WHEN I first opened my eyes upon my native town,it was already nearly two hundred years old,counting from the time when it was part of the original Salem settlement,--old enough to have gained a character and an individuality of its own,as it certainly had.
We children felt at once that we belonged to the town,as we did to our father or our mother.
The sea was its nearest neighbor,and penetrated to every fireside,claiming close intimacy with every home and heart.The farmers up and down the shore were as much fishermen as farmers;they were as familiar with the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as they were with their own potato-fields.Every third man you met in the street,you might safely hail as "Shipmate,"or "Skipper,"or "Captain."My father's early seafaring experience gave him the latter title to the end of his life.
It was hard to keep the boys from going off to sea before they were grown.No inland occupation attracted them."Land-lubber"was one of the most contemptuous epithets heard from boyish lips.
The spirit of adventure developed in them a rough,breezy type of manliness,now almost extinct.
Men talked about a voyage to Calcutta,or Hong-Kong,or "up the Straits,"--meaning Gibraltar and the Mediterranean,--as if it were not much more than going to the next village.It seemed as if our nearest neighbors lived over there across the water;we breathed the air of foreign countries,curiously interblended with our own.
The women of well-to-do families had Canton crape shawls and Smyrna silks and Turk satins,for Sabbath-day wear,which somebody had brought home for them.Mantel-pieces were adorned with nautilus and conch-shells,and with branches and fans of coral;and children had foreign curiosities and treasures of the sea for playthings.There was one imported shell that we did not value much,it was so abundant--the freckled univalve they called a "prop."Yet it had a mysterious interest for us little ones.
We held it to our ears,and listened for the sound of the waves,which we were told that,it still kept,and always would keep.Iremember the time when I thought that the ocean was really imprisoned somewhere within that narrow aperture.
We were accustomed to seeing barrels full of cocoa-nuts rolled about;and there were jars of preserved tropical fruits,tamarinds,ginger-root,and other spicy appetizers,almost as common as barberries and cranberries,in the cupboards of most housekeepers.
I wonder what has become of those many,many little red "guinea-peas"we had to play with!It never seemed as if they really belonged to the vegetable world,notwithstanding their name.
We had foreign coins mixed in with our large copper cents,--all kinds,from the Russian "kopeck"to the "half-penny token"of Great Britain.Those were the days when we had half cents in circulation to make change with.For part of our currency was the old-fashioned "ninepence,"--twelve and a half cents,and the "four pence ha'penny,"--six cents and a quarter.There was a good deal of Old England about us still.
And we had also many living reminders of strange lands across the sea.Green parrots went scolding and laughing down the thimble-berry hedges that bordered the cornfields,as much at home out of doors as within.Java sparrows and canaries and other tropical songbirds poured their music out of sunny windows into the street,delighting the ears of passing school children long before the robins came.Now and then somebody's pet monkey would escape along the stone walls and shed-roofs,and try to hide from his boy-persecutors by dodging behind a chimney,or by slipping through an open scuttle,to the terror and delight of juveniles whose premises he invaded.
And there were wanderers from foreign countries domesticated in many families,whose swarthy complexions and un-Caucasian features became familiar in our streets,--Mongolians,Africans,and waifs from the Pacific islands,who always were known to us by distinguished names,--Hector and Scipio,and Julius Caesar and Christopher Columbus.Families of black people were scattered about the place,relics of a time when even New England had not freed her slaves.Some of them had belonged in my great-grand-father's family,and they hung about the old homestead at "The Farms"long after they were at liberty to go anywhere they pleased.There was a "Rose"and a "Phillis"among them,who came often to our house to bring luscious high blackberries from the Farms woods,or to do the household washing.They seemed pathetically out of place,although they lived among us on equal terms,respectable and respected.
The pathos of the sea haunted the town,made audible to every ear when a coming northeaster brought the rote of the waves in from the islands across the harbor-bar,with a moaning like that we heard when we listened for it in the shell.Almost every house had its sea-tragedy.Somebody belonging to it had been shipwrecked,or had sailed away one day,and never returned.
Our own part of the bay was so sheltered by its islands that there were seldom any disasters heard of near home,although the names of the two nearest--Great and Little Misery--are said to have originated with a shipwreck so far back in the history of the region that it was never recorded.
But one such calamity happened in my infancy,spoken of always by those who knew its victims in subdued tones;--the wreck of the "Persia."The vessel was returning from the Mediterranean,and in a blinding snow-storm on a wild March night her captain probably mistook one of the Cape Ann light-houses for that on Baker's Island,and steered straight upon the rocks in a lonely cove just outside the cape.In the morning the bodies of her dead crew were found tossing about with her cargo of paper-manufacturers'rags,among the breakers.Her captain and mate were Beverly men,and their funeral from the meeting-house the next Sabbath was an event which long left its solemnity hanging over the town.
