schooners, clippers, hermaphrodite brigs,
steamers, great craft and small. Wonder where they come from, and where
they are going to, and who is aboard? Just enough clovertops to sweeten the
briny air into the most delightful tonic. We do not know the geological
history of this place, but imagine that the rest of Long Island is the
discourse of which East Hampton is the peroration. There are enough bluffs
to relieve the dead level, enough grass to clothe the hills, enough trees
to drop the shadow, enough society to keep one from inanity, and enough
quietude to soothe twelve months of perturbation. The sea hums us to sleep
at night, and fills our dreams with intimations of the land where the
harmony is like "the voice of many waters." In smooth weather the billows
take a minor key; but when the storm gives them the pitch, they break forth
with the clash and uproar of an overture that fills the heavens and makes
the beach tremble. Strange that that which rolls perpetually and never
rests itself should be a psalm of rest to others! With these sands of the
beach we help fill the hour-glass of life. Every moment of the day there
comes in over the waves a flotilla of joy and rest and health, and our
piazza is the wharf where the stevedores unburden their cargo. We have
sunrise with her bannered hosts in cloth of gold, and moonrise with her
innumerable helmets and shields and swords and ensigns of silver, the
morning and the night being the two buttresses from which are swung a
bridge of cloud suspended on strands of sunbeam, all the glories of the sky
passing to and fro with airy feet in silent procession.
We have wandered far and wide, but found no such place to rest in. We can
live here forty-eight hours in one day, and in a night get a Rip Van Winkle
sleep, waking up without finding our gun rusty or our dog dead.
No wonder that Mr. James, the first minister of this place, lived to eighty
years of age, and Mr. Hunting, his successor, lived to be eighty-one years
of age, and Doctor Buel, his successor, lived to be eighty-two years of
age. Indeed, it seems impossible for a minister regularly settled in this
place to get out of the world before his eightieth year. It has been only
in cases of "stated supply," or removal from the place, that early demise
has been possible. And in each of these cases of decease at fourscore it
was some unnecessary imprudence on their part, or who knows but that they
might be living yet? That which is good for settled pastors being good for
other people, you may judge the climate here is salutary and delectable for
all.
The place was settled in 1648, and that is so long ago that it will
probably never be unsettled. The Puritans took possession of it first, and
have always held it for the Sabbath, for the Bible and for God. Much
maligned Puritans! The world will stop deriding them after a while, and the
caricaturists of their stalwart religion will want to claim them as
ancestors, but it will be too late then; for since these latter-day folks
lie about the Puritans now, we will not believe them when they want to get
into the illustrious genealogical line.
East Hampton has always been a place of good morals. One of the earliest
Puritan regulations of this place was that licensed liquor-sellers should
not sell to the young, and that half a pint only should be given to four
men--an amount so small that most drinkers would consider it only a
tantalization. A woman here, in those days, was sentenced "to pay a fine of
fifteen dollars, or to stand one hour with a cleft stick upon her tongue,
for saying that her husband had brought her to a place where there was
neither gospel nor magistracy." She deserved punishment of some kind, but
they ought to have let her off with a fine, for no woman's tongue ought to
be interfered with. When in olden time a Yankee peddler with the measles
went to church here on the Sabbath for the purpose of selling his
knick-knacks, his behavior was considered so perfidious that before the
peddler left town the next morning the young men gave him a free ride upon
what seems to us an uncomfortable and insufficient vehicle, namely, a rail,
and then dropped him into the duck-pond. But such conduct was not
sanctioned by the better people of the place. Nothing could be more
unwholesome for a man with the measles than a plunge in a duck-pond, and so
the peddler recovered one thousand dollars damage. So you see that every
form of misdemeanor was sternly put down. Think of the high state of morals
and religion which induced this people, at an early day, at a political
town-meeting, to adopt this decree: "We do sociate and conjoin ourselves
and successors to be one town or corporation, and do for ourselves and our
successors, and such as shall be adjoined to us at any time hereafter,
enter into combination and confederation together to maintain and preserve
the purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ which we now possess."
The pledge of that day has been fully kept; and for sobriety, industry,
abhorrence of evil and adherence to an unmixed gospel, we know not the
equal of this place.
That document of two centuries ago reads strangely behind the times, but it
will be some hundreds of years yet before other communities come up to the
point where that document stops. All our laws and institutions are yet to
be Christianized. The Puritans took possession of this land in the name of
Christ, and it belongs to Him; and if people do not like that religion, let
them go somewhere else. They can find many lands where there is no
Christian religion to bother them. Let them emigrate to Greenland, and we
will provide them with mittens, or to the South Sea Islands, and we will
send them ice-coolers. This land is for Christ. Our Legislatures and
Congresses shall yet pass laws as radically evangelical as the venerable
document above referred to. East Hampton, instead of being two hundred
years behind, is two hundred years ahead.
Glorious place to summer! Darwin and Stuart, Mill and Huxley and Renan have
not been through here yet. May they miss the train the day they start for
this place! With an Atlantic Ocean in which to wash, and a great-hearted,
practical, sympathetic gospel to take care of all the future, who could not
be happy in East Hampton?
The strong sea-breeze ruffles the sheet upon which we write, and the "white
caps" are tossing up as if in greeting to Him who walks the pavements of
emerald and opal:
"Waft, waft, ye winds, His story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till, like a sea of glory,
It spreads from pole to pole."