The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Provincetown SketchbookThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Pilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Provincetown SketchbookAuthor: Frances Lester WarnerIllustrator: C. Scott WhiteRelease date: January 31, 2011 [eBook #35136]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Steve Mattern*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PILGRIM TRAILS: A PLYMOUTH-TO-PROVINCETOWN SKETCHBOOK ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Pilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Provincetown SketchbookAuthor: Frances Lester WarnerIllustrator: C. Scott WhiteRelease date: January 31, 2011 [eBook #35136]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Steve Mattern
Title: Pilgrim Trails: A Plymouth-to-Provincetown Sketchbook
Author: Frances Lester WarnerIllustrator: C. Scott White
Author: Frances Lester Warner
Illustrator: C. Scott White
Release date: January 31, 2011 [eBook #35136]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Steve Mattern
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PILGRIM TRAILS: A PLYMOUTH-TO-PROVINCETOWN SKETCHBOOK ***
North Street, PlymouthNorth Street, Plymouth
I Plymouth Towne
II Alden and Standish
III Winslow's "Great Lot"
IV The Cape
North Street, Plymouth
Plymouth Harbor
Site of First House, Leyden Street
"Nautical House"
Old Plymouth Doorway
Burial Hill
John Alden's House, Duxbury (1653)
The Myles Standish Monument
The Standish House, Duxbury (1666)
The Winslow House, Marshfield (1699)
"The Ark"
Old Fish Wharf, Cape Cod
The Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown
"There!" said the artist, "isn't that a nautical-looking house?"
When the artist says that a house is nautical, he means that it looks as if it had been built by seafaring men; not by wealthy ship-owners, but by generations of skippers and men before the mast. When you build a nautical house, you should begin more than a hundred years ago with a small cottage on the side-hill over the harbor, and add on a snug cabin now and then, tucking in a shipshape companionway here and there, and running a new section out along the slope. If you like to indulge your taste in roofs, you make a different kind for every addition. One section may be gable, another lean-to, and the one-story addition may run out as long as you please, shaped on top something like the roof of a barge. Simply fit your building to the ups and downs of the land and the ways of the wind. A bit of faded blue paint somewhere on the blinds or near the door, and all your roofing weathered by many hundred harbor gales, and your house is nautical.
There are not as many of these in Plymouth as in Gloucester, but there are a few. In fact, at Plymouth you may find almost any kind of building you look for, from Mansard roofs and bungalows, to the lobster-houses down by Eel River, the shooting-boxes out on the sand-spit, and the dark old structures beside Town Brook and around the region once known as Clamshell Alley.
We had left the car at the garage, and had walked along the upper streets over the hill. The artist was going sketching, his brother Alexander was meeting a business appointment, and Barbara and I had come to see Plymouth.
"I'm going in among those places on the other side of Town Brook," said the artist. "The only way to find something good is to go everywhere you're not supposed to."
"But you and Barbara," said Alexander, as he prepared to escort us out to the main street, "might as well go where you're supposed to."
He paused for a moment to let his words sink in.
"The best way," said Alexander, "is to follow your guide-book."
"The best way," said the artist over his shoulder, "is to explore."
Barbara receives advice from her two brothers with the air of a young empress listening to the remarks of two prime ministers, but makes her own decisions. I have acted as her confederate and chaperon on so many occasions that I know enough to be quiet until the prime ministers have gone.
"The best way," said Barbara when this had happened, "is to ask a little boy."
Doubtless any real expedition to Plymouth ought to begin with the Rock. We found our way down along the water-front, to the place where the Rock used to be, but it was nowhere in sight.
"When I was here before," said I, "the Rock was exactly here, under its canopy at the foot of Cole's Hill. You couldn't miss it."
Barbara looked out along the wharves. Some children were playing at the end of one of the piers.
"We'll ask a little boy," said Barbara, leading the way.
"They look like little foreigners," said I. "Do you think they would know?"
For answer, Barbara went out slowly to the edge of the pier, and stood watching the white seagulls flying over the harbor. The boys gave her a glance, made up their minds about her, and went on with their play.
"Where'sthe Rock?" said Barbara casually, over her shoulder.
"They're moving it," said one.
"It's all broke up," said another.
"Want us to show it to you?" said a third.
"Yes," said Barbara. "Where are they moving it to?"
"Down to the edge. When they get it there, we can swim right up to it," said our guide with unction. "But now it's all broke up."
He was leading us rapidly back to Water Street, to a great pile of masonry by the roadside. "That's the rock," said he. "Here's some, and here's some, and here's some more. All broke up."
The boys were scrambling over the arches and hopping about among the blocks of granite.
"Oh, yes," said Barbara tactfully, "this is the old canopy that used to be over the Rock, isn't it? And where's the real Rock?"
Our guide looked puzzled. Then light dawned. "The little one with 1620 on it? Down on the other side of the road." He waved a brown fist. "See?"
And there it was, the famous boulder, waiting to be taken to its new position at the water's edge. Plymouth Rock is a very satisfactory relic; just the shape of a Rock. Its prehistoric excursions with the glacier and its historic pilgrimages since 1620 have combined to lead it a roving life. In Revolutionary days it was on Town Square, with the Liberty Pole; then it migrated to the lawn in front of Pilgrim Hall; then it rested under its canopy at the foot of Cole's Hill—and in all these positions it inspired tourists to remarks about the agility of the Fathers in using it as a stepping-stone from the harbor to dry land. And now, in 1921, it goes back to the original landing-place, where the high tides will reach it again.
Plymouth HarborPlymouth Harbor
Barbara and I congratulated ourselves on our luck in arriving at the right time to catch it on the move. Probably its fourth century of fame will bring it more visitors than ever before, including our friends, the little delegates from Portugal and Italy, who hope to swim near by.
"Now," said Barbara, "let's go up to Leyden Street and see if we can imagine that it's First Street, with the first houses and all."
Taking our imaginations well in hand, we found Leyden Street and the site of the first house. Probably it is not necessary to be thrilled at every inch of Plymouth. No matter how many times we visit it, I think we expect to find it looking more gray and spectral than it does; just as children, from much study of the map, half expect to see the land of China look yellow. There are fishing-coves on the Maine coast that look a good deal more like our childhood idea of Plymouth—weatherbeaten houses, low roofs, and great dark cliffs with the surf pounding against them. Mrs. Felicia Hemans is not entirely responsible for our misconception. We know that we shall not see the original block-house, but we still have a lingering feeling that Plymouth ought to look gray.
And Leyden Street does not. It is old, but not decrepit. A very short street, with close-set houses, some of them painted white or yellow; and at the head of the street, on what used to be Elder Brewster's Meerstead, the fine Post-Office building—it is hard to realize that this is the place where the Mayflower settlers staked off their nineteen plots of ground. Even in winter, there is no sweeping impression that anything very grim or perilous ever happened here. But one impression we do feel strongly. If we stand at the head of the street by Elder Brewster's spring, and look down past the site of the first house, at the blue harbor, and then turn and look up at Burial Hill, we find ourselves thinking of the compactness of it all. Within a three-minute walk, we have caught a glimpse of the landing-place, Cole's Hill burying-ground, the site of the first house, the first street, and the hill where, as Governor Bradford says, "they built a fort, both strong & comly, made with a flate rofe & batllments, on which their ordnance were mounted, and wher they kepte constante watch, espetially in time of danger." The times of danger seem remote from Plymouth now, "espetially" at the corner of Leyden Street.
Site of First House, Leyden StreetSite of First House, Leyden Street
In order to feel the true sense of history,—not a worked-up sentiment, but the real thing,—you have to look at Plymouth, not in panorama but in detail. You have to accept with philosophy such modern phenomena as the Massasoit Shoe-Shine Parlors and the Plymouth Rock Garage, and keep your eyes open for certain types of old houses scattered in unexpected places everywhere.
One of these is a neat old house in excellent repair, the ends of the house of brick, the side toward the street of wood, plain gable roof, stout chimney, the whole thing painted white, and all fascinating within. This is Tabitha Plaskett's house, on Court Street, near Pilgrim Hall. It is not so very old,—only two hundred years come 1922,—but it is the one of its kind into which visitors are most naturally admitted, for they sell antiques there now. But before the Revolution it was the home of Mrs. Tabitha Plaskett, the first woman to keep a school in Plymouth.
Barbara and I went in, seeking gifts, and we stayed to look at the doors. They are plain one-paneled doors, each made of a single piece of wood, with old hand-made hinges,—some the H-hinge, some the H and L,—with irregular hand-wrought nails, and on each door a polished door-latch of slenderest design. The tiles around the fireplace are blue and white, the central one showing a dog running very fast, with all four feet off the ground, and all his legs held perfectly stiff like the legs of a rocking-horse.
We were shown the place where Tabitha Plaskett used to do her spinning and her school-teaching at the same time. Every legend-lover recalls the story of Tabitha's famous way of punishing children, by slipping a skein of yarn underneath their arms and hanging them up on a peg on the wall, much as Mrs. Peter Rabbit in the story hangs all her little rabbits on the clothes-line. The soft yarn probably did not hurt the children, though the position must have been, for the moment, embarrassing. We wonder whether Tabitha really did this often. If we remember our own schooldays, we know that the story of a punishment can take a fabulous turn in less than two hundred years. But from her epitaph on Burial Hill, we may be fairly sure that her relations with the public were not without an occasional breeze. She is supposed to have composed the epitaph herself, and it certainly sounds like the document of a vivid personality. We may read it now, carefully chiseled on her grave-stone, under an elaborate design of urn and weeping willow:—
Adieu, vain world, I've seen enough of thee
And I am careless what thou sayst of me
Thy smiles I wish not
Nor thy frowns I fear
I am now at rest, my head lies quiet here.
Well, Tabitha's headstone now overlooks the place where the little children go along to school. If you should go into the primary rooms after school-hours, you would see the sand-tables and the little desks, and, hanging around the walls, a series of paper cut-outs of the Three Bears and the Little Red Hen. And if you should ask to be allowed to look at the register, you would find there some names that would remind you of the cabins of the Mayflower and the Fortune and the Ann, together with some that came over in a later ship. Surely the boys and girls of to-day will not object if we imagine Tabitha calling the roll of their last names in alphabetical order? She stands beside her spinning-wheel and begins: "Alden, Cook, Crane, Dante, Davenport, Deschamps, Donovan, Kitchin, Kerrigan, Locatelli, Malaguto, Metz, Morgan—" And she goes on, adjusting her voice to the musical variety of the names, until she ends the alphabet with "Thornhill, Vacchino, Wood, and Worcester." It is like a pleasant chant of the nations.
It is a very pretty question whether Tabitha Plaskett could maintain the quiet orderliness that we see now in these primary rooms, and make headway with her spinning at the same time. Would she apply the skeins of yarn internationally? And would she know just what to do with the sand-tables? If she could keep school again in her old house now, perhaps, instead of punishing the wicked, she would reward the just by letting them go into the front room, when they were very good, to look at the dog running like a rocking-horse on the blue tile.
"Nautical House""Nautical House"
Another kind of house that stirs our "sense of the past" is the sort that really does seem old on the outside. A little way down Sandwich Street is the Howland House, built in 1666, recently repaired and opened to visitors. If we are looking for a house that actually did come under the eye of the Pilgrims, this is one. A plain gable cottage, now painted the dull red that we associate with "little-red-schoolhouse" coloring, it stands a little back from the busy street, and the visitor goes in through a turnstile at the gate. Inside, all sorts of old furniture, including spinning-wheel and carriage-top bed, make it look as much as possible as if it were still inhabited. Other houses that were built in the sixteen hundreds, especially the Holmes House, also repay the trouble of searching them out. And when we find them, they look as if they had been built in the spirit of Governor Bradford's specifications about the colony's purpose in founding the Plymouth Plantation: "Not out of any newfanglednes or other such like giddie humor, by which men are oftentimes transported to their great hurt and danger, but for sundrie weightie & solid reasons." There is not much "giddie humor" about the old beams and rafters that have borne the solid weight of two hundred and fifty years.
In Plymouth there are many houses made partly of brick, with iron S-shaped anchors bolted through their brick-work to the beam inside. There are some of these on the side of Leyden Street near LeBaron Alley. And on North Street, there are great Santa Claus chimneys, with small low houses built around them, the structure of the house looking altogether too tiny to go with the generous flues.
Best of all, perhaps, because they have plenty of space around them, are the unpainted gambrel-roofed houses on the outskirts of the town. Now and then you find one where the shingles that cover the house from top to bottom have weathered a silver gray. Here and there the shingles have curled a trifle, so that they look like the bark of a shagbark walnut tree, in no danger of flying away with the wind, but making the house look crusted, picturesque. And there are some gabled houses where the long slope of the roof has sagged a little, just enough to make a place for moss and shadows, but not enough to look fallen in.
Barbara and I did not find all these the first day, or the next. We spent a good deal of time scouting over the moors, among the bayberry bushes and the pointed red cedars. Now and then we came upon a cranberry bog, hidden away behind what one geologist calls the "tumbled hills of Plymouth."
It was Alexander who showed us the best Colonial mansion. The frame was got out in England, and brought over in 1754, and, tradition says, was put upside down. It belonged to the Winslows—not the Edward Winslow who wrote "Good News From New England" in 1624, but a later branch of the family. The Winslow family seems to have prospered steadily in the early days—one of the cases where, in the elder Winslow's own words, "religion and profit jump together, which is rare."
"I want to show you the Winslow house," said Alexander; "the house where Emerson was married."
"I think we passed it on the corner of North and Winslow," said I. "Isn't it the fine square one, painted yellow and white, with the carving of fruit around the doorways?"
"That's it," admitted Alexander placidly, "but you don't know that house just by going past it on the street."
He led us down North Street to Winslow, and found the point where we could get the best view.
Old Plymouth DoorwayOld Plymouth Doorway
"Now," said he when he had planted us to his satisfaction, "notice the doorway, with those two immense linden-trees shading the path. The original shoots of the Winslow linden-trees were brought to this country in a raisin-box. Up on the front of the house, over the upstairs window, you see the carving of the British Lion and Unicorn. This branch of the Winslows in Revolutionary days remained Tories and were very loyal to the King; and after the war their property went into other hands. But their Lion and Unicorn are as good as ever."
"Is it really true," asked Barbara, "that the house is upside down?"
"Well," said Alexander, "the legend is very old. And the second-story rooms are a great deal higher-studded than the rooms downstairs. There's one door upstairs that looks as if it had been made for a giant. But they say that some of the English builders used to plan a house that way."
Whether the house is upside down or not, one thing is certain—that here Miss Lydia Jackson was married to Emerson. Once in a while an event in the world takes place in precisely the perfect setting. Emerson's marriage was one. The huge English door, almost as broad as it is tall, with its great brass knocker and deep paneling, knows how to swing wide open in a stately way of its own; a proper door to welcome Mr. Emerson. And the rooms inside, with their high white paneling and delicate beading around the top, have dignity in every line. In every room there is a fireplace, with tiles. In the room where Emerson was married, the tiles around the fireplace illustrate Scripture stories—the drawings exactly in the style of the pictures in the New England Primer. Jonah emerges from his specially constructed fish; Elijah sits under his juniper bush; Jacob awakens from his dream. Under each picture is a reference to the Bible, with chapter and verse; so that, if you should fail to recognize any Bible worthy from his picture, you could look him up.
In the hallway, the white staircase, with its mahogany rail, is deeply paneled at the sides, and if you stand beneath the stairway where it turns, you see still more careful paneling on the under side of each stair. The spindles of the balustrade are white and delicately carved, and the slender newel-post is twined with a perfectly proportioned white spiral, like a smooth round stem of a vine, running round and round it, and disappearing into the woodwork of the rail.
This house, with its linden trees, its traditions, its Lion and Unicorn rampant over the sea, was the best example of old-time royalist elegance that we saw.
"Are you going sketching this afternoon?" asked Barbara politely of the artist.
"Yes, on Burial Hill," said he. "Want to come?"
"Don't you ever carry a camp-chair?" said I. For days I had been longing to ask him that question, when I saw him starting out with no visible sketching equipment except a leather affair, which looked like a lawyer's brief-case, strapped over his shoulder.
"Yes, I always take a chair," said he. "It folds. It's in the leather case."
I, who remember the days when people went sketching with an immense French sketching-umbrella, a camp-chair, an easel, and a portfolio, looked with respect upon the leather case.
"Before we go up to the hill," said the artist, "don't you want me to show you the most stunning subject for a painting that I've found?"
Even Alexander rose to this. We followed our leader down past the old Junk Shop, in among the old houses at the water-front, and as we picked our way around the corner, the artist threw up his hands in despair.
"Oh, ye gods," we heard him say, "it's gone!"
We followed his tragic gaze out toward the harbor, expecting to find that an ancient landmark had been razed to the ground.
"What was it?" said Barbara anxiously. "Have they moved it somewhere else?"
"Yes," said the artist bitterly, "they've moved it somewhere else. It was the washing that was out on that line—the colors—all the accents—Portuguese as you can imagine—and they'vetaken it in!"
Alexander turned on his heel and left us to make our way back to Burial Hill. He sympathizes with his brother's sorrows when fishermen go down to their boats and change all the rigging the moment a marine sketch is half done; but he is not quite advanced enough to grieve because Portuguese laundry no longer flaps against the American blue.
"By the way," said the artist when we reached the Hill, "the lettering on these stones is something remarkably fine. Pemberton identifies it with Caslon lettering, Caslon the Elder, English typefounder in the sixteen hundreds. I '11 show you the article when we get home."
Barbara was examining a very old stone. "Listen," said she,—
"The spider's most attenuated thread
Is cord, is cable to man's tender tie."
As we made our way along the paths beside the family lots of the Bradfords, Cottons, Harlows, LeBarons, and Howlands, we began to notice how the wording varied with the relative age of the stones. For example, "Edward Gray, Gent." is older style than "Josiah Cotton, Esq." And "That Virtuous Woman, Mrs. Rebecca Turner" is of an earlier period than "Mary, Relict of Deac. Lot Harlow."
We found one very stately epitaph to a young wife, the simplest expression of the language of bereavement: "By this event a husband was deprived of his best friend."
Far more elaborate is the tribute to Mrs. Lucy Hammatt, Relict of the late Capt. Abraham Hammatt. Still clear and definite, the inscription, deeply lettered on the face of the worn slab, records the ideals of an exemplary life:—
Composed in suffering, in joy sedate,
Good without show, for just discernment great.
But Barbara's favorite among the epitaphs was one on the stone of a young Southern bride:--
Phebe J. Bramhalla Native of Virginiaand Wife of Benj. BramhallPossess'd of an Amiable Disposition
It suggests that our early ancestors were not impervious to Southern charm.
On our way down the Hill, we went around to see the harbor at sunset. Clark's Island in the distance, Captain's Hill, Manomet—we had begun to think of these as our own landmarks.
Burial HillBurial Hill
"Since this is our last night at Plymouth," said Alexander that evening, "don't you want to see the country by moonlight?"
"It's only a half-moon," said Barbara critically; but we went.
On our way, we went up to look at the town from the site of the old Watch-Tower, on the very top of Burial Hill. We climbed the Hill this time by the path nearest the sea. The low branches of the twisted tree over the flight of steps made strange patterns above us against the sky. There is one place on the summit where you can look out into the darkness of the country, not toward the lights of town. Here you can see only the shadows of the elm branches and the outlines of the slanting stones. And here, I think, we found the time for the spirit of place to be abroad. We did not see the kindly ghosts of Adoniram Judson and Bathsheba Bradford and Captain Jabez Harlow. But we were in the midst of something very real. All the odd phrasings of the epitaphs—the relicts and consorts and phyticians—were hidden now, translated by the shadows. We saw only the silhouette of the past; and it was not grim or gloomy, but only brave. The record of antique sorrow is a quieting thing. Every thought on this hill was thought a long time ago. The poignancy is out of it now. And as we stand on the spot where the Pilgrims once set watch every night for danger, we cannot help being stirred by the gray dignity of their thoughts about the continuity of life.
We stayed only a moment. Then we went down again, pausing only to watch the harbor lights.
Plymouth harbor is a quiet place by moonlight, and Burial Hill is a very quiet place. Yet it gave us the most direct message we had—of spacious thought dramatized in narrow setting, of definite achievement with inadequate equipment, of the resourceful valiance of those early people, and of what Governor Bradford calls "their great patience and allacritie of spirit" in the face of life, and death.
Duxbury, Duxberie, Duxborough, Ducksborrow: the early writers spelled it as they pleased. But the Duxbury Light, Duxbury ships, and Duxbury clam-flats have standardized the spelling for all time. This town, across the harbor from Plymouth, where grants of land were settled by Myles Standish, Elder Brewster, and John Alden, has been the home port of notable ships and men. Merchant-ships, brigs, and schooners—the Eliza Warwick and the Mary Chilton, the Oriole, the Lion, Boreas, and Seadrift, the Triton, Mattakeeset, and the Hitty Tom,—these and hundreds of sail besides were built here in the shipyards and manned by Duxbury boys. Among the early men of Duxbury were Benjamin Church, who captured Philip the Sachem; Major Judah Alden and Colonel Ichabod, descendants of John Alden and Priscilla; Colonel Gamaliel Bradford and Captain Gamaliel, his son; George Partridge, one of George Washington's Congressmen; and Ezra Weston, the King Caesar of the shipyards.
At one end of the town used to be the Ezra Weston ropewalk; and not too far away was the famous Duxbury Ordinary, the tavern where, in 1678, Mr. Seabury the landlord had license to "sell liquors unto such sober-minded naighbors, as hee shall think meet, so as he sell not less than the quantie of a gallon att a time to one prson and not in smaller quantities to the occationing of drunkenes." Mr. Seabury was evidently to use his own judgment as to which "naighbors" were sufficiently sober-minded to sustain the gallon.
But doubtless the oldest Duxbury settlers were the clams. The colonists called them, first, "sandgapers," then clamps, then clambs, clambes, slammes, and clammes. We surmise that the clam was not at first the Pilgrims' favorite dish, when we read Mr. John Pory's account of his visit to Plymouth in 1622. "Muskles and slammes they have all the yeare long, which being the meanest of God's blessings here, and such as these people fat their hogs with at low water, if ours upon any extremitie did enjoy in the South Colonie, they would never complain of famine or want, although they wanted bread." When we read this remark of Mr. Pory's, we wonder how it happened that the Pilgrims were reduced at one time to five grains of parched corn per meal per person. But suppose that you yourself had never tasted a clamb at a clam-bake, and had never been introduced to it in the right circumstances by the right people—would it naturally occur to you to steam it, and discard its little neck, and make a chowder of its straps? This would call for the strictly pioneering spirit, especially if, in the words of an early explorer, these clamps were ofttimes "as big as ye penny white loafe." In fact, the only Pilgrim who at all adequately celebrates the clam is Edward Winslow. "Indeed," says he, "had we not been in a place where divers sort of shell-fish are, that may be taken with the hand, we must have perished, unless God had raised up some unknown or extraordinary means for our preservation." And to-day, in certain spots along the Duxbury coast, from the Gurnet to the Nook, you may still find the descendants of those early sandgapers drawing down their necks at your approach, lest peradventure you take them with the hand.
Barbara and I explored Duxbury, not for clams, but for another sort of oldest inhabitant, the trailing arbutus. We did not explain to Alexander the object of our quiet trips to the woods, for it was the middle of winter, and we felt that he might not sympathize with our simple-minded quest. Of course, we did not expect to find flowers, but we thought that we might find a root or two of mayflower from John Alden's land, to transplant on our hill at home. We know that it does grow in Duxbury, but we must have looked in all the wrong places. Like many other great explorers, we found all sorts of things other than the thing we sought: charming patches of checkerberry and mosses; blueberry bushes growing where blueberries ought not to grow and arbutus ought; many pleasant views of Captain Standish's tall monument on the Hill, but not one stiff rusty leaf of a mayflower. Finally we decided to go to the present Mr. John Alden and inquire.
We hail from a part of the country where you would no sooner ask a person to direct you to his patch of trailing arbutus than you would ask him the combination of his safe. We therefore planned to word our question discreetly. "Do you know," we planned to say to Mr. John Alden, "whether any mayflower, or trailing arbutus, ever used to grow in Duxbury?"
That ought to give him a chance to tell us about contemporary mayflowers, if he cared to, at the same time giving him plenty of leeway if he preferred to dwell upon the past.
We were putting the finishing touches on our speech as we went up the path to the old John Alden house, when a great touring-car, with an Indiana number, went rocking past us up the uneven lane, and stopped.
"Can you tell us," said a gentleman, leaning out of the car and calling back to us, "whether this house is open to visitors?"
"We don't know," said I, "but we know that Mr. John Alden lives here."
"I'll ask him," said the gentleman from Indiana; and he went to the door.
"He says it's open to-day," reported our new guide in a moment, helping his family out of the car, and giving the youngest child a big jump up into his arms.
Barbara and I, abandoning trailing arbutus, merged ourselves with the family group, and went in at the front door.
The little hallway is papered with the kind of paper you sometimes see in houses where "George Washington spent the night"—gray, with landscapes. But, in addition to the landscapes in this paper, there are slender pillars in groups, a design that makes you think of a miniature Alma Tadema picture, all in gray. This wall-paper is, of course, not as old as the house, but it is old-fashioned enough to be interesting.
We threaded our way in single file around the door, into the hallway, and our host invited us first to go upstairs.
The stairs go straight up beside the great chimney, very steep and narrow, each stair twice as tall as a modern stair and half as deep. At the top, we went around the slope of the chimney and into the rooms above. Here, in these low square rooms, with the supporting beams still showing the marks of the broad-axe, and the wide boards of the floor attesting the size of timber-growth in the early days, we found a perfect paradise of old-time furniture stored away. We were allowed to stop and prowl among the old possessions. None of the things used by Priscilla are here, of course; these are the accumulations of generations that followed her.
John Alden's House, Duxbury, (1653)John Alden's House, Duxbury, (1653)
In the corner by the chimney, we saw a small wooden cradle, with its wooden roof sloping in three sections over the top. On the wall hung an old lantern made to hold a candle, the kind of "lanthorn" that might have been used by Moon in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
We were looking at the churn and the yarn-winder, when one of the ladies called us to look at the strap-hinges on the door. These hinges, handmade of iron, long and narrow and pennant-shaped, run out almost a third of the way across the door. The iron latch, also hand-wrought, is worn where the bar slips into the hasp, and the downward curve of the lift of the latch is bent into a thin twisted shape. One of the doors, a curious, three-paneled affair, is supposed to have been saved from a former house of John Alden's.
The present house, built in 1653, was the place where John Alden spent his later years. Here he lived to the age of eighty-nine, holding important offices in Plymouth Colony up to the time of his death. He was one of the eight Purchasers who bought from the Merchant Adventurers their interest in the colony, after the expiration of seven years' copartnership. And in paying the required sum of eighteen hundred pounds, he, with Myles Standish and the other "Undertakers," must have been very busy managing the Plymouth trade, and "fraighting the White Angell, Frindship and others" with saxafrass, clapboards, and beaver. They were a busy brood, those old-comers; and John Alden, whom Bradford called "a hopfull young man," fulfilled the promise of his youth.
Ever since his death, his house has been lived in by Aldens. The present John Alden is a Grand Army veteran, son of a veteran of the Civil War, grandson of veterans of the Revolution, and grandfather of a veteran of the World War.
He led us downstairs, and out to the large room where they used to do their fireplace cooking. The fireplace is closed now, but the spirit of the house is still one of comfort and hospitable good cheer. From its windows you cannot quite see the place where Myles Standish lived; it is too far away. But it is pleasant to know that the Captain and John Alden were near neighbors, and that one of Myles Standish's sons married one of the daughters of Priscilla. All of Priscilla's eleven children turned out well; many of them were later called to "act in publick stations;" and the old house has been the homestead of her descendants all these years.
When we had signed our names in the big register, and turned to go, Barbara said, "Do you know why the Aldens and Standishes left Plymouth and came over here so far?"
"Why, they came over to settle it," said Mr. John Alden kindly; "to open it up."