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An Old Town By The Sea

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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This Project Gutenberg Etext prepared by Susan L. Farley.

An Old Town By The Sea

by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

PISCATAQUA RIVER

Thou singest by the gleaming isles,

By woods, and fields of corn,

Thou singest, and the sunlight smiles

Upon my birthday morn.

But I within a city, I,

So full of vague unrest,

Would almost give my life to lie

An hour upon upon thy breast.

To let the wherry listless go,

And, wrapt in dreamy joy,

Dip, and surge idly to and fro,

Like the red harbor-buoy;

To sit in happy indolence,

To rest upon the oars,

And catch the heavy earthy scents

That blow from summer shores;

To see the rounded sun go down,

And with its parting fires

Light up the windows of the town

And burn the tapering spires;

And then to hear the muffled tolls

From steeples slim and white,

And watch, among the Isles of Shoals,

The Beacon's orange light.

O River! flowing to the main

Through woods, and fields of corn,

Hear thou my longing and my pain

This sunny birthday morn;

And take this song which fancy shapes

To music like thine own,

And sing it to the cliffs and capes

And crags where I am known!

CONTENTS

I. CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

II. ALONG THE WATER SIDE

III. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN

IV. A STROLL ABOUT TOWN (continued)

V. OLD STRAWBERRY BANK

VI. SOME OLD PORTSMOUTH PROFILES

VII. PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

INDEX OF NAMES

AN OLD TOWN BY THE SEA

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

I CALL it an old town, but it is only relatively old. When one

reflects on the countless centuries that have gone to the

for-mation of this crust of earth on which we temporarily move,

the most ancient cities on its surface seem merely things of the

week before last. It was only the other day, then--that is to

say, in the month of June, 1603--that one Martin Pring, in the

ship Speedwell, an enormous ship of nearly fifty tons burden,

from Bristol, England, sailed up the Piscataqua River. The

Speedwell, numbering thirty men, officers and crew, had for

consort the Discoverer, of twenty-six tons and thirteen men.

After following the windings of "the brave river" for twelve

miles or more, the two vessels turned back and put to sea again,

having failed in the chief object of the expedition, which was to

obtain a cargo of the medicinal sassafras-tree, from the bark of

which, as well known to our ancestors, could be distilled the

Elixir of Life.

It was at some point on the left bank of the Piscataqua, three or

four miles from the mouth of the river, that worthy Master Pring

probably effected one of his several landings. The beautiful

stream widens suddenly at this place, and the green banks, then

covered with a network of strawberry vines, and sloping

invitingly to the lip of the crystal water, must have won the

tired mariners.

The explorers found themselves on the edge of a vast forest of

oak, hemlock, maple, and pine; but they saw no sassafras-trees to

speak of, nor did they encounter--what would have been infinitely

less to their taste--and red-men. Here and there were

discoverable the scattered ashes of fires where the Indians had

encamped earlier in the spring; they were absent now, at the

silvery falls, higher up the stream, where fish abounded at that

season. The soft June breeze, laden with the delicate breath of

wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce and pine, ruffled

the duplicate sky in the water; the new leaves lisped pleasantly

in the tree tops, and the birds were singing as if they had gone

mad. No ruder sound or movement of life disturbed the primeval

solitude. Master Pring would scarcely recognize the spot were he

to land there to-day.

Eleven years afterwards a much cleverer man than the commander of

the Speedwell dropped anchor in the Piscataqua--Captain John

Smith of famous memory. After slaying Turks in hand-to-hand

combats, and doing all sorts of doughty deeds wherever he chanced

to decorate the globe with his presence, he had come with two

vessels to the fisheries on the rocky selvage of Maine, when

curiosity, or perhaps a deeper motive, led him to examine the

neighboring shore lines. With eight of his men in a small boat,

a ship's yawl, he skirted the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape

Cod, keeping his eye open. This keeping his eye open was a

peculiarity of the little captain; possibly a family trait. It

was Smith who really discovered the Isles of Shoals, exploring in

person those masses of bleached rock--those "isles assez hautes,"

of which the French navigator Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts,

had caught a bird's-eye glimpse through the twilight in 1605.

Captain Smith christened the group Smith's Isles, a title which

posterity, with singular persistence of ingratitude, has ignored.

It was a tardy sense of justice that expressed itself a few years

ago in erecting on Star Island a simple marble shaft to the

memory of JOHN SMITH--the multitudinous! Perhaps this long delay

is explained by a natural hesitation to label a monument so

ambiguously.

The modern Jason, meanwhile, was not without honor in his own

country, whatever may have happened to him in his own house, for

the poet George Wither addressed a copy of pompous verses "To his

Friend Captain Smith, upon his Description of New England.""Sir,"

he says--

"Sir: your Relations I haue read: which shew

Ther's reason I should honor them and you:

And if their meaning I have vnderstood,

I dare to censure thus: Your Project's good;

And may (if follow'd) doubtlesse quit the paine

With honour, pleasure and a trebble gaine;

Beside the benefit that shall arise

To make more happy our Posterities."

The earliest map of this portion of our seaboard was prepared by

Smith and laid before Prince Charles, who asked to give the

country a name. He christened it New England. In that remarkable

map the site of Portsmouth is call Hull, and Kittery and York are

known as Boston.

It was doubtless owing to Captain John Smith's representation on

his return to England that the Laconia Company selected the banks

of the Piscataqua for their plantation. Smith was on an intimate

footing with Sir Ferinand Gorges, who, five years subsequently,

made a tour of inspection along the New England coast, in company

with John Mason, then Governor of Newfoundland. One of the

results of this summer cruise is the town of Portsmouth, among

whose leafy ways, and into some of whose old-fashioned houses, I

purpose to take the reader, if he have an idle hour on his hands.

Should we meet the flitting ghost of some old-time worthy, on the

staircase or at a lonely street corner, the reader must be

prepared for it.

II.

ALONG THE WATER SIDE

IT is not supposable that the early settlers selected the site of

their plantation on account of its picturesqueness. They were

influenced entirely by the lay of the land, its nearness and easy

access to the sea, and the secure harbor it offered to their

fishing-vessels; yet they could not have chosen a more beautiful

spot had beauty been the sole consideration. The first settlement

was made at Odiorne's Point--the Pilgrims' Rock of New Hampshire;

there the Manor, or Mason's Hall, was built by the Laconia

Company in 1623. It was not until 1631 that the Great House was

erected by Humphrey Chadborn on Strawberry Bank. Mr. Chadborn,

consciously or unconsciously, sowed a seed from which a city has

sprung.

The town of Portsmouth stretches along the south bank of the

Piscataqua, about two miles from the sea as the crow flies--three

miles following the serpentine course of the river. The stream

broadens suddenly at this point, and at flood tide, lying without

a ripple in a basin formed by the interlocked islands and the

mainland, it looks more like an island lake than a river. To the

unaccustomed eye there is no visible outlet. Standing on one of

the wharves at the foot of State Street or Court Street, a

stranger would at first scarcely suspect the contiguity of the

ocean. A little observation, however, would show him that he was

in a seaport. The rich red rust on the gables and roofs of

ancient buildings looking seaward would tell him that. There is

a fitful saline flavor in the air, and if while he gazed a dense

white fog should come rolling in, like a line of phantom

breakers, he would no longer have any doubts.

It is of course the oldest part of the town that skirts the

river, though few of the notable houses that remain are to be

found there. Like all New England settlements, Portsmouth was

built of wood, and has been subjected to extensive

conflagrations. You rarely come across a brick building that is

not shockingly modern. The first house of the kind was erected

by Richard Wibird towards the close of the seventeenth century.

Though many of the old landmarks have been swept away by the

fateful hand of time and fire, the town impresses you as a very

old town, especially as you saunter along the streets down by the

river. The worm-eaten wharves, some of them covered by a sparse,

unhealthy beard of grass, and the weather-stained, unoccupied

warehouses are sufficient to satisfy a moderate appetite for

antiquity. These deserted piers and these long rows of empty

barracks, with their sarcastic cranes projecting from the eaves,

rather puzzle the stranger. Why this great preparation for a

commercial activity that does not exist, and evidently had not

for years existed? There are no ships lying at the pier-heads;

there are no gangs of stevedores staggering under the heavy cases

of merchandise; here and there is a barge laden down to the

bulwarks with coal, and here and there a square-rigged schooner

from Maine smothered with fragrant planks and clapboards; an

imported citizen is fishing at the end of the wharf, a ruminative

freckled son of Drogheda, in perfect sympathy with the indolent

sunshine that seems to be sole proprietor of these crumbling

piles and ridiculous warehouses, from which even the ghost of

prosperity has flown.

Once upon a time, however, Portsmouth carried on an extensive

trade with the West Indies, threatening as a maritime port to

eclipse both Boston and New York. At the windows of these musty

counting-rooms which overlook the river near Spring Market used

to stand portly merchants, in knee breeches and silver

shoe-buckles and plum-colored coats with ruffles at the wrist,

waiting for their ships to come up the Narrows; the cries of

stevedores and the chants of sailors at the windlass used to echo

along the shore where all is silence now. For reasons not worth

setting forth, the trade with the Indies abruptly closed, having

ruined as well as enriched many a Portsmouth adventurer. This

explains the empty warehouses and the unused wharves. Portsmouth

remains the interesting widow of a once very lively commerce. I

fancy that few fortunes are either made or lost in Portsmouth

nowadays. Formerly it turned out the best ships, as it did the

ablest ship captains, in the world. There were families in which

the love for blue water was in immemorial trait. The boys were

always sailors; "a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation,

retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of

fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting

the salt spray and the gale, which had blasted against his sire

and grandsire." (1. Hawthorne in his introduction to The Scarlet

Letter.) With thousands of miles of sea-line and a score or two

of the finest harbors on the globe, we have adroitly turned over

our carrying trade to foreign nations.

In other days, as I have said, a high maritime spirit was

characteristic of Portsmouth. The town did a profitable business

in the war of 1812, sending out a large fleet of the sauciest

small craft on record. A pleasant story is told of one of these

little privateers--the Harlequin, owned and commanded by Captain

Elihu Brown. The Harlequin one day gave chase to a large ship,

which did not seem to have much fight aboard, and had got it into

close quarters, when suddenly the shy stranger threw open her

ports, and proved to be His Majesty's Ship-of-War Bulwark,

seventy-four guns. Poor Captain Brown!

Portsmouth has several large cotton factories and one or two

corpulent breweries; it is a wealthy old town, with a liking for

first mortgage bonds; but its warmest lover will not claim for it

the distinction of being a great mercantile centre. The majority

of her young men are forced to seek other fields to reap, and

almost every city in the Union, and many a city across the sea,

can point to some eminent merchant, lawyer, or what not, as "a

Portsmouth boy." Portsmouth even furnished the late king of the

Sandwich Islands, Kekuanaoa, with a prime minister, and his

nankeen Majesty never had a better. The affection which all these

exiles cherish for their birthplace is worthy of remark. On two

occasions--in 1852 and 1873, the two hundred and fiftieth

anniversary of the settlement of Strawberry Bank--the

transplanted sons of Portsmouth were seized with an impulse to

return home. Simultaneously and almost without concerted action,

the lines of pilgrims took up their march from every quarter of

the globe, and swept down with music and banners on the motherly

old town.

To come back to the wharves. I do not know of any spot with such

a fascinating air of dreams and idleness about it as the old

wharf at the end of Court Street. The very fact that it was once

a noisy, busy place, crowded with sailors and soldiers--in the

war of 1812--gives an emphasis to the quiet that broods over it

to-day. The lounger who sits of a summer afternoon on a rusty

anchor fluke in the shadow of one of the silent warehouses, and

look on the lonely river as it goes murmuring past the town,

cannot be too grateful to the India trade for having taken itself

off elsewhere.

What a slumberous, delightful, lazy place it is! The sunshine

seems to lie a foot deep on the planks of the dusty wharf, which

yields up to the warmth a vague perfume of the cargoes of rum,

molasses, and spice that used to be piled upon it. The river is

as blue as the inside of a harebell. The opposite shore, in the

strangely shifting magic lights of sky and water, stretches along

like the silvery coast of fairyland. Directly opposite you is

the navy yard, and its neat officers' quarters and workshops and

arsenals, and its vast shiphouses, in which the keel of many a

famous frigate has been laid. Those monster buildings on the

water's edge, with their roofs pierced with innumerable little

windows, which blink like eyes in the sunlight, and the

shiphouses. On your right lies a cluster of small islands,--there

are a dozen or more in the harbor--on the most extensive of which

you see the fading-away remains of some earthworks thrown up in

1812. Between this--Trefethren's Island--and Peirce's Island lie

the Narrows. Perhaps a bark or a sloop-of-war is making up to

town; the hulk is hidden amoung the islands, and the topmasts

have the effect of sweeping across the dry land. On your left is

a long bridge, more than a quarter of a mile in length, set upon

piles where the water is twenty or thirty feet deep, leading to

the navy yard and Kittery--the Kittery so often the theme of

Whittier's verse.

This is a mere outline of the landscape that spreads before you.

Its changeful beauty of form and color, with the summer clouds

floating over it, is not to be painted in words. I know of many a

place where the scenery is more varied and striking; but there is

a mandragora quality in the atmosphere here that holds you to the

spot, and makes the half-hours seem like minutes. I could fancy a

man sitting on the end of that old wharf very contentedly for two

or three years, provided it could be always in June.

Perhaps, too, one would desire it to be always high water. The

tide falls from eight to twelve feet, and when the water makes

out between the wharves some of the picturesqueness makes out

also. A corroded section of stovepipe mailed in barnacles, or the

skeleton of a hoopskirt protruding from the tide mud like the

remains of some old-time wreck, is apt to break the enchantment.

I fear I have given the reader an exaggerated idea of the

solitude that reigns along the river-side. Sometimes there is

society here of an unconventional kind, if you care to seek it.

Aside from the foreign gentleman before mentioned, you are likely

to encounter, farther down the shore toward the Point of Graves

(a burial-place of the colonial period), a battered and aged

native fisherman boiling lobsters on a little gravelly bench,

where the river whispers and lisps among the pebbles as the tide

creeps in. It is a weather-beaten ex-skipper or ex-pilot, with

strands of coarse hair, like seaweed, falling about a face that

has the expression of a half-open clam. He is always ready to

talk with you, this amphibious person; and if he is not the most

entertaining of gossips--more weather-wise that Old

Probabilities, and as full of moving incident as Othello

himself--then he is not the wintery-haired shipman I used to see

a few years ago on the strip of beach just beyond Liberty Bridge,

building his drift-wood fire under a great tin boiler, and making

it lively for a lot of reluctant lobsters.

I imagine that very little change has taken place in this

immediate locality, known prosaically as Puddle Dock, during the

past fifty or sixty years. The view you get looking across

Liberty Bridge, Water Street, is probably the same in every

respect that presented itself to the eyes of the town folk a

century ago. The flagstaff, on the right, is the representative

of the old "standard of liberty" which the Sons planted on this

spot in January, 1766, signalizing their opposition to the

enforcement of the Stamp Act. On the same occasion the patriots

called at the house of Mr. George Meserve, the agent for

distributing the stamps in New Hampshire, and relieved him of his

stamp-master's commission, which document they carried on the

point of a sword through the town to Liberty Bridge (the Swing

Bridge), where they erected the staff, with the motto, "Liberty,

Property, and no Stamp!"

The Stamp Act was to go into operation on the first day of

November. On the previous morning the "New Hampshire Gazette"

appeared with a deep black border and all the typographical

emblems of affliction, for was not Liberty dead? At all events,

the "Gazette" itself was as good as dead, since the printer could

no longer publish it if he were to be handicapped by a heavy tax.

"The day was ushered in by the tolling of all the bells in town,

the vessels in the harbor had their colors hoisted half-mast

high; about three o'clock a funeral procession was formed, having

a coffin with this inscription, LIBERTY, AGED 145, STAMPT. It

moved from the state house, with two unbraced drums, through the

principal streets. As it passed the Parade, minute-guns were

fired; at the place of interment a speech was delivered on the

occasion, stating the many advantages we had received and the

melancholy prospect before us, at the seeming departure of our

invaluable liberties. But some sign of life appearing, Liberty

was not deposited in the grave; it was rescued by a number of her

sons, the motto changed to Liberty revived, and carried off in

triumph. The detestable Act was buried in its stead, and the

clods of the valley were laid upon it; the bells changed their

melancholy sound to a more joyful tone." (1. Annals of

Portsmouth, by Nathaniel Adams, 1825.)

With this side glance at one of the curious humors of the time,

we resume our peregrinations.

Turning down a lane on your left, a few rods beyond Liberty

Bridge, you reach a spot known as the Point of Graves, chiefly

interesting as showing what a graveyard may come to if it last

long enough. In 1671 one Captain John Pickering, of whom we

shall have more to say, ceded to the town a piece of ground on

this neck for burial purposes. It is an odd-shaped lot,

comprising about half an acre, inclosed by a crumbling red brick

wall two or three feet high, with wood capping. The place is

overgrown with thistles, rank grass, and fungi; the black slate

headstones have mostly fallen over; those that still make a

pretense of standing slant to every point of the compass, and

look as if they were being blown this way and that by a

mysterious gale which leaves everything else untouched; the

mounds have sunk to the common level, and the old underground

tombs have collapsed. Here and there the moss and weeds you can

pick out some name that shines in the history of the early

settlement; hundreds of the flower of the colony lie here, but

the known and the unknown, gentle and simple, mingle their dust

on a perfect equality now. The marble that once bore a haughty

coat of arms is as smooth as the humblest slate stone guiltless

of heraldry. The lion and the unicorn, wherever they appear on

some cracked slab, are very much tamed by time. The once

fat-faced cherubs, with wing at either cheek, are the merest

skeletons now. Pride, pomp, grief, and remembrance are all at

end. No reverent feet come here, no tears fall here; the old

graveyard itself is dead! A more dismal, uncanny spot than this

at twilight would be hard to find. It is noticed that when the

boys pass it after nightfall, they always go by whistling with a

gayety that is perfectly hollow.

Let us get into some cheerfuler neighborhood!

III.

A STROLL ABOUT TOWN

AS you leave the river front behind you, and pass "up town," the

streets grow wider, and the architecture becomes more

ambitious--streets fringed with beautiful old trees and lined

with commodious private dwellings, mostly square white houses,

with spacious halls running through the centre. Previous to the

Revolution, white paint was seldom used on houses, and the

diamond-shaped window pane was almost universal. Many of the

residences stand back from the brick or flagstone sidewalk, and

have pretty gardens at the side or in the rear, made bright with

dahlias and sweet with cinnamon roses. If you chance to live in a

town where the authorities cannot rest until they have destroyed

every precious tree within their blighting reach, you will be

especially charmed by the beauty of the streets of Portsmouth.

In some parts of the town, when the chestnuts are in blossom, you

would fancy yourself in a garden in fairyland. In spring,

summer, and autumn the foliage is the glory of the fair town--her

luxuriant green and golden treeses! Nothing could seem more like

the work of enchantment than the spectacle which certain streets

in Portsmouth present in the midwinter after a heavy snowstorm.

You may walk for miles under wonderful silvery arches formed by

the overhanging and interlaced boughs of the trees, festooned

with a drapery even more graceful and dazzling than springtime

gives them. The numerous elms and maples which shade the

principal thoroughfares are not the result of chance, but the

ample reward of the loving care that is taken to preserve the

trees. There is a society in Portsmouth devoted to

arboriculture. It is not unusual there for persons to leave

legacies to be expended in setting out shade and ornamental trees

along some favorite walk. Richards Avenue, a long, unbuilt

thoroughfare leading from Middle Street to the South

Burying-Ground, perpetuates the name of a citizen who gave the

labor of his own hands to the beautifying of that windswept and

barren road the cemetery. This fondness and care for trees seems

to be a matter of heredity. So far back as 1660 the selectmen

instituted a fine of five shillings for the cutting of timber or

any other wood from off the town common, excepting under special

conditions.

In the business section of the town trees are few. The chief

business streets are Congress and Market. Market Street is the

stronghold of the dry-goods shops. There are seasons, I suppose,

when these shops are crowded, but I have never happened to be in

Portsmouth at the time. I seldom pass through the narrow

cobble-paved street without wondering where the customers are

that must keep all these flourishing little establishments going.

Congress Street--a more elegant thoroughfare than Market--is the

Nevski Prospekt of Portsmouth. Among the prominent buildings is

the Athenaeum, containing a reading-room and library. From the

high roof of this building the stroller will do well to take a

glance at the surrounding country. He will naturally turn

seaward for the more picturesque aspects. If the day is clear, he

will see the famous Isle of Shoals, lying nine miles

away--Appledore, Smutty-Nose, Star Island, White Island, etc.;

there are nine of them in all. On Appledore is Laighton's Hotel,

and near it the summer cottage of Celia Thaxter, the poet of the

Isles. On the northern end of Star Island is the quaint town of

Gosport, with a tiny stone church perched like a sea-gull on its

highest rock. A mile southwest form Star Island lies White

Island, on which is a lighthouse. Mrs. Thaxter calls this the

most picturesque of the group. Perilous neighbors, O mariner! in

any but the serenest weather, these wrinkled, scarred, are

storm-smitten rocks, flanked by wicked sunken ledges that grow

white at the lip with rage when the great winds blow!

How peaceful it all looks off there, on the smooth emerald sea!

and how softly the waves seem to break on yonder point where the

unfinished fort is! That is the ancient town of Newcastle, to

reach which from Portsmouth you have to cross three bridges with

the most enchanting scenery in New Hampshire lying on either

hand. At Newcastle the poet Stedman has built for his summerings

an enviable little stone chateau--a seashell into which I fancy

the sirens creep to warm themselves during the winter months. So

it is never without its singer.

Opposite Newcastle is Kittery Point, a romantic spot, where Sir

William Pepperell, the first American baronet, once lived, and

where his tomb now is, in his orchard across the road, a few

hundred yards from the "goodly mansion" he built. The knight's

tomb and the old Pepperell House, which has been somewhat

curtailed of it fair proportions, are the objects of frequent

pilgrimages to Kittery Point.

From the elevation (the roof of the Athenaeun) the navy yard, the

river with its bridges and islands, the clustered gables of

Kittery and Newcastle, the illimitable ocean beyond make a

picture worth climbing four or five flights of stairs to gaze

upon. Glancing down on the town nestled in the foliage, it seems

like a town dropped by chance in the midst of a forest. Among the

prominent objects which lift themselves above the tree tops are

the belfries of the various churches, the white façade of the

custom house, and the mansard and chimneys of the Rockingham, the

principal hotel. The pilgrim will be surprised to find in

Portsmouth one of the most completely appointed hotels in the

United States. The antiquarian may lament the demolition of the

old Bell Tavern, and think regretfully of the good cheer once

furnished the wayfarer by Master Stavers at the sign of the Earl

of Halifax, and by Master Stoodley at his inn on Daniel Street;

but the ordinary traveler will thank his stars, and confess that

his lines have fallen in pleasant places, when he finds himself

among the frescoes of the Rockingham.

Obliquely opposite the doorstep of the Athenaeum--we are supposed

to be on terra firma again--stands the Old North Church, a

substantial wooden building, handsomely set on what is called The

Parade, a large open space formed by the junction of Congress,

Market, Daniel, and Pleasant streets. Here in days innocent of

water-works stood the town pump, which on more than one occasion

served as whipping-post.

The churches of Portsmouth are more remarkable for their number

than their architecture. With the exception of the Stone Church

they are constructed of wood or plain brick in the simplest

style. St. John's Church is the only one likely to attract the

eye of a stranger. It is finely situated on the crest of Church

Hill, overlooking the ever-beautiful river. The present edifice

was built in 1808 on the site of what was known as Queen's

Chapel, erected in 1732, and destroyed by fire December 24, 1806.

The chapel was named in honor of Queen Caroline, who furnished

the books for the altar and pulpit, the plate, and two solid

mahogany chairs, which are still in use in St. John's. Within

the chancel rail is a curious font of porphyry, taken by Colonel

John Tufton Mason at the capture of Senegal from the French in

1758, and presented to the Episcopal Society on 1761. The

peculiarly sweet-toned bell which calls the parishioners of St.

John's together every Sabbath is, I believe, the same that

formerly hung in the belfry of the old Queen's Chapel. If so, the

bell has a history of its own. It was brought from Louisburg at

the time of the reduction of that place in 1745, and given to the

church by the officers of the New Hampshire troops.

The Old South Meeting-House is not to be passed without mention.

It is among the most aged survivals of pre-revolutionary days.

Neither its architecture not its age, however, is its chief

warrant for our notice. The absurd number of windows in this

battered old structure is what strikes the passer-by. The church

was erected by subscription, and these closely set large windows

are due to Henry Sherburne, one of the wealthiest citizens of the

period, who agreed to pay for whatever glass was used. If the

building could have been composed entirely of glass it would have

been done by the thrifty parishioners.

Portsmouth is rich in graveyards--they seem to be a New England

specialty--ancient and modern. Among the old burial-places the

one attached to St. John's Church is perhaps the most

interesting. It has not been permitted to fall into ruin, like

the old cemetery at the Point of Graves. When a headstone here

topples over it is kindly lifted up and set on its pins again,

and encouraged to do its duty. If it utterly refuses, and is not

shamming decrepitude, it has its face sponged, and is allowed to

rest and sun itself against the wall of the church with a row of

other exempts. The trees are kept pruned, the grass trimmed, and

here and there is a rosebush drooping with a weight of pensive

pale roses, as becomes a rosebush in a churchyard.

The place has about it an indescribable soothing atmosphere of

respectability and comfort. Here rest the remains of the

principal and loftiest in rank in their generation of the

citizens of Portsmouth prior to the Revolution--stanch,

royalty-loving governors, counselors, and secretaries of the

Providence of New Hampshire, all snugly gathered under the

motherly wing of the Church of England. It is almost impossible

to walk anywhere without stepping on a governor. You grow haughty

in spirit after a while, and scorn to tread on anything less than

one of His Majesty's colonels or secretary under the Crown. Here

are the tombs of the Atkinsons, the Jaffreys, the Sherburnes, the

Sheafes, the Marshes, the Mannings, the Gardners, and others of

the quality. All around you underfoot are tumbled-in coffins,

with here and there a rusty sword atop, and faded escutcheons,

and crumbling armorial devices. You are moving in the very best

society.

This, however, is not the earliest cemetery in Portsmouth. An

hour's walk from the Episcopal yard will bring you to the spot,

already mentioned, where the first house was built and the first

grave made, at Odiorne's Point. The exact site of the Manor is

not known, but it is supposed to be a few rods north of an old

well of still-flowing water, at which the Tomsons and the Hiltons

and their comrades slaked their thirst more than two hundred and

sixty years ago. Oriorne's Point is owned by Mr. Eben L. Odiorne,

a lineal descendant of the worthy who held the property in 1657.

Not far from the old spring is the resting-place of the earliest

pioneers.

"This first cemetery of the white man in New Hampshire," writes

Mr. Brewster, (1. Mr. Charles W. Brewster, for nearly fifty years

the editor of the Portsmouth Journal, and the author of two

volumes of local sketches to which the writer of these pages here

acknowledges his indebtedness.) "occupies a space of perhaps one

hundred feet by ninety, and is well walled in. The western side

is now used as a burial-place for the family, but two thirds of

it is filled with perhaps forty graves, indicated by rough head

and foot stones. Who there rest no one now living knows. But the

same care is taken of their quiet beds as if they were of the

proprietor's own family. In 1631 Mason sent over about eighty

emigrants many of whom died in a few years, and here they were

probably buried. Here too, doubtless, rest the remains of

several of those whose names stand conspicuous in our early state

records."

IV.

A STROLL ABOUT TOWN (continued)

WHEN Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789 he was not much

impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood

by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence. "There are

some good houses," he writes, in a diary kept that year during a

tour through Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, "

among which Colonel Langdon's may be esteemed the first; but in

general they are indifferent, and almost entirely of wood. On

wondering at this, as the country is full of stone and good clay

for bricks, I was told that on account of the fogs and damp they

deemed them wholesomer, and for that reason preferred wood

buildings."

The house of Colonel Langdon, on Pleasant Street, is an excellent

sample of the solid and dignified abodes which our

great-grandsires had the sense to build. The art of their

construction seems to have been a lost art these fifty years.

Here Governor John Langdon resided from 1782 until the time of

his death in 1819--a period during which many an illustrious man

passed between those two white pillars that support the little

balcony over the front door; among the rest Louis Philippe and

his brothers, the Ducs de Montpensier and Beaujolais, and the

Marquis de Chastellus, a major-general in the French army,

serving under the Count de Rochambeau, whom he accompanied from

France to the States in 1780. The journal of the marquis contains

this reference to his host: "After dinner we went to drink tea

with Mr. Langdon. He is a handsome man, and of noble carriage; he

has been a member of Congress, and is now one of the first people

of the country; his house is elegant and well furnished, and the

apartments admirably well wainscoted" (this reads like Mr. Samuel

Pepys); "and he has a good manuscript chart of the harbor of

Portsmouth. Mrs. Langdon, his wife, is young, fair, and tolerably

handsome, but I conversed less with her than her husband, in

whose favor I was prejudiced from knowing that he had displayed

great courage and patriotism at the time of Burgoynes's

expedition."

It was at the height of the French Revolution that the three sons

of the Due d'Orleans were entertained at the Langdon mansion.

Years afterward, when Louis Philippe was on the throne of France,

he inquired of a Portsmouth lady presented at his court if the

mansion of ce brave Gouverneur Langdon was still in existence.

The house stands back a decorous distance from the street, under

the shadows of some gigantic oaks or elms, and presents an

imposing appearance as you approach it over the tessellated

marble walk. A hundred or two feet on either side of the gate,

and abutting on the street, is a small square building of brick,

one story in height--probably the porter's lodge and tool-house

of former days. There is a large fruit garden attached to the

house, which is in excellent condition, taking life comfortably,

and having the complacent air of a well-preserved beau of the

ancien regime. The Langdon mansion was owned and long occupied by

the late Rev. Dr. Burroughs, for a period of forty-seven years

the esteemed rector or St. John's Church.

At the other end of Pleasant Street is another notable house, to

which we shall come by and by. Though President Washington found

Portsmouth but moderately attractive from an architectural point

of view, the visitor of to-day, if he have an antiquarian taste,

will find himself embarrassed by the number of localities and

buildings that appeal to his interest. Many of these buildings

were new and undoubtedly commonplace enough at the date of

Washington's visit; time and association have given them a

quaintness and a significance which now make their architecture a

question of secondary importance.

One might spend a fortnight in Portsmouth exploring the nooks and

corners over which history has thrown a charm, and by no means

exhaust the list. I cannot do more than attempt to describe--and

that very briefly--a few of the typical old houses. On this same

Pleasant Street there are several which we must leave unnoted,

with their spacious halls and carven staircases, their antiquated

furniture and old silver tankards and choice Copleys. Numerous

examples of this artist's best manner are to be found here. To

live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by

Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the

old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said

to flourish. To make this statement smooth, I will remark that

every one in Portsmouth has a Copley--or would have if a fair

division were made.

In the better sections of the town the houses are kept in such

excellent repair, and have so smart an appearance with their

bright green blinds and freshly painted woodwork,that you are

likely to pass many an old landmark without suspecting it.

Whenever you see a house with a gambrel roof, you may be almost

positive that the house is at least a hundred years old, for the

gambrel roof went out of fashion after the Revolution.

On the corner of Daniel and Chapel streets stands the oldest

brick building in Portsmouth--the Warner House. It was built in

1718 by Captain Archibald Macpheadris, a Scotchman, as his name

indicates, a wealthy merchant, and a member of the King's

Council. He was the chief projector of one of the earliest

iron-works established in America. Captain Macpheadris married

Sarah Wentworth, one of the sixteen children of Governor John

Wentworth, and died in 1729, leaving a daughter, Mary, whose

portrait, with that of her mother, painted by the ubiquitous

Copley, still hangs in the parlor of this house, which is not

known by the name of Captain Macpheadris, but by that of his

son-in-law, Hon. Jonathan Warner, a member of the King's Council

until the revolt of the colonies. "We well recollect Mr. Warner,"

says Mr. Brewster, writing in 1858, "as one of the last of the

cocked hats. As in a vision of early childhood he is still before

us, in all the dignity of the aristocratic crown officers. That

broad-backed, long-skirted brown coat, those small-clothes and

silk stockings, those silver buckles, and that cane--we see them

still, although the life that filled and moved them ceased half a

century ago."

The Warner House, a three-story building with gambrel roof and

luthern windows, is as fine and substantial an exponent of the

architecture of the period as you are likely to meet with

anywhere in New England. The eighteen-inch walls are of brick

brought from Holland, as were also many of the materials used in

the building--the hearth-stones, tiles, etc. Hewn-stone

underpinnings were seldom adopted in those days; the brick-work

rests directly upon the solid walls of the cellar. The interior

is rich in paneling and wood carvings about the mantel-shelves,

the deep-set windows, and along the cornices. The halls are wide

and long, after a by-gone fashion, with handsome staircases, set

at an easy angle, and not standing nearly upright, like those

ladders by which one reaches the upper chambers of a modern

house. The principal rooms are paneled to the ceiling, and have

large open chimney-places, adorned with the quaintest of Dutch

files. In one of the parlors of the Warner House there is a

choice store of family relics--china, silver-plate, costumes, old

clocks, and the like. There are some interesting paintings,

too--not by Copley this time. On a broad space each side of the

hall windows, at the head of the staircase, are pictures of two

Indians, life size. They are probably portraits of some of the

numerous chiefs with whom Captain Macphaedris had dealings, for

the captain was engaged in the fur as well as in the iron

business. Some enormous elk antlers, presented to Macpheadris by

his red friends, are hanging in the lower hall.

By mere chance, thirty or forty years ago, some long-hidden

paintings on the walls of this lower hall were brought to light.

In repairing the front entry it became necessary to remove the

paper, of which four or five layers had accumulated. A one place,

where several coats had peeled off cleanly, a horse's hoof was

observed by a little girl of the family. The workman then began

removing the paper carefully; first the legs, then the body of a

horse with a rider were revealed, and the astonished paper-hanger

presently stood before a life-size representation of Governor

Phipps on his charger. The workman called other persons to his

assistance, and the remaining portions of the wall were speedily

stripped, laying bare four or five hundred square feet covered

with sketches in color, landscapes, views of unknown cities,

Biblical scenes, and modern figure-pieces, among which was a lady

at a spinning-wheel. Until then no person in the land of the

living had had any knowledge of those hidden pictures. An old

dame of eighty, who had visited at the house intimately ever

since her childhood, all but refused to believe her spectacles

(though Supply Ham made them(1.)) when brought face to face with

the frescoes. (1. In the early part of this century, Supply Ham

was the leading optician and watchmaker of Portsmouth.)

The place is rich in bricabrac, but there is nothing more curious

that these incongruous printings, clearly the work of a practiced

hand. Even the outside of the old edifice is not without its

interest for an antiquarian. The lightening-rod which protects

the Warner House to-day was put up under Benjamin Franklin's own

supervision in 1762--such at all events is the credited

tradition--and is supposed to be the first rod put up in New

Hampshire. A lightening-rod "personally conducted" by Benjamin

Franklin ought to be an attractive object to even the least

susceptible electricity. The Warner House has another imperative

claim on the good-will of the visitor--it is not positively known

that George Washington ever slept there.

The same assertion cannot be made on connection with the old

yellow barracks situated in the southwest corner of Court and

Atkinson streets. Famous old houses seem to have an intuitive

perception of the value of corner lots. If it is a possible

thing, they always set themselves down on the most desirable

spots. It is beyond a doubt that Washington slept not only one

night, but several nights, under this roof; for this was a

celebrated tavern previous and subsequent to the War of

Independence, and Washington made it his headquarters during his

visit to Portsmouth in 1797. When I was a boy I knew an old

lady--not one of the preposterous old ladies in the newspapers,

who have all their faculties unimpaired, but a real old lady,

whose ninety-nine years were beginning to tell on her--who had

known Washington very well. She was a girl in her teens when he

came to Portsmouth. The President was the staple of her

conversation during the last ten years of her life, which she

passed in the Stavers House, bedridden; and I think those ten

years were in a manner rendered short and pleasant to the old

gentlewoman by the memory of a compliment to her complexion which

Washington probably never paid to it.

The old hotel--now a very unsavory tenement-house--was built by

John Tavers, innkeeper, in 1770, who planted in front of the door

a tall post, from which swung the sign of the Earl of Halifax.

Stavers had previously kept an inn of the same name on Queen, now

State Street.

It is a square three-story building, shabby and dejected, giving

no hint of the really important historical associations that

cluster about it. At the time of its erection it was no doubt

considered a rather grand structure, for buildings of three

stories were rare in Portsmouth. Even in 1798, of the six hundred

and twenty-six dwelling houses of which the town boasted,

eighty-six were of one story, five hundred and twenty-four were

of two stories, and only sixteen of three stories. The Stavers

inn has the regulation gambrel roof, but is lacking in those wood

ornaments which are usually seen over the doors and windows of

the more prominent houses of that epoch. It was, however, the

hotel of the period.

That same worn doorstep upon which Mr. O'Shaughnessy now

stretches himself of a summer afternoon, with a short clay pipe

stuck between his lips, and his hat crushed down on his brows,

revolving the sad vicissitude of things--that same doorstep has

been pressed by the feet of generals and marquises and grave

dignitaries upon whom depended the destiny of the

States--officers in gold lace and scarlet cloth, and high-heeled

belles in patch, powder, and paduasoy. At this door the Flying

Stage Coach, which crept from Boston, once a week set down its

load of passengers--and distinguished passengers they often were.

Most of the chief celebrities of the land, before and after the

secession of the colonies, were the guests of Master Stavers, at

the sign of the Earl of Halifax.

While the storm was brewing between the colonies and the mother

country, it was in a back room of the tavern that the adherents

of the crown met to discuss matters. The landlord himself was a

amateur loyalist, and when the full cloud was on the eve of

breaking he had an early intimation of the coming tornado. The

Sons of Liberty had long watched with sullen eyes the secret

sessions of the Tories in Master Stavers's tavern, and one

morning the patriots quietly began cutting down the post which

supported the obnoxious emblem. Mr. Stavers, who seems not to

have been belligerent himself, but the cause of belligerence in

others, sent out his black slave with orders to stop proceedings.

The negro, who was armed with an axe, struck but a single blow

and disappeared. This blow fell upon the head of Mark Noble; it

did not kill him, but left him an insane man till the day of his

death, forty years afterward. A furious mob at once collected,

and made an attack on the tavern, bursting in the doors and

shattering every pane of glass in the windows. It was only

through the intervention of Captain John Langdon, a warm and

popular patriot, that the hotel was saved from destruction.

In the mean while Master Stavers had escaped through the stables

in the rear. He fled to Stratham, where he was given refuge by

his friend William Pottle, a most appropriately named gentleman,

who had supplied the hotel with ale. The excitement blew over

after a time, and Stavers was induced to return to Portsmouth. He

was seized by the Committee of Safety, and lodged in Exeter jail,

when his loyalty, which had really never been very high, went

down below zero; he took the oath of allegiance, and shortly

after his released reopened the hotel. The honest face of William

Pitt appeared on the repentant sign, vice Earl of Halifax,

ignominiously removed, and Stavers was himself again. In the

state records is the following letter from poor Noble begging for

the enlargement of John Stavers:--

PORTSMOUTH, February 3, 1777.

To the Committee of Safety of the Town of Exeter:

GENTLEMEN,--As I am informed that Mr. Stivers is in confinement

in gaol upon my account contrary to my desire, for when I was at

Mr. Stivers a fast day I had no ill nor ment none against the

Gentleman but by bad luck or misfortune I have received a bad

Blow but it is so well that I hope to go out in a day or two. So

by this gentlemen of the Committee I hope you will release the

gentleman upon my account. I am yours to serve.

MARK NOBLE,

A friend to my country.

From that period until I know not what year the Stavers House

prospered. It was at the sign of the William Pitt that the

officers of the French fleet boarded in 1782, and hither came the

Marquis Lafayette, all the way from Providence, to visit

them.John Hancock, Elbridge Gerry, Rutledge, and other signers of

the Declaration sojourned here at various times. It was here

General Knox--"that stalwart man, two officers in size and three

in lungs"--was wont to order his dinner, and in a stentorian

voice compliment Master Stavers on the excellence of his larder.

One day--it was at the time of the French Revolution--Louis

Philippe and his two brothers applied at the door of the William

Pitt for lodgings; but the tavern was full, and the future king,

with his companions, found comfortable quarters under the

hospitable roof of Governor Langdon in Pleasant Street.

A record of the scenes, tragic and humorous, that have been

enacted within this old yellow house on the corner would fill a

volume. A vivid picture of the social and public life of the old

time might be painted by a skillful hand, using the two Earl of

Halifax inns for a background. The painter would find gay and

sombre pigments ready mixed for his palette, and a hundred

romantic incidents waiting for his canvas. One of these romantic

episodes has been turned to very pretty account by Longfellow in

the last series of The Tales of a Wayside Inn--the marriage of

Governor Benning Wentworth with Martha Hilton, a sort of second

edition of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.

Martha Hilton was a poor girl, whose bare feet and ankles and

scant drapery when she was a child, and even after she was well

in the bloom of her teens, used to scandalize good Dame Stavers,

the innkeeper's wife. Standing one afternoon in the doorway of

the Earl of Halifax, (1. The first of the two hotels bearing that

title. Mr. Brewster commits a slight anachronism in locating the

scene of this incident in Jaffrey Street, now Court. The Stavers

House was not built until the year of Governor Benning

Wentworth's death. Mr. Longfellow, in the poem, does not fall

into the same error.

"One hundred years ago, and something more,

In Queen Street, Portsmouth, at her tavern door,

Neat as a pin, and blooming as a rose,

Stood Mistress Stavers in her furbelows.")

Dame Stavers took occasion to remonstrate with the sleek-limbed

and lightly draped Martha, who chanced to be passing the tavern,

carrying a pail of water, in which, as the poet neatly says, "the

shifting sunbeam danced."

"You Pat! you Pat!" cried Mrs. Stavers severely; "why do you go

looking so? You should be ashamed to be seen in the street."

"Never mind how I look," says Miss Martha, with a merry laugh,

letting slip a saucy brown shoulder out of her dress; "I shall

ride in my chariot yet, ma'am."

Fortunate prophecy! Martha went to live as servant with Governor

Wentworth at his mansion at Little Harbor, looking out to sea.

Seven years passed, and the "thin slip of a girl," who promised

to be no great beauty, had flowered into the loveliest of women,

with a lip like a cherry and a cheek like a tea-rose--a lady by

instinct, one of Nature's own ladies. The governor, a lonely

widower, and not too young, fell in love with his fair handmaid.

Without stating his purpose to any one, Governor Wentworth

invited a number of friends (among others the Rev. Arthur Brown)

to dine with him at Little Harbor on his birthday. After the

dinner, which was a very elaborate one, was at an end, and the

guests were discussing their tobacco-pipes, Martha Hilton glided

into the room, and stood blushing in front of the chimney-place.

She was exquisitely dressed, as you may conceive, and wore her

hair three stories high. The guests stared at each other, and

particularly at her, and wondered. Then the governor, rising from

his seat,

"Played slightly with his ruffles, then looked down,

And said unto the Reverend Arthur Brown:

'This is my birthday; it shall likewise be

My wedding-day; and you shall marry me!'"

The rector was dumfounded, knowing the humble footing Martha had

held in the house, and could think of nothing cleverer to say

than, "To whom, your excellency?" which was not cleaver at all.

"To this lady," replied the governor, taking Martha Hilton by the

hand. The Rev. Arthur Brown hesitated. "As the Chief Magistrate

of New Hampshire I command you to marry me!" cried the choleric

old governor.

And so it was done; and the pretty kitchen-maid became Lady

Wentworth, and did ride in her own chariot. She would not have

been a woman if she had not taken an early opportunity to drive

by Staver's hotel!

Lady Wentworth had a keen appreciation of the dignity of her new

station, and became a grand lady at once. A few days after her

marriage, dropping her ring on the floor, she languidly ordered

her servant to pick it up. The servant, who appears to have had a

fair sense of humor, grew suddenly near-sighted, and was unable

to the ring until Lady Wentworth stooped and placed her

ladyship's finger upon it. She turned out a faultless wife,

however; and Governor Wentworth at his death, which occurred in

1770, signified his approval of her by leaving her his entire

estate. She married again without changing name, accepting the

hand, and what there was of the heart, of Michael Wentworth, a

retired colonel of the British army, who came to this country in

1767. Colonel Wentworth (not connected, I think, with the

Portsmouth branch of Wentworths) seems to have been of a

convivial turn of mind. He shortly dissipated his wife's fortune

in high living, and died abruptly in New York--it was supposed by

his own hand. His last words--a quite unique contribution to the

literature of last words--were, "I have had my cake, and ate it,"

which showed that the colonel within his own modest limitations

was a philosopher.

The seat of Governor Wentworth at Little Harbor--a pleasant walk

from Market Square--is well worth a visit. Time and change have

laid their hands more lightly on this rambling old pile than on

any other of the old homes in Portsmouth. When you cross the

threshold of the door you step into the colonial period. Here the

Past seems to have halted courteously, waiting for you to catch

up with it. Inside and outside the Wentworth mansion remains

nearly as the old governor left it; and though it is no longer in

the possession of the family, the present owners, in their

willingness to gratify the decent curiosity of strangers, show a

hospitality which has always characterized the place.

The house is an architectural freak. The main building--if it is

the main building--is generally two stories in height, with

irregular wings forming three sides of a square which opens in

the water. It is, in brief, a cluster of whimsical extensions

that look as if they had been built at different periods, which I

believe was not the case. The mansion was completed in 1750. It

originally contained fifty-two rooms; a portion of the structure

was removed about half a century ago, leaving forty-five

apartments. The chambers were connected in the oddest manner, by

unexpected steps leading up or down, and capricious little

passages that seem to have been the unhappy afterthoughts of the

architect. But it is a mansion on a grand scale, and with a grand

air. The cellar was arranged for the stabling of a troop of

thirty horse in times of danger. The council-chamber, where for

many years all questions of vital importance to the State were

discussed, is a spacious, high-studded room, finished in the

richest style of the last century. It is said that the

ornamentation of the huge mantel, carved with knife and chisel,

cost the workman a year's constant labor. At the entrance to the

council-chamber are still the racks for the twelve muskets of the

governor's guard--so long ago dismissed!

Some valuable family portraits adorn the walls here, among which

is a fine painting-yes, by our friend Copley--of the lovely

Dorothy Quincy, who married John Hancock, and afterward became

Madam Scott. This lady was a niece of Dr. Holme's "Dorothy Q."

Opening on the council-chamber is a large billiard-room; the

billiard-table is gone, but an ancient spinnet, with the prim air

of an ancient maiden lady, and of a wheezy voice, is there; and

in one corner stands a claw-footed buffet, near which the

imaginative nostril may still detect a faint and tantalizing odor

of colonial punch. Opening also on the council-chamber are

several tiny apartments, empty and silent now, in which many a

close rubber has been played by illustrious hands. The stillness

and loneliness of the old house seem saddest here. The jeweled

fingers are dust, the merry laughs have turned themselves into

silent, sorrowful phantoms, stealing from chamber to chamber. It

is easy to believe in the traditional ghost that haunts the

place--

"A jolly place in times of old,

But something ails it now!"

The mansion at Little Harbor is not the only historic house that

bears the name of Wentworth. On Pleasant Street, at the head of

Washington Street, stands the abode of another colonial worthy,

Governor John Wentworth, who held office from 1767 down to the

moment when the colonies dropped the British yoke as if it had

been the letter H. For the moment the good gentleman's occupation

was gone. He was a royalist of the most florid complexion. In

1775, a man named John Fenton, and ex-captain in the British

army, who had managed to offend the Sons of Liberty, was given

sanctuary in this house by the governor, who refused to deliver

the fugitive to the people. The mob planted a small cannon

(unloaded) in front of the doorstep and threatened to open fire

if Fenton were not forthcoming. He forth-with came. The family

vacated the premises via the back-yard, and the mob entered,

doing considerable damage. The broken marble chimney-place still

remains, mutely protesting against the uncalled-for violence.

Shortly after this event the governor made his way to England,

where his loyalty was rewarded first with a governorship and then

with a pension of L500. He was governor of Nova Scotia from 1792

to 1800, and died in Halifax in 1820. This house is one of the

handsomest old dwellings in the town, and promises to outlive

many of its newest neighbors. The parlor has undergone no change

whatever since the populace rushed into it over a century ago.

The furniture and adornments occupy their original positions and

the plush on the walls has not been replaced by other hangings.

In the hall--deep enough for the traditional duel of baronial

romance--are full-length portraits of the several governors and

sundry of their kinsfolk.

There is yet a third Wentworth house, also decorated with the

shade of a colonial governor--there were three Governors

Wentworth--but we shall pass it by, though out of no lack of

respect for that high official personage whose commission was

signed by Joseph Addison, Esq., Secretary of State under George

OLD STRAWBERRY BANK

THESE old houses have perhaps detained us too long. They are

merely the crumbling shells of things dead and gone, of persons

and manners and customs that have left no very distinct record of

themselves, excepting here and there in some sallow manuscript

which has luckily escaped the withering breath of fire, for the

old town, as I have remarked, has managed, from the earliest

moment of its existence, to burn itself up periodically. It is

only through the scattered memoranda of ancient town clerks, and

in the files of worm-eaten and forgotten newspapers, that we are

enabled to get glimpses of that life which was once so real and

positive and has now become a shadow. I am of course speaking of

the early days of the settlement on Strawberry Bank. They were

stormy and eventful days. The dense forest which surrounded the

clearing was alive with hostile red-men. The sturdy pilgrim went

to sleep with his firelock at his bedside, not knowing at what

moment he might be awakened by the glare of his burning hayricks

and the piercing war-whoops of the Womponoags. Year after year he

saw his harvest reaped by a sickle of flames, as he peered

through the loop-holes of the blockhouse, whither he had flown in

hot haste with goodwife and little ones. The blockhouse at

Strawberry Bank appears to have been on an extensive scale, with

stockades for the shelter of cattle. It held large supplies of

stores, and was amply furnished with arquebuses, sakers, and

murtherers, a species of naval ordnance which probably did not

belie its name. It also boasted, we are told, of two drums for

training-days, and no fewer than fifteen hautboys and soft-voiced

recorders--all which suggests a mediaeval castle, or a grim

fortress in the time of Queen Elizabeth. To the younger members

of the community glass or crockery ware was an unknown substance;

to the elders it was a memory. An iron pot was the

pot-of-all-work, and their table utensils were of beaten pewter.

The diet was also of the simplest--pea-porridge and corn-cake,

with a mug of ale or a flagon of Spanish wine, when they could

get it.

John Mason, who never resided in this country, but delegated the

management of his plantation at Ricataqua and Newichewannock to

stewards, died before realizing any appreciable return from his

enterprise. He spared no endeavor meanwhile to further its

prosperity. In 1632, three years before his death, Mason sent

over from Denmark a number of neat cattle, "of a large breed and

yellow colour." The herd thrived, and it is said that some of the

stock is still extant on farms in the vicinity of Portsmouth.

Those old first families had a kind of staying quality!

In May, 1653, the inhabitants of the settlement petitioned the

General Court at Boston to grant them a definite township--for

the boundaries were doubtful--and the right to give it a proper

name. "Whereas the name of this plantation att present being

Strabery Banke, accidentlly soe called, by reason of a banke

where strawberries was found in this place, now we humbly desire

to have it called Portsmouth, being a name most suitable for this

place, it being the river's mouth, and good as any in this land,

and your petit'rs shall humbly pray," etc.

Throughout that formative period, and during the intermittent

French wars, Portsmouth and the outlying districts were the

scenes of bloody Indian massacres. No portion of the New England

colony suffered more. Famine, fire, pestilence, and war, each in

turn, and sometimes in conjunction, beleaguered the little

stronghold, and threatened to wipe it out. But that was not to

be.

The settlement flourished and increased in spite of all, and as

soon as it had leisure to draw breath, it bethought itself of the

school-house and the jail--two incontestable signs of budding

civilization. At a town meeting in 1662, it was ordered "that a

cage be made or some other meanes invented by the selectmen to

punish such as sleepe or take tobacco on the Lord's day out of

the meetinge in the time of publique service." This salutary

measure was not, for some reason, carried into effect until nine

years later, when Captain John Pickering, who seems to have had

as many professions as Michelangelo, undertook to construct a

cage twelve feet square and seven feet high, with a pillory on

top; "the said Pickering to make a good strong dore and make a

substantiale payre of stocks and places the same in said cage." A

spot conveniently near the west end on the meeting-house was

selected as the site for this ingenious device. It is more than

probable that "the said Pickering" indirectly furnished an

occasional bird for his cage, for in 1672 we find him and one

Edward Westwere authorized by the selectmen to "keepe houses of

publique entertainment." He was a versatile individual, this John

Pickering--soldier, miller, moderator, carpenter, lawyer, and

innkeeper. Michelangelo need not blush to be bracketed with him.

In the course of a long and variegated career he never failed to

act according to his lights, which he always kept well trimmed.

That Captain Pickering subsequently became the grandfather, at

several removes, of the present writer was no fault of the

Captain's, and should not be laid up against him.

Down to 1696, the education of the young appears to have been a

rather desultory and tentative matter; "the young idea" seems to

have been allowed to "shoot" at whatever it wanted to; but in

that year it was voted "that care be taken that an abell

scollmaster [skullmaster!] be provided for the towen as the law

directs, not visious in conversation." That was perhaps demanding

too much; for it was not until "May ye7" of the following year

that the selectmen were fortunate enough to put their finger on

this rara avis in the person of Mr. Tho. Phippes, who agreed "to

be scollmaster for the the towen this yr insewing for teaching

the inhabitants children in such manner as other schollmasters

yously doe throughout the countrie: for his soe doinge we the

sellectt men in behalfe of ower towen doe ingage to pay him by

way of rate twenty pounds and yt he shall and may reserve from

every father or master that sends theyer children to school this

yeare after ye rate of 16s. for readers, writers and cypherers

20s., Lattiners 24s."

Modern advocates of phonetic spelling need not plume themselves

on their originality. The town clerk who wrote that delicious

"yously doe" settles the question. It is to be hoped that Mr.

Tho. Phippes was not only "not visious in conversation," but was

more conventional in his orthography. He evidently gave

satisfaction, and clearly exerted an influence on the town clerk,

Mr. Samuel Keais, who ever after shows a marked improvement in

his own methods. In 1704 the town empowered the selectmen "to

call and settell a gramer scoll according to ye best of yower

judgement and for ye advantag [Keais is obviously dead now] of ye

youth of ower town to learn them to read from ye primer, to

wright and sypher and to learne ym the tongues and good-manners."

On this occasion it was Mr. William Allen, of Salisbury, who

engaged "dilligently to attend ye school for ye present yeare,

and tech all childern yt can read in thaire psallters and

upward." From such humble beginnings were evolved some of the

best public high schools at present in New England.

Portsmouth did not escape the witchcraft delusion, though I

believe that no hangings took place within the boundaries of the

township. Dwellers by the sea are generally superstitious;

sailors always are. There is something in the illimitable expanse

of sky and water that dilates the imagination. The folk who live

along the coast live on the edge of a perpetual mystery; only a

strip of yellow sand or gray rock separates them from the

unknown; they hear strange voices in the winds at midnight, they

are haunted by the spectres of the mirage. Their minds quickly

take the impress of uncanny things. The witches therefore found a

sympathetic atmosphere in Newscastle, at the mouth of the

Piscataqua--that slender paw of land which reaches out into the

ocean and terminates in a spread of sharp, flat rocks, lie the

claws of an amorous cat. What happened to the good folk of that

picturesque little fishing-hamlet is worth retelling in brief. In

order properly to retell it, a contemporary witness shall be

called upon to testify in the case of the Stone-Throwing Devils

of Newcastle. It is the Rev. Cotton Mather who addresses you--

"On June 11, 1682, showers of stones were thrown by an invisible

hand upon the house of George Walton at Portsmouth [Newcastle was

then a part of the town]. Whereupon the people going out found

the gate wrung off the hinges, and stones flying and falling

thick about them, and striking of them seemingly with a great

force, but really affecting 'em no more than if a soft touch were

given them. The glass windows were broken by the stones that came

not from without, but from within; and other instruments were in

a like manner hurled about. Nine of the stones they took up,

whereof some were as hot as if they came out of the fire; and

marking them they laid them on the table; but in a little while

they found some of them again flying about. The spit was carried

up the chimney, and coming down with the point forward, stuck in

the back log, from whence one of the company removing it, it was

by an invisible hand thrown out at the window. This disturbance

continued from day to day; and sometimes a dismal hollow

whistling would be heard, and sometimes the trotting and snorting

of a horse, but nothing to be seen. The man went up the Great Bay

in a boat on to a farm which he had there; but the stones found

him out, and carrying from the house to the boat a stirrup iron

the iron came jingling after him through the woods as far as his

house; and at last went away and was heard no more. The anchor

leaped overboard several times and stopt the boat. A cheese was

taken out of the press, and crumbled all over the floor; a piece

of iron stuck into the wall, and a kettle hung thereon. Several

cocks of hay, mow'd near the house, were taken up and hung upon

the trees, and others made into small whisps, and scattered about

the house. A man was much hurt by some of the stones. He was a

Quaker, and suspected that a woman, who charged him with

injustice in detaining some land from here, did, by witchcraft,

occasion these preternatural occurrences. However, at last they

came to an end."

Now I have done with thee, O credulous and sour Cotton Mather! so

get thee back again to thy tomb in the old burying-ground on

Copp's Hill, where, unless thy nature is radically changed, thou

makest it uncomfortable for those about thee.

Nearly a hundred years afterwards, Portsmouth had another

witch--a tangible witch in this instance--one Molly Bridget, who

cast her malign spell on the eleemosynary pigs at the Almshouse,

where she chanced to reside at the moment. The pigs were

manifestly bewitched, and Mr. Clement March, the superintendent

of the institution, saw only one remedy at hand, and that was to

cut off and burn the tips of their tales. But when the tips were

cut off they disappeared, and it was in consequence quite

impracticable to burn them. Mr. March, who was a gentleman of

expedients, ordered that all the chips and underbrush in the yard

should be made into heaps and consumed, hoping thus to catch and

do away with the mysterious and provoking extremities. The fires

were no sooner lighted than Molly Bridget rushed from room to

room in a state of frenzy. With the dying flames her own vitality

subsided, and she was dead before the ash-piles were cool. I say

it seriously when I say that these are facts of which there is

authentic proof.

If the woman had recovered, she would have fared badly, even at

that late period, had she been in Salem; but the death-penalty

has never been hastily inflicted in Portsmouth. The first

execution that ever took place there was that of Sarah Simpson

and Penelope Kenny, for the murder of an infant in 1739. The

sheriff was Thomas Packer, the same official who, twenty-nine

years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of Ruth

Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton

in a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote in full. The

following stanzas, however, give the pith of the story--

"And a voice among them shouted,

"Pause before the deed is done;

We have asked reprieve and pardon

For the poor misguided one.'

"But these words of Sheriff Packer

Rang above the swelling noise:

'Must I wait and lose my dinner?

Draw away the cart, my boys!'

"Nearer came the sound and louder,

Till a steed with panting breath,

From its sides the white foam dripping,

Halted at the scene of death;

"And a messenger alighted,

Crying to the crowd, 'Make way!

This I bear to Sheriff Packer;

'Tis a pardon for Ruth Blay!'"

But of course he arrived too late--the Law led Mercy about twenty

minutes. The crowd dispersed, horror-stricken; but it assembled

again that night before the sheriff's domicile and expressed its

indignation in groans. His effigy, hanged on a miniature gallows,

was afterwards paraded through the streets.

"Be the name of Thomas Packer

A reproach forevermore!"

Laighton's ballad reminds me of that Portsmouth has been prolific

in poets, one of whom, at least, has left a mouthful of perennial

rhyme for orators--Jonathan Sewell with his

"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,

But the whole boundless continent is yours."

I have somewhere seen a volume with the alliterative title of

"Poets of Portsmouth," in which are embalmed no fewer than sixty

immortals!

But to drop into prose again, and have done with this iliad of

odds and ends. Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of

establishing the first recorded pauper workhouse--though not in

connection with her poets, as might naturally be supposed. The

building was completed and tenanted in 1716. Seven years later,

an act was passed in England authorizing the establishment of

parish workhouses there. The first and only keeper of the

Portsmouth almshouse up to 1750 was a woman--Rebecca Austin.

Speaking of first things, we are told by Mr. Nathaniel Adams, in

his "Annals of Portsmouth," that on the 20th of April, 1761, Mr.

John Stavers began running a stage from that town to Boston. The

carriage was a two-horse curricle, wide enough to accommodate

three passengers. The fare was thirteen shillings and sixpence

sterling per head. The curricle was presently superseded by a

series of fat yellow coaches, one of which--nearly a century

later, and long after that pleasant mode of travel had fallen

obsolete--was the cause of much mental tribulation (1. Some idle

reader here and there may possibly recall the burning of the old

stage-coach in The Story of a Bad Boy.) to the writer of this

chronicle.

The mail and the newspaper are closely associated factors in

civilization, so I mention them together, though in this case the

newspaper antedated the mail-coach about five years. On October

7, 1756, the first number of "The New Hampshire Gazette and

Historical Chronicle" was issued in Portsmouth from the press of

Daniel Fowle, who in the previous July had removed from Boston,

where he had undergone a brief but uncongenial imprisonment on

suspicion of having printed a pamphlet entitled "The Monster of

Monsters, by Tom Thumb, Esq.," an essay that contained some

uncomplimentary reflections on several official personages.The

"Gazette" was the pioneer journal of the province. It was

followed at the close of the same year by "The Mercury and Weekly

Advertiser," published by a former apprentice of Fowle, a certain

Thomas Furber, backed by a number of restless Whigs, who

considered the "Gazette" not sufficiently outspoken in the cause

of liberty. Mr. Fowle, however, contrived to hold his own until

the day of his death. Fowle had for pressman a faithful negro

named Primus, a full-blooded African. Whether Primus was a

freeman or a slave I am unable to state. He lived to a great age,

and was a prominent figure among the people of his own color.

Negro slavery was common in New England at that period. In 1767,

Portsmouth numbered in its population a hundred and eighty-eight

slaves, male and female. Their bondage, happily, was nearly

always of a light sort, if any bondage can be light. They were

allowed to have a kind of government of their own; indeed, were

encouraged to do so, and no unreasonable restrictions were placed

on their social enjoyment. They annually elected a king and

counselors, and celebrated the event with a procession. The

aristocratic feeling was highly developed in them. The rank of

the master was the slave's rank. There was a great deal of ebony

standing around on its dignity in those days. For example,

Governor Langdon's manservant, Cyrus Bruce, was a person who

insisted on his distinction, and it was recognized. His massive

gold chain and seals, his cherry-colored small-clothes and silk

stockings, his ruffles and silver shoe-buckles, were a tradition

long after Cyrus himself was pulverized.

In cases of minor misdemeanor among them, the negros themselves

were permitted to be judge and jury. Their administration of

justice was often characteristically naive. Mr. Brewster gives an

amusing sketch of one of their sessions. King Nero is on the

bench, and one Cato--we are nothing if not classical--is the

prosecuting attorney. The name of the prisoner and the nature of

his offense are not disclosed to posterity. In the midst of the

proceedings the hour of noon is clanged from the neighboring

belfry of the Old North Church. "The evidence was not gone

through with, but the servants could stay no longer from their

home duties. They all wanted to see the whipping, but could not

conveniently be present again after dinner. Cato ventured to

address the King: Please you Honor, best let the fellow have his

whipping now, and finish the trial after dinner. The request

seemed to be the general wish of the company: so Nero ordered ten

lashes, for justice so far as the trial went, and ten more at the

close of the trial, should he be found guilty!"

Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless

Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced

any emancipation edict. During the Revolutionary War the slaves

were generally emancipated by their masters. That many of the

negros, who had grown gray in service, refused their freedom, and

elected to spend the rest of their lives as pensioners in the

families of their late owners, is a circumstance that illustrates

the kindly ties which held between slave and master in the old

colonial days in New England.

The institution was accidental and superficial, and never had any

real root in the Granite State. If the Puritans could have found

in the Scriptures any direct sanction of slavery, perhaps it

would have continued awhile longer, for the Puritan carried his

religion into the business affairs of life; he was not even able

to keep it out of his bills of lading. I cannot close this

rambling chapter more appropriately and solemnly than by quoting

from one of those same pious bills of landing. It is dated June,

1726, and reads: "Shipped by the grace of God in good order and

well conditioned, by Wm. Pepperills on there own acct. and

risque, in and upon the good Briga called the William, whereof is

master under God for this present voyage George King, now riding

at anchor in the river Piscataqua and by God's grace bound to

Barbadoes." Here follows a catalogue of the miscellaneous cargo,

rounded off with: "And so God send the good Briga to her desired

port in safety. Amen."

VI.

SOME OLD PORTSMOUTH PROFILES

I DOUBT if any New England town ever turned out so many eccentric

characters as Portsmouth. From 1640 down to about 1848 there must

have been something in the air of the place that generated

eccentricity. In another chapter I shall explain why the

conditions have not been favorable to the development of

individual singularity during the latter half of the present

century. It is easier to do that than fully to account for the

numerous queer human types which have existed from time to time

previous to that period.

In recently turning over the pages of Mr. Brewster's entertaining

collection of Portsmouth sketches, I have been struck by the

number and variety of the odd men and women who appear

incidentally on the scene. They are, in the author's intention,

secondary figures in the background of his landscape, but they

stand very much in the foreground of one's memory after the book

is laid aside. One finds one's self thinking quite as often of

that squalid old hut-dweller up by Sagamore Creek as of General

Washington, who visited the town in 1789. Conservatism and

respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the

unconventional its values also? If we render unto that old

hut-dweller the things which are that old hut-dweller's, we must

concede him his picturesqueness. He was dirty, and he was not

respectable; but he is picturesque--now that he is dead.

If the reader has five or ten minutes to waste, I invite him to

glance at a few old profiles of persons who, however substantial

they once were, are now leading a life of mere outlines. I would

like to give them a less faded expression, but the past is very

chary of yielding up anything more than its shadows.

The first who presents himself is the ruminative hermit already

mentioned--a species of uninspired Thoreau. His name was Benjamin

Lear. So far as his craziness went, he might have been a lineal

descendant of that ancient king of Britain who figures on

Shakespeare's page. Family dissensions made a recluse of King

Lear; but in the case of Benjamin there were no mitigating

circumstances. He had no family to trouble him, and his realm

remained undivided. He owned an excellent farm on the south side

of Sagamore Creek, a little to the west of the bridge, and might

have lived at ease, if personal comfort had not been distasteful

to him. Personal comfort entered into no part of Lear's. To be

alone filled the little pint-measure of his desire. He ensconced

himself in a wretched shanty, and barred the door, figuratively,

against all the world. Wealth--what would have been wealth to

him--lay within his reach, but he thrust it aside; he disdained

luxury as he disdained idleness, and made no compromise with

convention. When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from

custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his

wants are, after all! Lear was of a cheerful disposition, and

seems to have been wholly inoffensive--at a distance. He

fabricated his own clothes, and subsisted chiefly on milk and

potatoes, the product of his realm. He needed nothing but an

island to be a Robinson Crusoe. At rare intervals he flitted like

a frost-bitten apparition through the main street of Portsmouth,

which he always designated as "the Bank," a name that had become

obsolete fifty or a hundred years before. Thus, for nearly a

quarter of a century, Benjamin Lear stood aloof from human

intercourse. In his old age some of the neighbors offered him

shelter during the tempestuous winter months; but he would have

none of it--he defied wind and weather. There he lay in his

dilapidated hovel in his last illness, refusing to allow any one

to remain with him overnight--and the mercury four degrees below

zero. Lear was born in 1720, and vegetated eighty-two years.

I take it that Timothy Winn, of whom we have only a glimpse,

would like to have more, was a person better worth knowing. His

name reads like the title of some old-fashioned novel--"Timothy

Winn, or the Memoirs of a Bashful Gentleman." He came to

Portsmouth from Woburn at the close of the last century, and set

up in the old museum-building on Mulberry Street what was called

"a piece goods store." He was the third Timothy in his monotonous

family, and in order to differentiate himself he inscribed on the

sign over his shop door, "Timothy Winn, 3d," and was ever after

called "Three-Penny Winn." That he enjoyed the pleasantry, and

clung to his sign, goes to show that he was a person who would

ripen on further acquaintance, were further acquaintance now

practicable. His next-door neighbor, Mr. Leonard Serat, who kept

a modest tailoring establishment, also tantalizes us a little

with a dim intimation of originality. He plainly was without

literary prejudices, for on one face of his swinging sign was

painted the word Taylor, and on the other Tailor. This may have

been a delicate concession to that part of the community--the

greater part, probably--which would have spelled it with a y.

The building in which Messrs. Winn and Serat had their shops was

the property of Nicholas Rousselet, a French gentleman of

Demerara, the story of whose unconventional courtship of Miss

Catherine Moffatt is pretty enough to bear retelling, and

entitles him to a place in our limited collection of etchings. M.

Rousselet had doubtless already mad excursions into the pays de

tendre, and given Miss Catherine previous notice of the state of

his heart, but it was not until one day during the hour of

service at the Episcopal church that he brought matters to a

crisis by handing to Miss Moffatt a small Bible, on the fly-leaf

of which he had penciled the fifth verse of the Second Epistle of

John--

"And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I

wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that

which we had from the beginning, that we love one another."

This was not to be resisted, at lease not by Miss Catherine, who

demurely handed the volume back to him with a page turned down at

the sixteenth verse in the first chapter of Ruth--

"Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I

will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:

where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the

Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and

me."

Aside from this quaint touch of romance, what attaches me to the

happy pair--for the marriage was a fortunate one--is the fact

that the Rousselets made their home in the old Atkinson mansion,

which stood directly opposite my grandfather's house on Court

Street and was torn down in my childhood, to my great

consternation. The building had been unoccupied for a quarter of

a century, and was fast falling into decay with all its rich

wood-carvings at cornice and lintel; but was it not full of

ghosts, and if the old barracks were demolished, would not these

ghosts, or some of them at least, take refuge in my grandfather's

house just across the way? Where else could they bestow

themselves so conveniently? While the ancient mansion was in

process of destruction, I used to peep round the corner of our

barn at the workmen, and watch the indignant phantoms go soaring

upward in spiral clouds of colonial dust.

A lady differing in many ways from Catherine Moffatt was the Mary

Atkinson (once an inmate of this same manor house) who fell to

the lot of the Rev. William Shurtleff, pastor of the South Church

between 1733 and 1747. From the worldly standpoint, it was a fine

match for the Newcastle clergyman--beauty, of the eagle-beaked

kind; wealth, her share of the family plate; high birth, a sister

to the Hon. Theodore Atkinson. But if the exemplary man had cast

his eyes lower, peradventure he had found more happiness, though

ill-bred persons without family plate are not necessarily

amiable. Like Socrates, this long-suffering divine had always

with him an object on which to cultivate heavenly patience, and

patience, says the Eastern proverb, is the key to content. The

spirit of Xantippe seems to have taken possession of Mrs.

Shurtleff immediately after her marriage. The freakish disrespect

with which she used her meek consort was a heavy cross to bear at

a period in New England when clerical dignity was at its highest

sensitive point. Her devices for torturing the poor gentleman

were inexhaustible. Now she lets his Sabbath ruffs go unstarched;

now she scandalizes him by some unseemly and frivolous color in

her attire; now she leaves him to cook his own dinner at the

kitchen coals; and now she locks him in his study, whither he has

retired for a moment or two of prayer, previous to setting forth

to perform the morning service. The congregation has assembled;

the sexton has tolled the bell twice as long as is custom, and is

beginning a third carillon, full of wonder that his reverence

does not appear; and there sits Mistress Shurtleff in the family

pew with a face as complacent as that of the cat that has eaten

the canary. Presently the deacons appeal to her for information

touching the good doctor. Mistress Shurtleff sweetly tells them

that the good doctor was in his study when she left home. There

he is found, indeed, and released from durance, begging the

deacons to keep his mortification secret, to "give it an

understanding, but no tongue." Such was the discipline undergone

by the worthy Dr. Shurtleff on his earthly pilgrimage. A portrait

of this patient man--now a saint somewhere--hangs in the rooms of

the New England Historical and Genealogical Society in Boston.

There he can be seen in surplice and bands, with his lamblike,

apostolic face looking down upon the heavy antiquarian labors of

his busy descendants.

Whether or not a man is to be classed as eccentric who vanishes

without rhyme or reason on his wedding-night is a query left to

the reader's decision. We seem to have struck a matrimonial vein,

and must work it out. In 1768, Mr. James McDonough was one of the

wealthiest men in Portsmouth, and the fortunate suitor for the

hand of a daughter of Jacob Sheafe, a town magnate. The home of

the bride was decked and lighted for the nuptials, the

banquet-table was spread, and the guests were gathered. The

minister in his robe stood by the carven mantelpiece, book in

hand, and waited. Then followed an awkward interval--there was a

hitch somewhere. A strange silence fell upon the laughing groups;

the air grew tense with expectation; in the pantry, Amos Boggs,

the butler, in his agitation split a bottle of port over his new

cinnamon-colored small-clothes. Then a whisper--a whisper

suppressed these twenty minutes--ran through the

apartments,--"The bridegroom has not come!". He never came. The

mystery of that night remains a mystery after the lapse of a

century and a quarter.

What had become of James McDonough? The assassination of so

notable a person in a community where every strange face was

challenged, where every man's antecedents were known, could not

have been accomplished without leaving some slight traces. Not a

shadow of foul play was discovered. That McDonough had been

murdered or had committed suicide were theories accepted at first

by a few, and then by no one. On the other hand, he was in love

with his fiancee, he had wealth, power, position--why had he

fled? He was seen a moment on the public street, and then never

seen again. It was as if he turned into air. Meanwhile the

bewilderment of the bride was dramatically painful. If McDonough

had been waylaid and killed, she could mourn for him. If he had

deserted her, she could wrap herself in her pride. But neither

course lay open to her, then or afterward. In one of the Twice

Told Tales Hawthorne deals with a man named Wakefield, who

disappears with like suddenness, and lives unrecognized for

twenty years in a street not far from his abandoned hearthside.

Such expunging of one's self was not possible in Portsmouth; but

I never think of McDonough without recalling Wakefield. I have an

inexplicable conviction that for many a year James McDonough, in

some snug ambush, studied and analyzed the effect of his own

startling disappearance.

Some time in the year 1758, there dawned upon Portsmouth a

personage bearing the ponderous title of King's Attorney, and

carrying much gold lace about him. This gilded gentleman was Mr.

Wyseman Clagett, of Bristol, England, where his father dwelt on

the manor of Broad Oaks, in a mansion with twelve chimneys, and

kept a coach and eight or ten servants. Up to the moment of his

advent in the colonies, Mr. Wyseman Clagett had evidently not

been able to keep anything but himself. His wealth consisted of

his personal decorations, the golden frogs on his lapels, and the

tinsel at his throat; other charms he had none. Yet with these he

contrived to dazzle the eyes of Lettice Mitchel, one of the young

beauties of the province, and to cause her to forget that she had

plighted troth with a Mr. Warner, then in Europe, and destined to

return home with a disturbed heart. Mr. Clagett was a man of

violent temper and ingenious vindictiveness, and proved more than

a sufficient punishment for Lettice's infidelity. The trifling

fact that Warner was dead--he died shortly after his return--did

not interfere with the course of Mr. Clagett's jealousy; he was

haunted by the suspicion that Lettice regretted her first love,

having left nothing undone to make her do so. "This is to pay

Warner's debts," remarked Mr. Clagett, as he twitched off the

table-cloth and wrecked the tea-things.

In his official capacity he was a relentless prosecutor. The noun

Clagett speedily turned itself into a verb; "to Clagett" meant

"to prosecute;" they were convertible terms. In spite of his

industrious severity, and his royal emoluments, if such existed,

the exchequer of the King's Attorney showed a perpetual deficit.

The stratagems to which he resorted from time to time in order to

raise unimportant sums reminded one of certain scenes in

Moliere's comedies.

Mr. Clagett had for his ame damnee a constable of the town. They

were made for each other; they were two flowers with but a single

stem, and this was their method of procedure: Mr. Clagett

dispatched one of his servants to pick a quarrel with some

countryman on the street, or some sailor drinking at an inn: the

constable arrested the sailor or the countryman, as the case

might be, and hauled the culprit before Mr. Clagett; Mr. Clagett

read the culprit a moral lesson, and fined him five dollars and

costs. The plunder was then divided between the conspirators--two

hearts that beat as one--Clagett, of course, getting the lion's

share. Justice was never administered in a simpler manner in any

country. This eminent legal light was extinguished in 1784, and

the wick laid away in the little churchyard in Litchfield, New

Hampshire. It is a satisfaction, even after such a lapse of time,

to know that Lettice survived the King's Attorney sufficiently

long to be very happy with somebody else. Lettice Mitchel was

scarcely eighteen when she married Wyseman Clagett.

About eighty years ago, a witless fellow named Tilton seems to

have been a familiar figure on the streets of the old town. Mr.

Brewster speaks of him as "the well-known idiot, Johnny Tilton,"

as if one should say, "the well-known statesman, Daniel Webster."

It is curious to observe how any sort of individuality gets

magnified in this parochial atmosphere, where everything lacks

perspective, and nothing is trivial. Johnny Tilton does not

appear to have had much individuality to start with; it was only

after his head was cracked that he showed any shrewdness

whatever. That happened early in his unobtrusive boyhood. He had

frequently watched the hens flying out of the loft window in his

father's stable, which stood in the rear of the Old Bell Tavern.

It occurred to Johnny, one day, that though he might not be as

bright as other lads, he certainly was in no respect inferior to

a hen. So he placed himself on the sill of the window in the

loft, flapped his arms, and took flight. The New England Icarus

alighted head downward, lay insensible for a while, and was

henceforth looked upon as a mortal who had lost his wits. Yet at

odd moments his cloudiness was illumined by a gleam of

intelligence such as had not been detected in him previous to his

mischance. As Polonius said of Hamlet--another unstrung

mortal--Tilton's replies had "a happiness that often madness hits

on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be

delivered of." One morning, he appeared at the flour-mill with a

sack of corn to be ground for the almshouse, and was asked what

he knew. "Some things I know," replied poor Tilton, "and some

things I don't know. I know the miller's hogs grow fat, but I

don't know whose corn they fat on." To borrow another word from

Polonius, though this be madness, yet there was method in it.

Tilton finally brought up in the almshouse, where he was allowed

the liberty of roaming at will through the town. He loved the

water-side as if he had had all his senses. Often he was seen to

stand for hours with a sunny, torpid smile on his lips, gazing

out upon the river where its azure ruffles itself into silver

against the islands. He always wore stuck in his hat a few hen's

feathers, perhaps with some vague idea of still associating

himself with the birds of the air, if hens can come into that

category.

George Jaffrey, third of the name, was a character of another

complexion, a gentleman born, a graduate of Harvard in 1730, and

one of His Majesty's Council in 1766--a man with the blood of the

lion and the unicorn in every vein. He remained to the bitter

end, and beyond, a devout royalist, prizing his shoe-buckles, not

because they were of chased silver, but because they bore the

tower mark and crown stamp. He stoutly objected to oral prayer,

on the ground that it gave rogues and hypocrites an opportunity

to impose on honest folk. He was punctilious in his attendance at

church, and unfailing in his responses, though not of a

particularly devotional temperament. On one occasion, at least,

his sincerity is not to be questioned. He had been deeply

irritated by some encroachments on the boundaries of certain

estates, and had gone to church that forenoon with his mind full

of the matter. When the minister in the course of reading the

service came to the apostrophe, "Cursed be he who removeth his

neighbor's landmark," Mr. Jeffrey's feelings were too many for

him, and he cried out "Amen!" in a tone of voice that brought

smiles to the adjoining pews.

Mr. Jaffrey's last will and testament was a whimsical document,

in spite of the Hon. Jeremiah Mason, who drew up the paper. It

had originally been Mr. Jaffrey's plan to leave his possessions

to his beloved friend, Colonel Joshua Wentworth; but the colonel

by some maladroitness managed to turn the current of Pactolus in

another direction. The vast property was bequeathed to George

Jaffrey Jeffries, the testator's grandnephew, on condition that

the heir, then a lad of thirteen, should drop the name of

Jeffries, reside permanently in Portsmouth, and adopt no

profession excepting that of gentleman. There is an immense

amount of Portsmouth as well as George Jaffrey in that final

clause. George the fourth handsomely complied with the

requirements, and dying at the age of sixty-six, without issue or

assets, was the last of that particular line of Georges. I say

that he handsomely complied with the requirements of the will;

but my statement appears to be subject to qualification, for on

the day of his obsequies it was remarked of him by a caustic

contemporary: "Well, yes, Mr. Jaffrey was a gentleman by

profession, but not eminent in his profession."

This modest exhibition of profiles, in which I have attempted to

preserve no chronological sequence, ends with the silhouette of

Dr. Joseph Moses.

If Boston in the colonial days had her Mather Byles, Portsmouth

had her Dr. Joseph Moses. In their quality as humorists, the

outlines of both these gentlemen have become rather broken and

indistinct. "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear that hears it."

Decanted wit inevitably loses its bouquet. A clever repartee

belongs to the precious moment in which it is broached, and is of

a vintage that does not usually bear transportation. Dr.

Moses--he received his diploma not from the College of

Physicians, but from the circumstance of his having once drugged

his private demijohn of rum, and so nailed an inquisitive negro

named Sambo--Dr. Moses, as he was always called, had been handed

down to us by tradition as a fellow of infinite jest and of most

excellent fancy; but I must confess that I find his high spirits

very much evaporated. His humor expended itself, for the greater

part, in practical pleasantries--like that practiced on the

minion Sambo--but these diversions, however facetious to the

parties concerned, lack magnetism for outsiders. I discover

nothing about him so amusing as the fact that he lived in a

tan-colored little tenement, which was neither clapboarded nor

shingled, and finally got an epidermis from the discarded

shingles of the Old South Church when the roof of that edifice

was repaired.

Dr. Moses, like many persons of his time and class, was a man of

protean employment--joiner, barber, and what not. No doubt he had

much pithy and fluent conversation, all of which escapes us. He

certainly impressed the Hon. Theodore Atkinson as a person of

uncommon parts, for the Honorable Secretary of the Province, like

a second Haroun Al Raschid, often summoned the barber to

entertain him with his company. One evening--and this is the only

reproducible instance of the doctor's readiness--Mr. Atkinson

regaled his guest with a diminutive glass of choice Madeira. The

doctor regarded it against the light with the half-closed eye of

the connoisseur, and after sipping the molten topaz with

satisfaction, inquired how old it was. "Of the vintage of about

sixty years ago," was the answer. "Well," said the doctor

reflectively, "I never in my life saw so small a thing of such an

age." There are other mots of his on record, but their faces are

suspiciously familiar. In fact, all the witty things were said

aeons ago. If one nowadays perpetrates an original joke, one

immediately afterward finds it in the Sanskirt. I am afraid that

Dr. Joseph Moses has no very solid claims on us. I have given him

place here because he has long had the reputation of a wit, which

is almost as good as to be one.

VII.

PERSONAL REMINISCENCES

THE running of the first train over the Eastern Road from Boston

to Portsmouth--it took place somewhat more than forty years

ago--was attended by a serious accident. The accident occurred in

the crowded station at the Portsmouth terminus, and was

unobserved at the time. The catastrophe was followed, though not

immediately, by death, and that also, curiously enough, was

unobserved. Nevertheless, this initial train, freighted with so

many hopes and the Directors of the Road, ran over and

killed--LOCAL CHARACTER.

Up to that day Portsmouth had been a very secluded little

community, and had had the courage of its seclusion. From time to

time it had calmly produced an individual built on plans and

specifications of its own, without regard to the prejudices and

conventionalities of outlying districts. This individual was

purely indigenous. He was born in the town, he lived to a good

old age in the town, and never went out of the place, until he

was finally laid under it. To him, Boston, though only fifty-six

miles away, was virtually an unknown quantity--only fifty-six

miles by brutal geographical measurement, but thousands of miles

distant in effect. In those days, in order to reach Boston you

were obliged to take a great yellow, clumsy stage-coach,

resembling a three-story mud-turtle--if zoologist will, for the

sake of the simile, tolerate so daring an invention; you were

obliged to take it very early in the morning, you dined at noon

at Ipswich, and clattered into the great city with the golden

dome just as the twilight was falling, provided always the coach

had not shed a wheel by the roadside or one of the leaders had

not gone lame. To many worthy and well-to-do persons in

Portsmouth, this journey was an event which occurred only twice

or thrice during life. To the typical individual with whom I am

for the moment dealing, it never occurred at all. The town was

his entire world; he was a parochial as a Parisian; Market Street

was his Boulevard des Italiens, and the North End his Bois de

Boulogne.

Of course there were varieties of local characters without his

limitations; venerable merchants retired from the East India

trade; elderly gentlewomen, with family jewels and personal

peculiarities; one or two scholarly recluses in by-gone cut of

coat, haunting the Athenaeum reading-room; ex-sea captains, with

rings on their fingers, like Simon Danz's visitors in

Longfellow's poem--men who had played busy parts in the bustling

world, and had drifted back to Old Strawberry Bank in the

tranquil sunset of their careers. I may say, in passing, that

these ancient mariners, after battling with terrific hurricanes

and typhoons on every known sea, not infrequently drowned

themselves in pleasant weather in small sail-boats on the

Piscataqua River. Old sea-dogs who had commanded ships of four or

five hundred tons had naturally slight respect for the

potentialities of sail-boats twelve feet long. But there was to

be no further increase of these odd sticks--if I may call them

so, in no irreverent mood--after those innocent-looking parallel

bars indissolubly linked Portsmouth with the capital of the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts. All the conditions were to be

changed, the old angles to be pared off, new horizons to be

regarded. The individual, as an eccentric individual, was to

undergo great modifications. If he were not to become extinct--a

thing little likely--he was at least to lose his prominence.

However, as I said, local character, in the sense in which the

term is here used, was not instantly killed; it died a lingering

death, and passed away so peacefully and silently as not to

attract general, or perhaps any, notice. This period of gradual

dissolution fell during my boyhood. The last of the cocked hats

had gone out, and the railway had come in, long before my time;

but certain bits of color, certain half obsolete customs and

scraps of the past, were still left over. I was not too late, for

example, to catch the last town crier--one Nicholas Newman, whom

I used to contemplate with awe, and now recall with a sort of