The Old Coast Road Part 3

"Old Spain" is the romantic name for an uninteresting part of the township, and, conversely, Commercial Street is the uninteresting name for a romantic part. It is along a highway stigmatized by such a name that one gets the glimpses of a Constable country: glimpses of rolling meadows, of fertile groves, of cattle grazing in elm-shaded pastures, of a road winding contentedly among simple, ancient cottages, and quiet, thrifty farms. These are the homes which belong, and have belonged for generations, to people who are neither rich nor poor; cozy, quaint, suggesting in an odd way the thatched-roof cottages of England. Not that all of Weymouth's homes are of this order. The Asa Webb Cowing house, which terminates Commercial Street within a stone's throw of the square of the town of Weymouth, is one of the very finest examples of the Colonial architecture in this country. The exquisite tracery and carving over and above the front door, and the white imported marble window lintels spin an elaborate and marvelously fine lacework of white over the handsome red-brick facade. Although it is, alas, falling somewhat into disrepair, perfect proportion and gemlike workmanship still stamp the venerable mansion as one of patrician heritage. There are other excellent examples of architecture in Weymouth, but the Cowing house must always be the star, both because of its extraordinary beauty and conspicuous position. Yes, if you want a characteristic glimpse of Weymouth, you cannot do better than to begin in front of this landmark, and drive down Commercial Street. Here for several smiling miles there is nothing--no ugly building large or small, no ruthless invasion of modernity to mar the mood of happy simplicity. Her beauty of beach, of sky, of river, Weymouth shares with other South Sh.o.r.e towns. Her perfection of idyllic rusticity is hers alone.

Just as Weymouth's scenery is unlike that of her neighbors, so her history projects itself from an entirely different angle from theirs.

While they were conceived by zealous, G.o.d-fearing men and women honestly seeking to establish homes in a new country, Weymouth was inadvertently born through the misconduct of a set of adventurers. Not every one who came to America in those significant early years came impelled by lofty motives. There were scapegraces, bad boys, rogues, mercenaries, and schemers; and perhaps it is entirely logical that the winning natural loveliness of this place should have lured to her men who were not of the caliber to face more exposed, less fertile sections, and men to whom beauty made an especial appeal.

The Indians early found Wessagusset, as they called it, an important rendezvous, as it was accessible by land and sea, and there were probably temporary camps there previous to 1620, formed by fishermen and traders who visited the New England coast to traffic with the natives.

But it was not until the arrival of Thomas Weston in 1622 that Weymouth's history really begins. And then it begins in a topsy-turvy way, so unlike Puritan New England that it makes us rub our eyes, wondering if it is really true.

This Thomas Weston, who was a merchant adventurer of London, took it into his head to establish a colony in the new country entirely different from the Plymouth Colony. He had been an agent of the Pilgrims in their negotiations with the Plymouth Company, and when he broke off the connection it was to start a settlement which should combine all of the advantages, with none of the disadvantages, of the Plymouth Colony. First of all, it was to be a trading community pure and simple, with its object frankly to make money. Second, it was to be composed of men without families and familiar with hardship. And third, there was no religious motive or bond. That such an unidealistic enterprise should not flourish on American soil is worth noting. The disorderly, thriftless rabble, picked up from the London streets, soon got into trouble with the Indians and with neighboring colonists, and finally, undone by the results of their own improvidence and misbehavior, wailed that they "wanted to go back to London," to which end the Plymouth settlers willingly aided them, glad to get them out of the country. Thus ended the first inauspicious settlement of Weymouth.

The second, which was undertaken shortly after by Robert Gorges, broke up the following spring, leaving only a few remnants behind. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who was not a Spaniard as his name suggests, but a picturesque Elizabethan and a kinsman of Sir Walter Raleigh, essayed (through his son Robert) an experimental government along practically the same commercial lines as had Weston, and his failure was as speedy and complete as Weston's had been.

A third attempt, while hardly more successful, furnishes one of the gayest and prettiest episodes in the whole history of New England.

Across the somber procession of earnest-faced men and women, across the psalm-singing and the praying, across the incredible toil of the pioneers at Plymouth now flashes the brightly costumed and pleasure-loving courtier, Thomas Morton. An agent of Gorges, Morton with thirty followers floated into Wessagusset to found a Royalist and Episcopalian settlement. This Episcopalian bias was quite enough to account for Bradford's disparaging description of him as a "kind of petie-fogie of Furnifells Inn," and explains why the early historians never made any fuller or more favorable record than absolutely necessary of these neighbors of theirs, although the churchman Samuel Maverick admits that Morton was a "gentleman of good qualitee."

But it was for worse sins than his connection with the Established Church that Morton's name became synonymous with scandal throughout the whole Colony. In the very midst of the dun-colored atmosphere of Puritanism, in the very heart of the pious pioneer settlement this audacious scamp set up, according to Bradford, "a schoole of atheisme, and his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves as if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of y^e Roman G.o.ddess Flora, or the beastly practises of y^e madd Bacha.n.a.lians." The charge of atheism in this case seems based on the fact that Morton used the Book of Common Prayer, but as for the rest, there is no question that this band of silken merry-makers imported many of the carnival customs and hereditary pastimes of Old England to the stern young New England; that they fraternized with the Indians, shared their strong waters with them, and taught them the use of firearms; and that Merrymount became indeed a scene of wildest revelry.

The site of Merrymount had originally been selected by Captain Wollaston for a trading post. Imbued with the same mercenary motive which had proved fatal in the case of Weston and Gorges, Captain Wollaston, whose name is perpetuated in Mount Wollaston, brought with him in 1625 a gang of indented white servants. Finding his system of industry ill suited to the climate, he carried his men to Virginia, where he sold them. When he left, Morton took possession of the place and dubbed it "Ma-re-mount."

And then began the pranks which shook the Colony to its foundations.

Picture to yourself a band of sworn triflers, dedicated to the wildest philosophy of pleasure, teaching bears to dance, playing blind-man's buff, holding juggling and boxing matches, and dancing. According to Hawthorne, on the eve of Saint John they felled whole acres of forests to make bonfires, and crowned themselves with flowers and threw the blossoms into the flames. At harvest-time they hilariously wasted their scanty store of Indian corn by making an image with the sheaves, and wreathing it with the painted garlands of autumn foliage. They crowned the King of Christmas and bent the knee to the Lord of Misrule! Such fantastic foolery is inconceivable in a Puritan community, and the Maypole which was its emblem was the most inconceivable of all. This "flower-decked abomination," ornamented with white birch bark, banners, and blossoms, was the center of the tipsy jollity of Merrymount. As Morton explains: "A goodly pine tree of eighty foote was reared up, with a peare of bucks horns nayled on somewhere near to the top of it: where it stood as a faire sea mark for directions how to find out the way to mine host of Ma-re-mount." Around this famous, or infamous, pole Morton and his band frolicked with the Indians on May Day in 1627. As the indignant historian writes: "Unleashed pagans from the purlieus of the gross court of King James, danced about the Idoll of Merry Mount, joining hands with the la.s.ses in beaver coats, and singing their ribald songs."

It doesn't look quite so heinous to us, this Maypole dancing, as it did to the outraged Puritans. In fact, the story of Morton and Merrymount is one of the few glistening threads in the somber weaving of those early days. But the New England soil was not prepared at that time to support any such exotic, and Myles Standish was sent to disperse the frivolous band, and to order Morton back to England, which he did, after a scrimmage which Morton relates with great vivacity and doubtful veracity in his "New English Canaan."

This "New English Canaan," by the way, had a rather singular career.

Morton tells in it many amusing stories, and one of them was destined to a remarkable perpetuity in English literature. The story deals with the Wessagusset settlers promising to hang one of their own members who had been caught stealing--this hanging in order to appease the Indians.

Morton gravely states that instead of hanging the real culprit, who was young and l.u.s.ty, they hanged, in his place, another, old and sick. In his quaint diction: "You all agree that one must die, and one shall die, this young man's cloathes we will take off and put upon one that is old and impotent, a sickly person that cannot escape death, such is the disease on him confirmed, that die hee must. Put the young man's cloathes on this man, and let the sick person be hanged in the other's steade. Amen sayes one, and so sayes many more." This absurd notion of vicarious atonement, spun purely from Morton's imagination, appealed to Samuel Butler as worthy of further elaboration. Morton's "New English Canaan" appeared in 1632. About thirty years later the second part of the famous English satire "Hudibras" appeared, embodying Morton's idea in altered but recognizable form, in what was the most popular English book of the day. This satire, appearing when the reaction against Puritanism was at its height, was accepted and solemnly deposited at the door of the good people of Boston and Plymouth! And thus it was that Morton's fabricated tale of the Weymouth hanging pa.s.sed into genuine history along with the "blue laws" of Connecticut. One cannot help believing that the mischievous perpetrator of the fable laughed up his sleeve at its result, and one cannot resist the thought that he was probably delighted to have the scandal attached to those righteous neighbors of his who had run him out of his dear Ma-re-mount.

However, driven out he was: the Maypole about which the revelers had danced was hewed down by the stern zealots who believed in dancing about only one pole, and that the whipping-post. Merrymount was deserted.

Certainly Weymouth, the honey spot which attracted not industrious bees, but only drones, was having a hard time getting settled! It was not until the Reverend Joseph Hull received permission from the General Court to settle here with twenty-one families, from Weymouth, England, that the town was at last shepherded into the Puritan fold.

These settlers, of good English stock and with the earnest ideals of pioneers, soon brought the community into good repute, and its subsequent life was as respectable and uneventful as that of a reformed _roue_. In fact there is practically no more history for Weymouth. There are certainly no more raids upon merry-makers; no more calls from the cricket colony which had sung all summer on the banks of the river to the ant colony which had providently toiled on the sh.o.r.e of the bay; no more experimental governments; no more scandal. The men and women of the next five generations were a poor, hard-working race, rising early and toiling late. The men worked in the fields, tending the flocks, planting and gathering the harvest. The women worked in the houses, in the dairies and kitchens, at the spinning-wheel and washtub. The privations and loneliness, which are part of every struggling colony, were augmented here, where the houses did not cl.u.s.ter about the church and burial ground, but were scattered and far away. This peculiarity of settlement meant much in days where there was no newspaper, no system of public transportation, no regular post, and Europe was months removed. A few of the young men went with the fishing fleet to Cape Sable, or sailed on trading vessels to the West Indies or Spain, but it is doubtful if any Weymouth-born woman ever laid eyes on the mother country during the first hundred and fifty years.

The records of the town are painfully dull. They are taken up by small domestic matters: the regulations for cattle; running boundary lines, locating highways, improving the town common, fixing fines for roving swine or agreeing to the division of a whale found on the sh.o.r.e. There was more or less bickering over the salary of the town clerk, who was to receive thirty-three pounds and fourteen shillings yearly to keep "A free school and teach all children and servants sent him to read and write and cast accounts."

Added to the isolation and pettiness of town affairs, the winters seem to have been longer, the snows deeper, the frosts more severe in those days. We have records of the harbor freezing over in November, and "in March the winter's snow, though much reduced, still lay on a level with the fences, nor was it until April that the ice broke up in Fore River."

They were difficult--those days ushered in by the Reverend Joseph Hull.

Through long nights and cold winters and an endless round of joyless living, Weymouth expiated well for the sins of her youth. Even as late as 1767 we read of the daughter of Parson Smith, of Weymouth--now the wife of John Adams, of Quincy--scrubbing the floor of her own bed-chamber the afternoon before her son--destined to become President of the United States, as his father was before him--was born.

But the English stock brought in by the Reverend Hull was good stock. We may not envy the ladies scrubbing their own floors or the men walking to Boston, but many of the best families of this country are proud to trace their origin back to Weymouth. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont; then New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut attracted men from Weymouth.

Later the Middle West and the Far West called them. In fact for over a century the town hardly raised its number of population, so energetic was the youth it produced.

As happens with lamentable frequency, when Weymouth ceased to be naughty she also ceased to be interesting. After poring over the dull pages of the town history, one is sometimes tempted to wonder if, perhaps, the irreverent Morton did not, for all his sins, divine a deeper meaning in this spot than the respectable ones who came after him. One cannot read the "New English Canaan" without regretting a little that this happy-natured fellow was so unceremoniously bustled out of the country.

Whatever Morton's discrepancies may have been, his response to beauty was lively and true: whatever his morals, his prose is delightful. All the town records and memorial addresses of all the good folk subsequent contain no such tribute to Weymouth, and paint no picture so true of that which is still best in her, as these loving words of the erstwhile master of Merrymount.

"And when I had more seriously considered the bewty of the place, with all her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd. For so many goodly groves of trees: dainty fine round rising hillocks: delicate faire large plaines: sweete crystal fountains, and clear running streams, that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweet a murmuring noise to heare, as would even lull the senses with delight asleep, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meet; and hand in hand run down to Neptune's court, to pay the yearly tribute which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the Springs."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER V

ECCLESIASTICAL HINGHAM

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Should you walk along the highway from Quincy to Hingham on a Sunday morning you would be pa.s.sed by many automobiles, for the Old Coast Road is now one of the great pleasure highways of New England. Many of the cars are moderately priced affairs, the tonneau well filled with children of miscellaneous ages, and enlivened by a family dog or two--for this is the way that the average American household spends its modern Sabbath holiday. Now and then a limousine, exquisite in workmanship within and without, driven by a chauffeur in livery and tenanted by a single languid occupant, rolls noiselessly past. A strange procession, indeed, for a road originally marked by the moccasined feet of Indians, and widened gradually by the toilsome journeyings of rough Colonial carts and coaches.

It is difficult to say which feature of the steadily moving travel would most forcibly strike the original Puritan settlers of the town: the fact that even the common man--the poor man--could own such a vehicle of speed and ease, or the fact that America--such a short time ago a wilderness--could produce, not as the finest flower on its tree of evolution, but certainly as its most exotic, the plutocrat who lives in a palace with fifty servants to do his bidding, and the fine lady whose sole exercise of her mental and physical functions consists in allowing her maid to dress her. Yes, New England has changed amazingly in the revolutions of three centuries, and here, under the shadow of this square plain building--Hingham's Old Ship Church--while we pause to watch the Sunday pageant of 1920, we can most easily call back the Sabbath rites, and the ideals which created those rites, three centuries ago.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It is the year of 1681. This wooden meeting-house, with the truncated pyramidal roof and belfry (to serve as a lookout station), has just been built. A stage ahead, architecturally, of the log meeting-house with clay-filled c.h.i.n.ks, thatched roof, oiled-paper windows, earthen floor, and a stage behind the charming steeple style made popular by Sir Christopher Wren, and now multiplied in countless graceful examples all over New England, the Old Ship is entirely unconscious of the distinction which is awaiting it--the distinction of being the oldest house for public worship in the United States which still stands on its original site, and which is still used for its original purpose. In the year 1681 it is merely the new meeting-house of the little hamlet of Hingham. The people are very proud of their new building. The timbers have been hewn with the broad-axe out of solid white pine (the marks are still visible, particularly in those rafters of the roof open to the attic). The belfry is precisely in the center of the four-sided pitched roof. To be sure this necessitates ringing the bell from one of the pews, but a little later the bellringer will stand above, and through a pane of gla.s.s let into the ceiling he will be able to see when the minister enters the pulpit. The original backless benches were replaced by box pews with narrow seats like shelves, hung on hinges around three sides, but part of the original pulpit remains and a few of the box pews. In 1681 the interior, like the exterior, is sternly bare. No paint, no decorations, no colored windows, no organ, or anything which could even remotely suggest the color, the beauty, the formalism of the churches of England. The unceiled roof shows the rafters whose arched timbers remind one that ships' carpenters have built this house of G.o.d.

This, then, is the meeting-house of 1681. What of the services conducted there?

In the first place, they are well attended. And why not, since in 1635 the General Court decreed that no dwelling should be placed more than half a mile away from the meeting-house of any new "plantation"--thus eliminating the excuse of too great distance? Every one is expected, nay, commanded, to come to church. In fact, after the tolling of the last bell, the houses may all be searched--each ten families is under an inspector--if there is any question of delinquents hiding in them. And so in twos and threes, often the man trudging ahead with his gun and the woman carrying her baby while the smaller children cling to her skirts, sometimes man and woman and a child or two on horseback, no matter how wild the storm, how swollen the streams, how deep the whirling snow--they all come to church: old folk and infants as well as adults and children. The congregation either waits for the minister and his wife outside the door, or stands until he has entered the pulpit. Once inside they are seated with the most meticulous exactness, according to rank, age, s.e.x, and wealth. The small boys are separated from their families and kept in order by t.i.thing-men who allow no wandering eyes or whispered words. The deacons are in the "fore" seats; the elderly people are sometimes given chairs at the end of the "pues"; and the slaves and Indians are in the rear. To seat one's self in the wrong "pue" is an offense punishable by a fine.

"Here is the church, and here are the people," as the old rhyme has it.

What then of the services? That they are interminable we know. The t.i.thing-man or clerk may turn the bra.s.s-bound hourgla.s.s by the side of the pulpit two and three times during the sermon, and once or twice during the prayer. Interminable, and, also, to the modern Sunday observer, unendurable. How many of us of this softer age can contemplate without a shiver the vision of people sitting hour after hour in an absolutely unheated building? (The Old Ship was not heated until 1822.) The only relief from the chill and stiffness comes during the prayer when the congregation stands: kneeling, of course, would savor too strongly of idolatry and the Church of Rome. They stand, too, while the psalms and hymns are lined out, and as they sing them, very uncertainly and very incorrectly. This performance alone sometimes takes an hour, as there is no organ, nor notes, and only a few copies of the Bay Psalm Book, of which, by the way, a copy now would be worth many times its weight in gold.

After the morning service there is a noon intermission, in which the half-frozen congregation stirs around, eats cold luncheons brought in baskets, and then returns to the next session. One must not for an instant, however, consider these noon hours as recreational. There is no idle talk or play. The sermon is discussed and the children forbidden to romp or laugh. One sometimes wonders how the little things had any impulse to laugh in such an abysmal atmosphere, but apparently the Puritan boys and girls were entirely normal and even wholesomely mischievous--as proved by the constantly required services of the t.i.thing-man.

These external trappings of the service sound depressing enough, but if the message received within these chilly walls is cheering, maybe we can forget or ignore the physical discomforts. But is the message cheering? h.e.l.l, d.a.m.nation, eternal tortures, painful theological hair-splittings, harrowing self-examinations, and humiliating public confessions--this is what they gather on the narrow wooden benches to listen to hour after hour, searching their souls for sin with an almost frenzied eagerness. And yet, forlorn and tedious as the bleak service appears to us, there is no doubt that these stern-faced men and women wrenched an almost mystical inspiration from it; that a weird fascination emanated from this morbid dwelling on sin and punishment, appealing to the emotions quite as vividly--although through a different channel--as the most elaborate ceremonial. When the soul is wrought to a certain pitch each hardship is merely an added opportunity to prove its faith. It was this high pitch, attained and sustained by our Puritan fathers, which produced a dramatic and sometimes terrible blend of personality.

It has become the modern fashion somewhat to belittle Puritanism. It is easy to emphasize its absurdities, to ridicule the almost fanatical fervor which goaded men to harshness and inconsistency. The fact remains that a tremendous selective force was needed to tear the Puritans away from the mother church and the mother country and fortify them in their struggle in a new land. It was religious zeal which furnished this motive power. Different implements and differently directed force are needed to extract the diamond from the earth, from the implements and force needed to polish and cut the same diamond. So different phases of religious development are called forth by progressive phases of development. It has been said about the New England conscience: "It fostered a condition of life and type of character doubtless never again possible in the world's history. Having done its work, having founded soundly and peopled strongly an exceptional region, the New England conscience had no further necessity for being. Those whom it now tortures with its hot pincers of doubt and self-reproach are sacrificed to a cause long since won."

The Puritans themselves grew away from many of their excessive severities. But as they gained bodily strength from their conflict with the elements, so they gained a certain moral stamina by their self-imposed religious observance. And this moral stamina has marked New England ever since, and marked her to her glory.

One cannot speak of Hingham churches--indeed, one cannot speak of Hingham--without admiring mention of the New North Church. This building, of exquisite proportions and finish, within and without, built by Bulfinch in 1806, is one of the most flawless examples of its type on the South Sh.o.r.e. You will appreciate the cream-colored paint, the buff walls, the quaint box pews of oiled wood, with handrails gleaming from the touch of many generations, with wooden b.u.t.tons and protruding hinges proclaiming an ancient fashion; but the unique feature of the New North Church is its slave galleries. These two small galleries, between the roof and the choir loft, held for thirty years, in diminishing numbers, negroes and Indians. The last occupant was a black Lucretia, who, after being freed, was invited to sit downstairs with her master and mistress, which she did, and which she continued to do until her death, not so very long ago.

Hingham, its Main Street--alas for the original name of "Bachelors Rowe"--arched by a double row of superb elms on either side, is incalculably rich in old houses, old traditions, old families. Even motoring through, too quickly as motorists must, one cannot help being struck by the substantial dignity of the place, by the well-kept prosperity of the houses, large and small, which fringe the fine old highway. Ever since the days when the three Misses Barker kept loyal to George IV, claiming the King as their liege lord fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, the town has preserved a Cranford-like charm. And why not, when the very house is still handsomely preserved, where the nameless n.o.bleman, Francis Le Baron, was concealed between the floors, and, as we are told in Mrs. Austen's novel, very properly capped the climax by marrying his brave little protector, Molly Wilder?

Why not, when the Lincoln family, ancestors of Abraham, has been identified with the town since its settlement? The house of Major-General Benjamin Lincoln, who received the sword of Cornwallis at Yorktown, is still occupied by his descendants, its neat fence, many windows, two chimneys, and its two stories and a half proclaiming it a dwelling of repute. Near by, descendants of Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham, occupy part of another roomy ancient homestead. The Wampatuck Club, named after the Indian chief who granted the original deeds of the town, has found quarters in an extremely interesting house dating from 1680. In the s.p.a.cious living-room are seventeen panels, on the walls and in the doors, painted with charming old-fashioned skill by John Hazlitt, the brother of the English essayist. The Reverend Daniel Shute house, built in 1746, is practically intact with its paneled rooms and wall-paper a hundred years old. Hingham's famous elms shade the house where Parson Ebenezer Gay lived out his long pastorate of sixty-nine years and nine months, and the Garrison house, built before 1640, sheltered, in its prime, nine generations of the same family. The Rainbow Roof house, so called from the delicious curve in its roof, is one of Hingham's prettiest two-hundred-year-old cottages, and Miss Susan B. Willard's cottage is one of the oldest in the United States. Derby Academy, founded almost two centuries and a half ago by Madam Derby, still maintains its social and scholarly prestige through all the educational turmoil of the twentieth century. One likes to a.s.sociate Hingham with Ma.s.sachusetts's stanch and st.u.r.dy "war governor," for it was here that John Albion Andrew, who proved himself so truly one of our great men during the Civil War, courted Eliza Jones Hersey, and here that the happy years of their early married life were spent. Later, another governor, John D. Long, was for many years a mighty figure in the town.

With its ancient churches and inst.i.tutions, its pensive graveyards and lovely elms, its ancestral houses and hidden gardens, Hingham typifies what is quaintest and best in New England towns. Possibly the dappling of the elms, possibly the shadow of the Old Ship Church, is a bit deeper here than in the other South Sh.o.r.e towns. However it may seem to its inhabitants, to the stranger everything in Hingham is tinctured by the remembrance of the stern old ecclesiasticism. Even the number of historic forts seems a proper part of those righteous days, for when did religion and warfare not go hand in hand? During the trouble with King Philip the town had three forts, one at Fort Hill, one at the Cemetery, and one "on the plain about a mile from the harbor"; and the sites may still be identified.

Not that Hingham history is exclusively religious or martial. Her little harbor once held seventy sail of fishing vessels, and between 1815 and 1826, 165,000 barrels of mackerel were landed on their salty decks. For fifty years (between 1811 and 1860) the Rapid sailed as a packet between this town and Boston, making the trip on one memorable occasion in sixty-seven minutes. We read that in the War of 1812 she was carried up the Weymouth River and covered, masts and hull, with green bushes so that the marauding British cruisers might not find her, and as we read we find ourselves remembering that _camouflage_ is new only in name.

How entirely fitting it seems that a town of such venerable houses and venerable legends should be presided over by a church which is the oldest of its kind in the country!

Hingham changes. There is a Roman Catholic Church in the very heart of that one-time Puritan stronghold: the New North is Unitarian, and Episcopalians, Baptists, and Second Adventists have settled down comfortably where once they would have been run out of town. Poor old Puritans, how grieved and scandalized they would be to stand, as we are standing now, and watch the procession of pa.s.sing automobilists! Would it seem all lost to them, we wonder, the religious ideal for which they struggled, or would they realize that their sowing had brought forth richer fruit than they could guess? It has all changed, since Puritan days, and yet, perhaps, in no other place in New England does the hand of the past lie so visibly upon the community. You cannot lift your eyes but they rest upon some building raised two centuries and more ago; the shade which ripples under your feet is cast by elms planted by that very hand of the past. Even your voice repeats the words which those old patriarchs, well versed in Biblical lore, chose for their neighborhood names. Accord Pond and Glad Tidings Plain might have been lifted from some Pilgrim's Progress, while the near-by Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem Road are from the Good Book itself.

"Which way to Egypt?" Is this an echo from that time when the Bible was the corner-stone of Church and State, of home and school?

"What's the best road to Jericho Beach?" Surely it is some grave-faced shade who calls: or is it a peal from the chimes in the Memorial Bell Tower--chimes reminiscent of old Hingham, in England? No, it is only the shouted question of the motorist, gay and prosperous, flying on his Sunday holiday through ancient Hingham town.