Rambles in Colonial Byways E-Book

Rufus Rockwell Wilson

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 419

Beschreibung

Good to look at and pleasant to read are the sketches of old colonial times entitled "Rambles in Colonial Byways.". In them the author sets forth in pleasing style the result of his observations during a series of leisurely jaunts to various nooks and byways in New England and New York, and along the Hudson, in Pennsylvania and through Washington's country, the spots visited being such as are memorable for their associations and souvenirs of Colonial and Revolutionary days. Wilson offers a good deal of crious lore about old times and suggestions which will interest a modern visitor, whether it be to the city, the river valleys of the delightful Maryland shores.

Leseprobe

Rambles In Colonial Byways

RUFUS ROCKWELL WILSON

Rambles in Colonial Byways, Rufus Rockwell Wilson

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

Printed by Bookwire, Voltastraße 1, 60486 Frankfurt/M.

ISBN: 9783849663025

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

AUTHOR'S NOTE.. 1

CHAPTER I. TWO ATLANTIC ISLANDS. 2

CHAPTER II. SOME COLONIAL NOOKS. 14

CHAPTER III. RAMBLES IN OLD NEW YORK.. 25

CHAPTER IV. IN THE WAKE OF THE PATROONS. 37

CHAPTER V. THE ALBANY POST ROAD... 49

CHAPTER VI. THE LAND OF THE SIX NATIONS. 61

CHAPTER VII. THE WEST BANK OF THE HUDSON... 73

CHAPTER VIII. ALONG THE EASTERN SHORE.. 85

CHAPTER IX. THE CITY OF THE FRIENDS. 97

CHAPTER X. PENN'S MANOR AND BEYOND.. 109

CHAPTER XI. GOD'S PECULIAR PEOPLE.. 121

CHAPTER XII. BETHLEHEM AND AROUND THERE.. 133

CHAPTER XIII. THREE GROUPS OF GERMAN MYSTICS. 145

CHAPTER XIV. THROUGH WASHINGTON'S COUNTRY.. 157

CHAPTER XV. YORKTOWN AND HER NEIGHBORS. 169

Author's Note

Interest in the colonial and Revolutionary periods grows and widens with each passing year. Should the present record of the writer's rambles in nooks and byways, rich in memories of the past, serve, even in modest measure, to quicken and foster this interest, I shall feel that the reward for my labors is an ample one.

It is proper to state that some of the chapters here brought together have appeared in part in Lippincott's, Harper's Weekly, the New England Magazine, and the Churchman, but all have been carefully revised and considerably expanded for use in this place. Since the one entitled "Three Groups of German Mystics" was written the Separatists of Zoar have ceased to exist as an organized society.

I desire to express my thanks to my longtime friend, Augustus S. Hooker, for suggestions and information which have been of the greatest value in the preparation of these volumes, and to two other good friends, William Lincoln Hudson and Lincoln Doty Brown, for the illustrations and photographs they have been kind enough to prepare for them.

R. R. W.

CHAPTER I. TWO ATLANTIC ISLANDS

It is only a short hour's sail from Greenport on the mainland to the sea-girt domain of Gardiner's Island, set down, like a giant emerald on a woman's breast, in the center of the wide bay that cuts deep into Long Island's eastern end, yet the journey carries one into another world, for Gardiner's Island was the first founded of the manors of colonial New York, and is the only one of them that has remained intact down to the present time. Not a foot of its soil has ever been owned by any save a Gardiner since it first passed from the possession of the Indians in 1639, nor have time and the years served to impair its quietude and seclusion. It still lies completely undisturbed in the busy track of commerce, a land quite out of reach of those modern aids to restlessness, the newspaper, the mail-bag, the railroad, the telegraph, and the hotel, where one is as completely severed from the rush and clamor of the thing men call civilization as one would be in mid-ocean, while wood and field and century-old manor-house peering out from its cozy nook, each helps to heighten the illusion of age and distance which the island imparts to the visitor, and makes potent and real the pleasing fancy that chance has wafted him for the moment to some placid feudal stronghold of the past.

A resolute, sturdy figure seen through the murk and mist of two hundred and sixty years is that of doughty Lion Gardiner, the first English settler in the province of New York and first lord of the manor of Gardiner's Island. The name of Lion well became this hardy warrior, whose fighting days began in the time of the first Charles, when he went from England to Holland to serve as lieutenant with the English allies under Lord Vere. There he married a Dutch lady, Mary Willemson, daughter of a "deurcant" in the town of Waerden, and became, so he tells us, "an engineer and master of works of fortification in the legions of the Prince of Orange, in the Low Countries."

Gardiner might have lived out his days in Holland, but being a friend of the Puritans and of the Parliament, he was engaged in 1635 by Lord Say and Seal, with other nobles and gentry, to go to the new plantation of Connecticut, under John Winthrop, the younger, and to build a fort at the mouth of the river. With his wife he set sail in the "Bachelor," a barque of twenty-five tons burden, and was three months and ten days on the voyage from Gravesend to Boston, where he was induced to stay long enough to take charge of and complete the military works on Fort Hill, –– those that Jocelyn described later on as mounted with "loud babbling guns."

Arrived at the mouth of the Connecticut, Gardiner proceeded to construct, amid the greatest difficulties, and with only a few men to aid him, a strong fort of hewn timber, –– with ditch, drawbridge, palisade, and rampart, –– to which he gave the name of Saybrook. This was the first stronghold erected in New England outside of Boston, and there Gardiner dwelt as commander for four years, years of ceaseless labor, of constant anxiety, of ever-present danger, and of active warfare with the Pequots, –– Gardiner himself was severely wounded in one close encounter, –– diversified by efforts to strengthen the plantation and agriculture carried on under the enemy's fire.

Most men at the end of four years of this sort of hardship would have gladly sought a more peaceful pursuit in life's crowded places, –– not so with Gardiner, for, when his engagement expired with the lords and gentlemen in whose employ he had come to America, he plunged still farther into the wilderness, purchasing from the Paumanoc Indians, for "ten coats of trading cloath," Manchonake, or the Isle of Wight, now Gardiner's Island, sixteen miles distant by water from the nearest settlement of English at Saybrook.

The Indians were Gardiner's only neighbors in his new home, but, despite the fact that he had been the chief author of the plans which in 1637 resulted in the defeat and almost complete annihilation of the Pequots, he knew how to foster and maintain peaceful relations with the red men. Before going to his island he won the good will of Wyandance, later chief of the Montauks, and the friendship between them, which ended only with the Indian's death, furnishes the material for one of the noblest chapters in colonial history.

Twice Gardiner foiled conspiracies for a general onslaught on the English by means of the warnings which his firm friend gave him; another time he remained as hostage with the Indians while Wyandance went before the English magistrates, who had demanded that he should discover and give up certain murderers, while on still another occasion, when Ninignet, chief of the Narragansetts, seized and carried off the daughter of Wyandance, on the night of her wedding, Gardiner succeeded in ransoming and restoring her to the father. The sachem rewarded this last act of friendship by the gift to Gardiner of a large tract of land on the north shore of Long Island, and when he died left his son to the guardianship of Lion and his son David. Indeed, a singularly beneficent one was this friendship between the white man and the red. They acted in concert with entire mutual trust, keeping the Long Island tribes on peaceful terms with the English by swift and severe measures in case of wrong-doing, tempered with diplomacy and with justice to both sides.

For thirteen years Gardiner remained on the island which bears his name. Here he exerted his good influence unmolested by the savages about him, at the same time developing his territory and deriving an income from the off-shore whale-fishery, which then flourished about the eastern end of Long Island. In 1653, leaving the island to the care of the old soldiers whom he had brought from the fort as farmers, he took up his residence in East Hampton, where he had bought much land and where he died in 1663, at the age of sixty-four. No one knows the place of his sepulture, but in the older East Hampton Cemetery, among the graves of many Gardiners, may be seen two very ancient flat posts of "drift cedar" sunk deep in the soil and joined together by a rail of the same material, about the normal length of a man. Under this rude memorial, it has been surmised, rests the body of Lion Gardiner. When the time comes to rear a monument to the ideal First Settler here is the spot where it should be placed.

When Lion Gardiner died his island passed to his wife, who at her death left it to their son David "in tail" to his first male heir, and the first heirs male following, forever. David, in leaving it to his eldest son, re-expressed the entail, and the estate descended from father to son for more than a hundred and fifty years until, in 1829, by the death of the eighth proprietor without issue, it passed to his younger brother, in the hands of whose descendants it has ever since remained.

Lion Gardiner's title to the island derived from the Indians was confirmed by a grant from the agent of the Earl of Stirling, who held a royal patent for an immense slice of territory, in which the island was embraced, –– a grant which allowed Gardiner to make and execute such laws as he pleased for church and civil government on his own land, if according to God and the king, "without giving any account thereof to any one whomsoever;" and David Gardiner, although he duly and formally acknowledged his submission to New York, received from Governor Nicholls a renewal of these privileges, the consideration being five pounds in hand and a yearly rental to the same amount. Each royal governor who came out to New York after Nicholls's day levied a charge of five pounds for issuing a new patent confirming the older ones, but in 1686 Governor Dongan, for a handsome sum paid down, gave David Gardiner a patent which created the island a lordship and manor, agreeing that the king would thenceforth accept, in lieu of all other tribute, one ewe lamb on the first of May in each year.

John Gardiner, third lord of the island, aside from several memorable visits from Captain Kidd, of which more in another place, was much annoyed by pirates, and occasionally fared badly at their hands. Twice they ransacked his house, carrying off his plate and cattle, and once they beat him with swords and tied him to a tree, while they searched for the money which they believed he had concealed somewhere about the manor. Then for a long time Gardiner's Island was a country without a history, but in the first year of the Revolution it was plundered by the British of its droves of cattle and sheep, which went to feed the troops of General Gage encamped at Boston; a patriot committee seized the rest of the stock, paying for it in Continental money, and the officers and men of the royal fleet, which during the winter of 1781 lay at anchor in the neighboring bay, plundered and marauded so effectively that when the war ended there remained on the island hardly enough personal property to pay arrears of taxes. However, John Lyon Gardiner, seventh proprietor and an able man of affairs, held the estate together and restored its prosperity, and ever since his death its history has been one of peace and contentment. Time was when the lords of the island derived a considerable revenue from whaling and the culture of maize, but in later years the estate has been devoted to farming, sheep-raising, and stockbreeding, the sea being resorted to only for such fish, clams, and lobsters as may supply the daily needs of the inhabitants.

Seen from the sea, the island, seven miles long, from one to two wide, and enclosing three thousand good acres, has no doubt changed but little since the long-gone day when Lion Gardiner came from Saybrook fort to build his home there. The nearest land is three miles and a half distant, at Fireplace, so named because in other times strangers bound for the manor used to build a fire of seaweed on the sand, the smoke of which being seen across the three-mile channel, a skiff would be sent over for the visitors. Shelter Island on the west, and the north and south arms of Long Island, help to convert Gardiner's Bay into a spacious roadstead, where, as I have said, a British fleet lay anchored during a portion of the Revolutionary War; but from the high bluffs which flank the eastern end of the island one gazes out over the open Atlantic until the blending of sea and sky blocks the range of vision.

The landing-place is on the sheltered southwest side of the island. Close at hand is an ancient windmill that supplies the inhabitants with flour, and a little farther back from the sea is the roomy manor-house, built in 1774 and with moss-covered dormer roof, behind which green, rolling downs stretch away to the noble woods which cover the northern and western parts of the island. Very near the center of the island, its white headstones grouped about a giant granite boulder, stands the graveyard of the Gardiners, and the other half of the estate is given over to woods, orchards, and wide-reaching fields of grain. Save the keeper of the federal lighthouse at the northern end of the island, all the persons living thereon, some sixty in number, are servants and tenants of the proprietor, or members of his family, for the kindly, patriarchal system instituted by stout old Lion Gardiner has continued until the present day, with results that a king or sage might envy. Indeed, one finds Gardiner's Island a little principality where a good citizen rules without pomp, guided only by the dictates of justice and good sense, where crime and violence are unknown, and where diligence, order, and contentment hold benignant sway from one year's end to another. There is not even a watchdog on the place, and one is not surprised to learn that the turbulent characters who now and then drift thither among the hired summer laborers promptly grow calm under the softening influence of the sweet and noble landscape, the grateful ocean air, and the time-haloed quietude that invest the daily routine of this ocean retreat.

Only restless wraiths from out the past now disturb the peace and quiet of Gardiner's Island. One of these is the uneasy memory of Captain Kidd, honest master mariner turned pirate, of whom so much that is misleading, so little that has a basis of truth, has been published. It was in the closing days of June 1699, that Kidd, returning from the three years' cruise that had caused a price to be set on his head, and later led to his trial and execution in London, –– sent out to cruise against pirates he had ended by adopting the trade of his victims, –– cast anchor in Gardiner's Bay. When his sloop, which carried six guns, had lain two days in sight of the island, without making any sign, Lord John Gardiner put off in a boat to board her and inquire what she was. Captain Kidd, whom he had never met before, received Lord John politely, and in answer to his inquiries said he was going to Boston to see Lord Bellomont, then governor of the provinces of New York and Massachusetts, and one of the company which had embarked Kidd on his pirate quest. Meanwhile he wished Gardiner to take two negro boys and a negro girl and keep them until he came or sent for them.

The next day Kidd demanded from Lord John a tribute of six sheep and a barrel of cider, which was cheerfully rendered. The captain, however, gave Gardiner two pieces of costly Bengal muslin for his wife, handed Gardiner's men four pieces of gold for their trouble, and offered to pay for the cider. Some of Kidd's crew also presented the island men with muslin for neckcloths. After this exchange of civilities, the rover fired a salute of four guns and stood for Block Island, some twenty miles away. Three days later Kidd came back to the manor island, and, sending one of his followers to fetch Gardiner, commanded the latter to take and keep for him or order a chest and a box of gold, a bundle of quilts, and four bales of goods. The chests were buried in a swamp near the manor-house, and Kidd, with a timely touch of ferocity, told Lord John that if he called for the treasure and it were missing, he would take his or his son's head. Before departing, however, the pirate leader presented his host with a bag of sugar. It was on this occasion, also, that Kidd requested Mrs. Gardiner to roast a pig for him and was so pleased with the result that he gave her a piece of cloth of gold, a fragment of which is still preserved at the manor.

Then Kidd set sail for Boston. A week or so later he was arrested in that city, and Lord John, ordered by the authorities to render up the goods in his charge, made haste to obey their command. In the treasure which Gardiner in due time turned over to Lord Bellomont there were bags of coined gold and silver, a bag of silver rings and unpolished gems, agates, amethysts, bags containing silver buttons and lamps, broken silver, gold bars and silver bars, and sixty-nine precious stones "by tale." However, the only profit derived by Lord John-history, let it be said in passing, tells us that "he had so much ability in affairs that, although he married four times and spent a great deal of money, he gave handsome dowries to his daughters and left a large estate at his death"-from his relations with Kidd was accidental. On coming home from Boston, whither he had gone to deliver the treasure to Lord Bellomont, he unpacked his portmanteau, in which some of the smaller packages had been stowed, and as he did so there rolled out upon the floor a diamond that had got astray from the "precious stones by tale." He would have sent it after the rest, but his wife interposed; she thought he had been at pains enough, and on her own responsibility kept the diamond. Yet even this slight guerdon slipped away, after the manner of all magic or underhand wealth. Mrs. Gardiner gave it to her daughter, and Lord John at that time kept a chaplain, one Thomas Green, of Boston, in whom his daughter became interested. Lord John kept the chaplain; the chaplain ran away with and married the daughter; and the daughter kept the diamond.

From this union of maid and parson sprang the famous Gardiner-Gard of Boston, the first of whom married a daughter of the artist Copley, sister of Baron Lyndhurst, Lord Chancellor of England. Other family connections of the Gardiners have historic interest. A son of one of the proprietors married the daughter of Sir Richard Saltonstall; a daughter of another was the great-grandmother of George Bancroft; and the widow of a third found a second husband in General Israel Putnam and died at his head-quarters in the Hudson Highlands during the Revolution. It should be said here, too, that Mary, the daughter of Lion, married Jeremiah, the ancestor of Roscoe Conkling, while in 1844 Miss Juliana Gardiner became the second wife of President Tyler, –– thus firmly has the family tree of the Saybrook captain taken root in New World soil.

When Captain William Kidd during the eventful voyage that proved his last took his leave of Lord John Gardiner's sea-girt domain he headed his course for Block Island, twenty miles to the eastward. We followed in his trail one cloud-free, wind-swept summer morning, and an hour or so after leaving Gardiner's Bay there arose from the sea ahead of us of what seemed like a dark, purple cloud thrust athwart the southern horizon line. Then, as the trim sloop yacht kept on its way, the cloud changed in hue to a brilliant green, flecked here and there with brown, and its misty prominences multiplying into a hundred conical little hills, their smooth flanks covered with stone-walled farms, strewn with white homesteads and animated with flocks of sheep, cattle, and fowl, Block Island sprang smiling from the waves to greet us.

We landed at a granite breakwater, which provides the only haven of the island, and before a week had ended had explored it from end to end. Its territory extends ten miles from east to west, and six miles from north to south in its widest place, having nearly the shape of a pear. Thickly wooded in the old Indian days, the land is now barren of anything in the shape of trees, save a few pinched and starveling poplars set out around some of the dwellings as a protection from the winds. Ponds are everywhere, several of considerable size, and a host of smaller ones lying in the hollows between the hills, and in many instances white with pond lilies, remarkable for their size and beauty. These ponds are set between knolls, and every knoll is capped with a small, one-story farmhouse, with stone chimney and sharp roof sloping to the ground, its shingled walls thickly coated with whitewash, the only wash that, I am told, will stand the intensely vaporous air of the island. Some of these dwellings are older than the century, and the island's solitary windmill was built of lumber grown two hundred years ago. From the hills inside the wind-stained sails of this mill, the spires of two tiny churches, and the white towers of five schoolhouses stand out against the skyline.

On the southeast side of the island, rising one hundred and twenty feet from the water, stands Mohegan Bluff, on which a lighthouse was built some twenty years ago. Within the great lantern, which rises two hundred and four feet from the sea, four or five people can stand together, its light on a clear night being visible for twenty-one nautical miles; and those who are fond of figures will, perhaps, be interested in the keeper's statement, made with every evidence of pride, that it takes twelve hundred gallons of oil annually to feed the hungry wick. To further aid the storm-beset mariner, a mighty foghorn, operated by a steam-engine of five- or six-horse power, has been set up near the light-house, and there are also three life-saving stations on the island, all of which, unhappily, find plenty of work to do in the winter months, as the south shore is rocky and dangerous; the island lies in the track of all east and west-bound vessels, and the wind forever howls and whistles across it with formidable volume and force. In the summer this is pleasant enough, but in winter death often follows in the wind's wake, and only the silent rocks, worn and scarred with the débris of wrecked vessels, know how many poor sailors have perished on this perilous coast.

Block Island-the Indian name was Manisees, meaning Little God's Island-antedates Plymouth Rock in point of history by nearly a century, it having been first brought to Old World notice in 1524 by Verrazano, a French navigator. The present name, however, is derived from the Dutch explorer Adrian Block, who visited the island some ninety years later, and whose sailors were, doubtless, the first white men to land on its shores. The Narragansett, Pequot, and Mohegan Indians lived here at different times, and were constantly involved in broils about the ownership of the island, which for the murder, in 1636, of one Captain John Oldham, a Boston trader, was subjugated by the colony of Massachusetts. Some years later it was transferred to John Endicott and three associates, who in turn sold it to sixteen individuals for four hundred pounds. This party soon settled in their newly-acquired territory, and their descendants now form a large portion of the inhabitants of the island. Nicholas Ball, who died some years ago, and who for more than a generation was the most influential man on the island, was a direct descendant in the sixth generation from one of these original settlers.

Once settled, the island throve apace, and during the wars between France and England its fertile farms and fat herds and flocks furnished tempting and convenient prey for marauders and pirates, who repeatedly descended on its shores and carried off or destroyed everything on which they could lay their hands. Although protection was asked of the General Assembly of Rhode Island by the inhabitants it was never given them. The General Assembly, if the truth was known, probably had all it could do to protect itself, and its wards had to defend themselves as best they could. However, the town records of this little forsaken, war-pillaged island show a strong love of freedom and of democratic institutions, and when the Revolutionary War came on its inhabitants gave splendid proof of the sturdy stuff that was in them, placing their lives and property and honor upon the altar of their country as freely as the people of the colonies, but faring worst of all. At first they were thoroughly sacked by their mother colony, and then left to the tender mercies of hostile British ships, while to make their plight still worse, they were forbidden by an enactment to visit the mainland, unless they intended to settle there, and it seemed that every man's hand was against them. But with peace came independence and prosperity in its train, and in these latter days the island's most dangerous visitor is the vagrom summer tourist.

Farming and fishing were long the only, and still remain the chief, vocations of the inhabitants of the island. Bluefish, codfish, swordfish, sharks, whales, and many other kinds of fish are caught here in their season, and the annual value of the island fisheries is something like one hundred thousand dollars. The typical Block Island fishing-boat, which was originated by the islanders more than two hundred years ago and is known in local parlance as a double-ender, is a very queer craft, –– a huge canoe, wide open like a caravel, with sides fabricated of long strips of sheeting, overlapping each other like clapboards on a house, sharp at both ends, so that a landsman is never quite sure which is stern and which bow, and with a tall mast stepped almost in the middle of the keel. It is never larger than a medium-sized sloop yacht; yet with one great square-sail a crew of rugged Block Islanders do not hesitate to drive one of these odd craft in the thickest weather to Newfoundland, or across the ocean for that matter.

In the hands of other mariners, however, the double-ender is a most refractory, disobedient, and insurrectionary craft, likely to spill them without warning, after the manner of a bucking broncho, or to go ashore in spite of tiller and sail, and in defiance of all well-grounded principles of navigation. A genuine islander can do pretty nearly what he pleases with it, sail into the very eye of the wind without winking, cruise right over sand spits and bars not too far out of water, so light is the boat's draught; and there is a trustworthy tradition that once an islander, alone in his open boat, with only his dinner-pail full of provision, was blown out to sea in a storm, and a few days later drove tranquilly into Havana. He devoted a week to sight-seeing in the Cuban city, then provisioned his craft anew, and set sail for the American republic-at large. Unfortunately, in the hurricane he had lost his compass overboard, and most of his other implements useful in seafaring, and had no money to purchase new ones. A sympathetic Spaniard in Havana was anxious to know how on earth he expected he would ever be able to get back to America and Block Island with no compass, only a part of his rudder and sail, and with various other things lacking that are generally thought to be indispensable in navigation. "Oh," was the matter-of-fact reply of the undaunted skipper, "I am just a-going to steer nor'nor'west, and with fair weather and time, barring accidents, I reckon I can hit the broadside of the United States somewheres." In about three weeks he did hit it, and no one wondered at the exploit who was acquainted with the sturdy, sea-going capabilities of the double-ender and Block Island skipper.

When the Viking boat, shown afterwards at the World's Fair, visited the harbor of New London in the summer of 1893, a Block Island skipper who chanced to be in the Connecticut town at that time was surprised and greatly pleased with the appearance of the northman. As a matter of fact, barring out her dragon-head prow, she was very like a Block Island double-ender, and local wiseacres affirm that the model of the old-time Viking boat was familiar to the forefathers of the men who settled Block Island; that they bequeathed it to their descendants, and that some of the latter having brought the substantial features of it as a part of their nautical knowledge across the Atlantic, have preserved and perpetuated them in the New World in the double-end craft centuries after the original model was discarded and forgotten by the hardy Vikings. Whether the ground on which this theory is founded is tenable or not, it is certain that for practical work in rough seas on a savage and treacherous coast there is no more serviceable craft than the Block Island double-ender, and none other so simply and cheaply constructed.

The visitor to Block Island is pretty sure to linger longest at the Center, a hamlet lying somewhat over a mile west of the harbor, and made up of a town-hall, a church, half a dozen stores, and a number of houses, set behind stone walls and amid green fields. One has only to pass a week of summer days here and nearly the whole life of the island will pass in review before him, for all the trade of the west and south sides centers at this point. Sunburned farmers drive up in vehicles of antique pattern laden with corn and barley, or patient sheep, or carcasses of beeves and hogs, or bundles of geese, ducks, and turkeys, for which the island is noted. Next comes a florid dame, chirruping to her slow-moving steed, her stout person flanked by pots of butter and baskets of eggs, and a pile of cheeses weighing down the springs behind her. She has come to trade, and one need have no fear that she will not hold her own in the wordy warfare with the merchant. A fisherman from the west side follows, his wagon loaded deep with bales of white, flaky codfish. Anon comes a shore lass, bright-eyed and agile, bearing a bundle of dried sea-moss; a lad with an egg in each hand, another with a pullet under each arm, a woman with a bundle of paper rags, a wagon filled with old junk, succeed; and so the endless procession continues, with few moments in the day when the merchant's varied wares are not being drawn upon by some needy customer. At night the store becomes an animated clubroom, where local wiseacres gather to retail village gossip, talk politics, and tell stirring tales of adventure and hair-breadth escapes on sea and land.

However, it is on the west side, rarely visited by the summer tourist, that nearly all that is wild, primitive, and picturesque about the island is found. From the Center a walk or ride of four miles will bring you there. The road winds and twists through the hollows and over the hills, with fleeting views of the sea, its white-caps flying, sails flitting hither and yon, and mayhap gray phantoms of fogs stalking up and down. The sea-breeze blows shrewdly and covers every exposed part with rime. Stone walls abut closely on the roads; ponds fill the hollows, broad meadows succeed, and then a lane branches off and leads up to a quaint old farmhouse nestled in the midst of a little community of haystacks, cattle-pens, and outbuildings. The prosaic structure takes on new interest when you reflect that there, possibly, pretty Catherine Ray made the famous cheese which was presented to Benjamin Franklin, of which the great philosopher makes frequent mention in his letters and of which Mrs. Franklin was so proud, or that there General Nathaniel Greene wooed and won Catherine Littlefield, the modest Block Island maiden, who, later, followed him to the camp and became intimate with Madam Washington and other stately dames.

All these things happened somewhere on the island, and with mind filled with thoughts of them, one leaves behind him other pastures and meadows and farm-houses, and at the end of an hour's walk descends, through a rift in the bluffs, to the west side, –– a strange, weird, mysterious coast, at which wind and sea are ever gnawing, and pounded by a surge whose thunder is like that from a hundred heavy guns. In winter, which comes early to this bleak shore, nights of storm and darkness are frequent, and on one of these some gallant vessel is sure to enter the Sound at the gateway of Montauk. The fog lowers, the gale shrieks, and strong currents whirl her irresistibly towards the island. Suddenly the breakers foam beneath her bows, there follows a sickening crash, and vessel and crew are swallowed in the boiling surges. Relics of a thousand such wrecks are scattered along this coast. The sea plays with them like a dog with the bones it has picked, now burying them deep in the sand, now leaving them bare and ghastly in the sunlight, and you meet them everywhere along the beach, thrown up under the cliffs or gathered in heaps, to be used as fuel for some wrecker's winter fire.

America has no coast that has been more prolific of wrecks than this bit of land set in the path of all the sails that crowd the Sound. Its currents draw many to its embrace that would otherwise have escaped, and a volume might be filled with records of these wrecks. The old men delight to tell of them snugly seated by their fires of peat, while the blast shrieks fiercely without. Saddest of all, they say, attended with greatest loss of life, was the wreck of the "Warrior," a large two-masted schooner, plying between New York and Boston. The night before her loss she was becalmed a little to the westward of Sandy Point. During the night a gale arose, and in the early morning she was driven with terrific violence on the Point. By the dim light she was seen hard aground in the very vortex of the conflicting currents that make this spot a seething caldron even in moderate weather. Waves masthead high were pouring upon her decks, and, although she was but seven-score yards from shore, the islanders saw that no mortal power could aid the people on her decks. The end came quickly: her masts, unstepped at the first shock, soon fell, ripping open her maindeck; then a wave broke over her, and in a moment tore her into fragments, while passengers and crew dropped into the boiling surges. Of the twenty-one souls on board not one was saved.

Many other notable wrecks the old seadogs love to recount, and mingled with their tales of disaster and death are weird legends of wraiths and phantoms and spectral crews and ships, for nowhere else in America has superstition so long and so tenaciously retained its hold as it has upon the people of Block Island. In their fancy and belief Kidd and his crew still pay random visits to Sandy Point, where they bury treasures, coming under the full moon in a spectral boat, driven by broken surf billows. There is also the story of the little child whose mother left it to die by the roadside, and whose doleful cry, it is said, is still to be heard in the gray afternoons when the wind whistles across Clay Head; and there is another that has been celebrated in song and verse and is known the wide world over, –– that of the good ship "Palatine," alleged to have been lured on the rocky coast by false beacons in the last century and afterwards pillaged by the islanders, and whose ghostly figure, wreathed in flame, is still seen gliding down the Sound of nights, awaking the awe of the superstitious and portending some disaster to the descendants of those who were suspected of wrecking and robbing her. The phantom ship was last seen in February 1880. Four days later a party of young Block Islanders were drowned in Newport harbor. That, on some late and stormy winter afternoon, when the twilight is swiftly glooming into night, the "Palatine" will come again to Block Island is never doubted by those who dwell in that lonesome, wave-swept place.

CHAPTER II. SOME COLONIAL NOOKS

The owner and master of the "Elsa" was one of those rare and welcome comrades who promise less than they perform; and when he lured us from our resting-place at Greenport for a summer voyage in the wake of Captain Kidd, he did not tell us that the homeward sail was to give us pleasant introduction to Fisher's and Shelter Islands, two sea-girt nooks, where linger delightful memories of the colonial era.

Nine miles in length and varying from half a mile to a mile and a quarter in width, the first of these islands lies like a breastwork at the entrance to the Sound. Its history, like that of Gardiner's Island, is bound up with that of a distinguished American family, for it was granted in 1668 to John Winthrop, the younger, eldest son of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, and himself governor of the colony of Connecticut. John Winthrop, the younger, built a manor-house on his island estate, and dwelt there until his death, in 1676, at the age of seventy. Fisher's Island descended to his eldest son, and when the latter died without male heir, in 1707, became the property of his aptly named brother Wait Still Winthrop, chief-justice of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, in the possession of whose descendants it remained for a hundred and sixty years.

More recently it has passed into other hands and is divided at present into several farms. However, one relic of the Winthrops remains, their handsome old manor-house, –– now much enlarged from its original size, –– with its thick stone walls and huge dormer-windows breaking the gray-shingled monotony of its high gabled roof. Nor does the island lack other reminders of a bygone time. Amid the long seagrass and by a small rock, blackened with soddened sea-moss, which marks one of the loneliest spots on its south shore, lies the grave of a man there washed up, who lost his life in attempting on a dark night nearly nine-score years ago to swim across the Connecticut River. According to tradition the young pastor-for it was the Rev. Samuel Pierpont, of the First Church, of Lyme-was returning to his bride. He did not find the ferryman, and anxious both on his own account and that of his wife, he essayed to cross by swimming. His life went out in the night and the darkness, and weeks later his body was washed ashore on Fisher's Island, where naught now disturbs his lonely sepulcher.

Time was when the nearest neighbor to the southward of the Winthrops, of Fisher's Island, was the lord and owner of Sylvester's, now called Shelter, Island. It was in 1652 that Nathaniel Sylvester, one of a wealthy royalist family driven from England by the undoing of the first Charles, brought Grissell Brinley, his bride, to Shelter Island, which he and his brother had lately purchased for "sixteen hundred pounds of good Muscovado sugar," building there a comfortable manor-house, which a little later became a place of refuge for the Quakers driven from Massachusetts by the authorities of that colony. George Fox was twice a guest of the Sylvesters and preached to the Indians from the door-steps of their hospitable home.

That is how it came to be called Shelter Island, descending in the third generation to Brinley Sylvester, of Newport, who elected to dwell in the place of his fathers and built a new house on the site of the original homestead. This house, erected in 1737, and known as the Sylvester Manor, is now owned and occupied by the widow and daughters of the late Eben Norton Horsford, who are lineal descendants of Nathaniel and Grissell Sylvester. It is reached by a mile drive from the western shore through a rolling country and over well-shaded roads. On each side of the entrance to the house are two small brass cannon glinting in the sunshine, and on the wide door is a heavy brass knocker. Lift this and a cordial welcome is assured you, for its owners delight to show the old house and its treasures to the visitor, –– a piece of the cloth of gold presented by Captain Kidd to Madam Gardiner, the snuff-box that Lord Fairfax gave to Washington, veneered and inlaid furniture, spinning-wheels, coffin-like clocks, and many other things quaint and deeply interesting in their quaintness.

And so, after a day divided between Fisher's and Shelter Islands, we came back to Greenport, and idled there until the summer was ended and the time for our return to the workaday world was at hand. But Long Island throughout its length and breadth is rich in reminders of colonial and Revolutionary days, and thus it was that we planned a leisurely homeward journey, which, beginning at the Hamptons, gave us pleasurable glimpses of St. George's Manor, Patchogue, Huntingdon Harbor, Jericho, Oyster Bay, and Roslyn, and came to an end at Flushing. Settled in 1640 by men from Lynn, Massachusetts, the three Hamptons, South, Bridge, and East, had early and frequent disputes with the Dutch, who came down the island from New Amsterdam. First joined to the Hartford colony, they were later made a part of the domain granted by Charles II. to his brother, the Duke of York, their energetic protest against this transfer passing unheeded. "But," in the words of the author of the ancient records of Southampton, "it requires something more than the patent of a king and the order of a governor to change the wishes, the thoughts, and the dispositions of a people, and from that day to the present Southampton has continued to be an integral part of New England to all intents and purposes, and in all modes of thought and action, as much as any portion of the land of steady habits."

Seated in the lap of a wide, wind-swept plain, against the southern edge of which the ocean pounds with never-ceasing roar, Southampton's first prosperity came from the sea. The whale-fishery began early, and often the whales came so close to the shore that the fishermen could capture them from boats. Sometimes they became stranded and were cut up by their captors. In 1687 there were a dozen whaling crews of ten men, each doing business on this plan, and over two thousand barrels of oil were secured in that year. Following the introduction of mineral oils, however, the whaling industry declined as rapidly as it had risen, and during the first three-quarters of the present century idleness and quiet brooded over the moss-grown old hamlet by the sea. Now the tide of modern wealth has set in upon it; the old and the new jostle and mingle delightfully in the Southampton of today, and in a walk along its main street, lined all the way with splendid elms, one comes upon venerable landmarks like the old Sayre House, built in 1648, and handed down from father to son for ten generations, touching elbows with smart summer cottages of the most recent pattern. The palace of a new-made millionaire keeps company with the old Pelletreau House, where Lord Erskine made his head-quarters during the British occupation in 1779; a golf-link and a club-house are within sight of the ruins of the three forts which that nobleman cause to be erected, and along the shores of old Town Pond, transformed by recent comers into Lake Agawam, and over the Ox Pasture and Great Plains roads, thoroughness opened in the middle of the seventeenth century and flecked with windmills brought from Holland, the visitor drives by a hundred modern villas, the creation of yesterday. To the south of the town are the dunes for which this coast is famous, and beyond them the rollers break upon the beach with a roar that can be heard a mile away.

Three miles west of Southampton village the level moorland rises into the hills of Shinnecock, so named from the Indians who were the original owners of all the lands. In 1703 the Shinnecock region was leased back to the Indians by the settlers who had previously purchased lands from the tribe and was used as a reservation until 1859, when the hills were sold to a local corporation and the remnant of the tribe took up their abode on the Shinnecock Neck, where they still live to the number of about two hundred. These are a mixture of Indians and negro, the last full-blooded member of the tribe having died several years ago. The women till the soil and find employment among the cottagers and villagers, but the men hug the shady side of the house or hill, smoke, watch the women at work, and say nothing. The government furnishes them with a schoolmaster and a preacher, but small influence have they to win the Indian from his contempt of labor, his pipe, and his taciturnity. The only thing taught him by the white man for which he has a liking is a keen relish for strong drink, and when in his cups he is said to be an ugly creature. In the main, however, the Shinnecocks are a silent and inoffensive people, gradually fading off the face of the earth.

Yet life among them has not been without its strange, mysterious tragedies. At the close of a summer day seventy-odd years ago a small sloop coming from the northward anchored near the shore of Peconic Bay. The only persons on the sloop who could be seen by the Indians fishing close at hand were a white man and a negro. After darkness had settled over the bay a light flickered from the cabin windows of the sloop, and a voice, that of a woman, was raised in song. In the early morning hours, a noise was heard in the direction of the boat and a woman's screams floated out over the water. Then the listeners on shore heard the sound of the hoisting of an anchor, and a little later in the early morning light the sloop was seen speeding out to sea. Just before it disappeared a man standing in the stern threw something white overboard.

Among the watchers on shore was one Jim Turnbull, an Indian known as the Water Serpent. After a time Turnbull swam out to the white object still floating on the water. As he drew near he saw it was the body of a woman lying face downward. When Turnbull turned the body over he recognized the face at a glance. The woman's throat had been cut and a dagger thrust into her heart. Then he conveyed the body to the beach and, aided by his companions, buried it near the head of Peconic Bay. The clay following the woman's burial the Water Serpent disappeared. He was absent for several weeks, and when he came back to his home in Shinnecock Hills gave no hint of his wanderings. Years later, however, when he was about to die, his lips opened and told a fearful story.

During a winter's storm a few months before the murder in Peconic Bay the Water Serpent and several other members of his tribe had been wrecked on the Connecticut shore. The Water Serpent, alone escaping death in the waters, was found lying unconscious on the beach by a farmer named Turner, who carried him to his home nearby, where the farmer's daughter, Edith, a beautiful girl, nursed him back to health. An Indian never forgets a kindness, and the Water Serpent was no exception to the rule. He did not see his young nurse again until he found her body floating in the waters of Peconic Bay. Following this discovery, he quickly made his way to the home of the girl, and found that she had eloped with an Englishman, a former officer in the British army. The Water Serpent told his story, and two of the girl's brothers went with him to her grave. They opened it at night, identified the body, and carried it away for burial beside that of the girl's mother.

The Water Serpent had seen the Englishman and remembered his face. With the farmer's sons he took up the search for the murderer, and finally traced him to a farmhouse near the village of Stamford. One day the Englishman was missed from his usual haunts, and months afterwards his body was found, in a thick piece of woodland, with a dagger plunged through the heart. It was the same dagger that the Water Serpent had found in the heart of Edith.

One of the winsome excursions open to the visitor to Southampton leads by way of Bridgehampton, smallest and least interesting of the Hamptons, to the ancient whaling port of Sag Harbor. The whaling propensities of the farmer-mariners of Long Island led them in their search for the big fish to cruise farther and farther each year from the shore. From building boats and towing the dead whales back to shore to be "tried out" they began to build ships and make voyages to the South and Arctic seas. This business centered at Sag Harbor, and at one time there were nearly fourscore whalers sailing from the little port. Everybody in Sag Harbor had shares in whaling vessels. A round three hundred men worked on her wharves and all the other men of the town went to sea. In 1847 a million dollars' worth of oil and whalebone was the spoil of the Sag Harbor fleet. Then came the quick decline in the whaling interests that followed the discovery and use of petroleum. Fire swept away a portion of the town; the finding of gold in California drew many of its adventurous seamen to the West, and the glory of Sag Harbor departed. The last whaling vessel was sold in 1862, and today its wharves are deserted and its streets are silent.

What with its want of life and trade and its handful of ancient mariners now fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, Sag Harbor belongs to the past, and the same is in a measure true of Easthampton, two miles east of it, until recently one of those fortunate towns that could not be reached by rail. Easthampton has a history dating back to 1650, and its single elm-shaded street abounds in relics of an earlier time. Many of the houses are of the last century, and one of them sheltered in boyhood John Howard Payne, author of "Home, Sweet Home." In another Lyman Beecher lived while pastor of the old village church. Cooper is said to have laid the opening scenes of his "Sea Lions" near Easthampton, and the place is rich in other strange and stirring memories.

On an April day in 1840 there came an unusual visitor to Easthampton's solitary inn. The newcomer was a man of fifty, handsome, courtly, reserved, and both he and the servant who accompanied him spoke with a marked Scotch accent. They were assigned quarters by the innkeeper, and with him they remained five years. Then the servant went away, and the master found a home with a leading family of Easthampton. His means were ample and remittances reached him regularly through a chain of banks. The life he led in the quiet town was in every way a sweet and lovely one. He was the constant patron of the poor, the warm friend of all the boys in the village, prompt and foremost in every good work, and a regular attendant at church, contributing freely to the building of a pretty little chapel at Easthampton.

And yet for more than thirty years this singular man led the life of a hermit. But once in that time did he pass the limits of Easthampton, and that was to visit Southampton, only a few miles away. During all these years his identity remained unknown to those about him. John Wallace was the name he gave when he came to Easthampton, and John Wallace is the name you will find carved on the white slab that stands above his grave in the village cemetery. At rare intervals he would come from the post-office holding a letter in his hand and remark to the members of the family with whom he lived, "This is from my lady friend in Edinburgh."