IT is strange that the spot of earth where we were born should make such a difference to us.People can live and grow anywhere,but people as well as plants have their habitat,--the place where they belong,and where they find their happiest,because their most natural life.If I had opened my eyes upon this planet elsewhere than in this northeastern corner of Massachusetts,elsewhere than on this green,rocky strip of shore between Beverly Bridge and the Misery Islands,it seems to me as if Imust have been somebody else,and not myself.These gray ledges hold me by the roots,as they do the bayberry bushes,the sweet-fern,and the rock-saxifrage.
When I look from my window over the tree-tops to the sea,I could almost fancy that from the deck of some one of those inward bound vessels the wistful eyes of the Lady Arbella might be turned towards this very hillside,and that mine were meeting hers in sympathy,across the graves of two hundred and fifty years.For Winthrop's fleet,led by the ship that bore her name,must have passed into harbor that way.Dear and gracious spirit!The memory of her brief sojourn here has left New England more truly consecrated ground.Sweetest of womanly pioneers!It is as if an angel in passing on to heaven just touched with her wings this rough coast of ours.
In those primitive years,before any town but Salem had been named,this whole region was known as Cape Ann Side;and about ten years after Winthrop's arrival,my first ancestor's name appears among those of other hardy settlers of the neighborhood.
No record has been found of his coming,but emigration by that time had grown so rapid that ships'lists were no longer carefully preserved.And then he was but a simple yeoman,a tiller of the soil;one who must have loved the sea,however,for he moved nearer and nearer towards it from Agawam through Wenham woods,until the close of the seventeenth century found his descendants--my own great-great-grandfatber's family--planted in a romantic homestead-nook on a hillside,overlooking wide gray spaces of the bay at the part of Beverly known as "The Farms."The situation was beautiful,and home attachments proved tenacious,the family claim to the farm having only been resigned within the last thirty or forty years.
I am proud of my unlettered forefathers,who were also too humbly proud to care whether their names would be remembered or not;for they were God-fearing men,and had been persecuted for their faith long before they found their way either to Old or New England.
The name is rather an unusual one,and has been traced back from Wales and the Isle of Wight through France to Languedoc and Pied-mont;a little hamlet in the south of France still bearing it in what was probably the original spelling-La Combe.There is a family shield in existence,showing a hill surmounted by a tree,and a bird with spread wings above.It might symbolize flight in times of persecution,from the mountains to the forests,and thence to heaven,or to the free skies of this New World.
But it is certain that my own immediate ancestors were both indifferent and ignorant as to questions of pedigree,and accepted with sturdy dignity an inheritance of hard work and the privileges of poverty,leaving the same bequest to their descendants.And poverty has its privileges.When there is very little of the seen and temporal to intercept spiritual vision,unseen and eternal realities are,or may be,more clearly beheld.
To have been born of people of integrity and profound faith in God,is better than to have inherited material wealth of any kind.And to those serious-minded,reticent progenitors of mine,looking out from their lonely fields across the lonelier sea,their faith must have been everything.
My father's parents both died years before my birth.My grandmother had been left a widow with a large family in my father's boyhood,and he,with the rest,had to toil early for a livelihood.She was an earnest Christian woman,of keen intelligence and unusual spiritual perception.She was supposed by her neighbors to have the gift of "second sight";and some remarkable stories are told of her knowledge of distant events while they were occurring,or just before they took place.Her dignity of presence and character must have been noticeable.
A relative of mine,who as a very little child,was taken by her mother to visit my grandmother,told me that she had always remembered the aged woman's solemnity of voice and bearing,and her mother's deferential attitude towards her:and she was so profoundly impressed by it all at the time,that when they had left the house,and were on their homeward path through the woods,she looked up into her mother's face and asked in a whisper,"Mother,was that God?"I used sometimes to feel a little resentment at my fate in not having been born at the old Beverly Farms home-place,as my father and uncles and aunts and some of my cousins had been.But perhaps I had more of the romantic and legendary charm of it than if I had been brought up there,for my father,in his communicative moods,never wearied of telling us about his childhood;and we felt that we still held a birthright claim upon that picturesque spot through him.Besides,it was only three or four miles away,and before the day of railroads,that was thought nothing of as a walk,by young or old.
But,in fact,I first saw the light in the very middle of Beverly,in full view of the town clock and the Old South steeple.(I believe there is an "Old South"in nearly all these first-settled cities and villages of Eastern Massachusetts.The town wore a half-rustic air of antiquity then,with its old-fashioned people and weather-worn houses;for I was born while my mother-century was still in her youth,just rounding the first quarter of her hundred years.
