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.
None can visit Plymouth without wishing to climb the bold
promontory of “hither Manomet.” The legend has it that Eric the
Red, the Viking who explored the New England shores centuries
before the first Englishman heard of them, made this his burial
hill and that somewhere beneath its forests his bones lie to this
day. I sought long for mayflowers on the seaward slopes and in the
rough gullies of these “highlands of Plymouth.” I did not find them
there.
On the landward slopes, gentler and less wind-swept, down toward
the “sweet waters” that flow from inland to the sea, you may with
patient search find many. But the heights shall reward you, if not
with mayflowers with greater and more lasting joys. The woods of
Manomet were full of butterflies. Splendid specimens of Vanessa
antiopa danced together by twos and threes in every sunny glade,
the gold edging of bright raiment showing beneath their “mourning
cloaks” of rich seal brown. Here in the rich sunshine Launcelot
might well have said:
“Myself beheld three spirits, mad with joy,
Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower.”
Here Grapta interrogationis carried his ever-present question mark
from one dry leaf to another, asking always that unanswerable
“why?” Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter’s butterfly,
flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming
invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky,
the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have
woefully named Lycæna pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground as
if a new-born flower tried quivering flight, and brown Hesperiidæ,
“bedouins of the pathless air,” buzzed in vanishing eccentricity.
But it was not for these that I lingered long on the seaward crest.
There below me lay the bay that the exploring Pilgrims entered at
such hazard, that but the day before had been blotted out with a
freezing storm and gray with snow, now smiling in unforgettable
beauty at my feet, bringing irresistibly to mind the one who sang,
“My soul to-day is far away,
Sailing the blue Vesuvian bay.”
At Naples indeed could be no softer, fairer skies than this June
day of late April brought to Plymouth Bay and spread over the
waters that nestled within the curve of that splendid young moon
of white sand that sweeps from Manomet to the tip of the sandspit,
with the Gurnet far to the right and Plymouth’s white houses rising
in the middle distance. It lacked only the cone of Vesuvius smoking
beyond to make the memory complete.
Nor has the Bay of Naples bluer waters than those that danced below
me. Some stray current of the Gulf Stream must have curled about
the tip of Cape Cod and spread its wonder bloom over them. Here
were the same exquisite soft blues, shoaling into tender green,
that I have seen among the Florida keys. Surely it was like a
transformation scene. The day before the torn sea wild with wind
and the dun clouds of a northeast gale hiding the distance with a
mystery of dread, a wind that beat the forest with snow and chilled
to the marrow; and this day the warmth of an Italian spring and the
blue Vesuvian Bay.
The Pilgrims had their seasons of storm and stress, but there came
to them too halcyon days like this when the mayflower bloomed in
all the woodland about them, the mourning cloak butterflies danced
with joy down the sunny glades, and the bay spread its wonderful
blue beneath their feet in the delicious promise of June. Nor is
it any wonder that in spite of hardships and disasters manifold
they yet found heart to write home that it was a “fayere lande and
bountiful.”
But for all the lure of Plymouth woods with their fragrance of
trailing arbutus, from all the grandeur of the wide outlook from
Manomet Heights, the hearts of all who come to Plymouth must lead
them back to the resting place of the fathers on the brow of the
little hill in the midst of the town. There where the grass was not
yet green and the buttercups that will later shine in gold have
put forth but the tiniest beginnings of their fuzzy, three-parted
leaves, I watched the sun sink, big and red in a golden mist, over
a land of whose coming material greatness Bradford and his fellow
Pilgrims could have had no inkling. Seaward the tropic bloom of
the water was all gone, and there as the sun passed I saw the
cool steel of the bay catch the last rays in little dimples of
silver light. Manomet withdrew, blue and mysterious in the haze of
nightfall. Out over the Gurnet, and beyond, the sky caught purples
from the colors in the west, and there, dropping below the horizon
line, east northeast toward England, I saw a sail vanish in the
soft haze as if it might be the first Mayflower, sailing away from
the heavy-hearted Pilgrims, toward England and home. The sun’s last
ray touched it with a fleck of rose as it passed, a rose like that
which tipped the petals of the mayflowers that I held in my hand,
mayflowers that sent up to me in the coolness of the gathering
April night a fragrance as aromatic and beloved as is the memory of
the lives of the Pilgrims that slept all about me on the brow of
Burial Hill. Bradford wrote gravely and simply the chronicles of
these, and no more, yet the fervent faith and sturdy love for fair
play, unquenchable in the hearts of these men, breathes from every
page, a fragrance that shall go forth on the winds of the world for
all time.
XI
OLD SALEM TOWN
_A Scarlet Letter Day in the Witch City_
Over all the hum of business activity that rises from Salem town
sleeps the glamour of old-time memories. Factories drone, traffic
roars or clatters, and the multiple message of modern civilization
goes forth to eye and ear, but among all these sits the ancient
city dreaming long dreams and careless of the children of to-day.
Along Charter Street and down Derby the once stately mansions of
the great merchants of another century droop in senile decay,
knee deep in the dust and debris that immigrant, alien races
scatter, and note it and them no more than they do the rats in the
wainscoting. The thoughts of the old houses are busy still with
ships in the China Sea, battling round the Cape of Good Hope with
the Flying Dutchman, or running down the trades from Senegambia,
Surinam or Ceylon, and their upper window eyes stare unwinkingly
across rotten wharves and out to the island gaps in the horizon of
the bay, watching for the sails that come no more. So the world
thinks of Salem to-day as the city of romantic memories. It may
weave cotton cloth and tan hides and make shoes and carry on a
thousand other inventions of modern business, yet we who dwell away
from it, far or near, will always know it best for its romance of
elder days, the dread delusion of its witch finding, the astounding
deeds of its merchant sailors, and in the end most of all perhaps,
for its man of dreams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who dreamed there the
grim story of “The Scarlet Letter” and made it live for all men for
all time.
More and more, as the years slip by, Hawthorne comes to be the
presiding genius of Salem, and reverent pilgrims in increasing
numbers come to seek the few abiding traces of his life there; and
though they go to Gallows Hill and also view the relics of the old
merchants and their portraits and the pictures of their ships,
they go first to the house where Hawthorne was born, to the other
houses where he lived and worked, and to the sleepy, dignified
old Custom House from whose drab duties grew the strange flower
of weird romance. It may be that out of the Ghettos and Warsaws
which now surround the old Custom House will come again as great
merchants as once dwelt there, or as great a writer of romance as
he who worked on its scarred old wooden desk now preserved with
such care in the Essex Institute, but one may be pardoned for
having his doubts. The world matures rapidly, and the heritage
of primitive environment and primitive opportunity is smoothed
out by the steel roller of modern invention. New ports no longer
wait the seaman adventurer. Steam makes all ports common, and the
knowledge of them common, to all the world. We shall look long for
the successors to Derby and Peabody and their ilk, and we may well
doubt if ships like The Grand Turk, Rajah and Astræa will sail
again from any future Salem.
[Illustration: One angle of “The House of the Seven Gables.”]
[Illustration: A Salem dock of the old sea-faring days]
Never again, the world surely hopes, can come upon a pioneer people
so mysterious a madness as the Salem witchcraft delusion, yet in
it were set the roots of temperament which made Hawthorne what
he was. Its grewsome mystery seems to brood in all he wrote, and
one cannot visit his haunts and the scenes of its terror to-day
without feeling some atmosphere of it still hovering over the
place. Hawthorne’s ancestor sat in judgment over the witches, and
Judge Hathorne, invisible indeed but grimly onlooking, seems to
me to preside over many a tale which he wrote. As relentless fate
mocked the witches while it gripped them and killed them with
trivialities, so it does the characters in Hawthorne’s stories, nor
in the progress of events is there room in the tale, in the one
case or the other, for the saving grace of humor. From Hathorne to
Hawthorne came the somber impress of the days of witch finding.
The spring sun and the spring rain fall alike gently on Gallows
Hill, yet it stands bare and wind-swept to-day as it did when the
witches met their fate there, as it has stood since the glaciers
ground over it, no one knows how many hundred thousand years ago.
The tough rock of which it was built shows everywhere the traces of
the fires which melted and reset it in its present form, its twist
and coloration burnt into it as the story of the deeds wrought on
its summit is seared into the annals of old Salem town. Here and
there on its fantastic ledges one sees zigzag marks struck pale as
if lightning had welted the tormented stone and left the impress
of its sudden anger there. The softening years can do little with
this rock. A curse far older than that of the witch finding has set
its seal upon the height, and though the gentle things of earth
strive patiently to ameliorate the evidence they do little to wipe
out the bleakness of the place. The green of spring grasses climbs
patiently toward the topmost ledges, indeed, and draws with it
the gold of potentilla and the white of wild strawberry blooms.
Dandelions set the round image of the sun in sheltered places, and
little lilac constellations of bluets star the moister spots adown
the slope, but the barren soil is too shallow and the summer turns
all these to a brown garment of sorrowful sackcloth and sprinkles
it with the gray ashes of drought.
A few houses have boldly climbed the hill from the street below,
but none has yet dared the very spot on the bare, red-gray summit
where the irons that once helped support the gibbet rust, still
firmly bedded in their holes in the rock. Over the ledges and down
the hill to the southeast lies a little pond of sweet water that
sparkles in the spring winds, cosily sheltered in the hollow and
surrounded by the vivid green of smooth turf. But even this the
long scorn of summer heat dries to a brown bog where sedges fight
for the life remaining in the stagnant pool in its center. About
this pond the barberry bushes have found a foothold in straggling
clumps to bear little crosses of witch-pin thorns, and steeples
of hard-hack blooms spire solemnly near it in summer. Potentilla
and cudweed dare the slope toward the summit of Gallows Hill when
the rain and sun are kind, and fragaria and violets and bulbous
buttercup trail after, but even in the soft days of May the height
where the witches were hung is desolate and forbidding. Yet it
dominates the outlook upon the town as the story of the witchcraft
delusion dominates the annals of it, as both will for all time.