Frances Lester Warner

“ In just this way, our friend from the West filed her deed, built her fire with driftwood and pine cones, set her teakettle on the stove, and sent for Barbara and me to come.
We had known Cape Cod in summer, with its blueberries and its sailing-craft, its wharves and artist-colonies and ocean breezes. But we had never seen it in winter, with snow on the sand-dunes and the wind flying over with sleet and rain.
An old house with seafaring memories knows how to behave in a storm. At high tide, our house sits up not so very far above the level of the sea. ”

“ The holiday spirit crowds the busy streets of Boston just at dusk on the day before Christmas. Red and white and crystal in the windows, lights gleaming on the slippery cross-streets, throngs of last-moment shoppers in all directions, and here and there bright posters still cheerfully advising us to do our shopping early — we have time, as we hurry for the train, only to glance at one after another of the groups along the way. ”

“ As the singers pause at the corner, the master of the choir directs the singing, with a tiny Hght on the tip of his baton, that flits and swings as we watch it, like a winter firefly in the dark.
Trumpeters and choir-boys, lanterns and candlelight and ancient carols — it all seems very old and legendary and charming, perfectly in keeping with the spirit and traditions of the place. ”

“ There is something very strong and homely about the pitch of the roof—a balanced, firm old line, in splendid proportions with the huge chimney and low walls. A weathered gambrel has a way of looking at home in the fields, a sort of boulder-shape firmly settled. And the Standish house, with its flat field-rock for a doorstep, looks like a very old settler indeed.
For a long time we sat on the doorstep and watched the outline of Plymouth Town across the harbor, and the white gulls flying, and the crows. The son of Standish of Standish knew where to pitch a house. ”

“ It rose up steep as a breaker itself, with a jagged edge at the top where the wind had scooped out sharp hollows at the roots of the beach-grass. We each made straight for one of these hollows, in one last determined dash up the sheer slope. All this time, the noise of tumult had been growing louder and louder, and when we reached the crest, there it was before us, the whole Atlantic ocean rearing toward our frail strip of sandy shore. ”

“ Swept along by the spirit of the moment, we make our own dash with the proper crowd to the proper gate ; and as we stand there waiting for our own home-coming guest, we reflect that Boston certainly manages, in spite of the crowds and the hurry, to give the feeling of Merry Christmas, of loyalty to old customs and to the legend of Christmas cheer. And then suddenly we remember that the legends of old Boston were diflferent, that Boston's great day was Thanksgiving, and that Christmas came to Boston only recently — not with the old settlers, at all. ”

“ You do not want to be merely a "summer person." The sea is rocking with a February gale, and the rain drives over the dunes in slanting gusts. But you go cruising down the Cape in the evening train, disembark two or three stations short of Provincetown, make your way up your lane, unlock your door, light a fire in your stove, set a lamp in your window, and feel that the house has been waiting there all its ninety-five years, for you. ”

“ Boston was a various old place, even in the days when Boylston Street was called "Frog Lane," when Washington Street was "The High Waye To Roxberrie," and when State Street was "The Great Streete to the Sea." The ghosts of old times flit beside us when we join in the Christmas celebrations in Boston to-day.
For now it is the Night Before Christmas again. The Santa Claus at the corner has slipped off his mask and gone home. The subway crowds have scattered. But quietly, from far and near, come the people who love the gracious custom of carol-singing on the Hill. " ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The wharves, the monument, the lighthouse, and the sails in the harbor were blurred by the fine flakes that filled the air.
But the snow soon changed to rain, the squall turned into a northeast wind, the wind rose to a gale, and Barbara and I decided to see the Atlantic in a real storm. We went home first for rubber coats, and then set off down the road to the ocean side of the Cape. The wind from the Atlantic goes over the Pamet valley in one great rush of invisible swiftness. As you lean forward against it, you feel that you must run to hold your own. ”

“ The world outside appears like a series of pictures seen through an artist's finder. If your house tops a dune on the narrow part of the Cape, you may see the sails on the horizon of the Atlantic on the east, and the sails on the horizon of the Bay on the west; a clear view of the salt water straight across the Cape in both directions.
As you go down from Barnstable to Provincetown, in automobile or by train, you notice that there are more windows than you expect to see in the triangle under the slope of the roofs. ”

“ But in 1714, Judge Sewall gives us a glimpse of the lively Christmas contest that arose when the "Royal Governour" undertook to spread the custom of celebrating the Lord's Supper on Christmas day, in Boston. As it happened, Christmas came that year on Saturday, on the day before Sunday. Here was a dilemma for the men of Boston. No industrious Bostonian would take two days of rest in succession. Therefore nobody could keep both Christmas and Sunday. One must choose. The members of the Church of England chose to keep Christmas sacred, and work on Sunday. ”

“ Country over which you have just been prowling on foot looks very different when viewed from a car. The blackberry tangles and wild rose-bushes, through which we had waded on our way to the woods, were now simply part of the scenery. And the Myles Standish monument, which had been our mariner's needle, one of the necessities of life, was now only a forsaken watch-tower, with a solitary figure on top of it against the sky. ”

“ A fine, enormous, distinguished-looking white cat, sitting on your doorstep at the foot of the pilaster of your doorway, is as common on some parts of the Cape as the pointed Christmas-trees in green tubs on the doorsteps of old houses in certain cities inland. Remarkable cats, brindle or yellow or tiger or snowball or gray, they are loved while they live, lamented when they die. "If I could look out of the window," said a little boy whose favorite cat had died, "and see my Bobbie coming down the road, wouldn't I wun to let him in?" ”

“ We stand for a moment and watch the singers. Along one street goes the Cathedral Choir in vestments ; down a narrow side street goes a little group of singers to the doorway of a friend ; and here comes another choir, the leader carrying one of those old-fashioned peak-roofed lanterns. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But though Boston was rather late in making thorough capitulation to the charms of Christmas cheer, the homes of the town were by no means slow in adopting the custom of exchanging gifts. In the advertisements in the papers of 1840 and 1850, we can read exactly what was to be had in the shops by way of "Rich and Elegant Goods, Suitable for Christmas Presents." The shoppers of those days must have scanned the advertising columns eagerly, when they could read of such things as "Reticules, Bouquet-Holders, Optic Views, Porte-Monnaies, Dissected Maps, Teetotum counters. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And as to-morrow will be a holiday, so the pope and his associates have ordained, my aunt thinks not to trouble Mrs. Smith with me this week. . . . The snow is up to the peoples wast in some places in the street. I keept Christmas at home this year, & did a very good day's work, aunt says so."
In the diary of a rather homesick young British soldier of the King's Own Regiment of Foot, we find an item for December 24, 1774, describing the Boston Christmas as he saw it; "Bad day; constant snow till evening, when it turned out rain and sleet. A soldier of the loth shot for desertion ”

“ But whenever you come upon the regulation, unspoiled Cape Cod house, there is a general plan that you recognize at once.
For example: the term "West Entry" is no idle phrase. West Entry means west entry, regardless of your angle to the road. Your house faces the south, and your side entry faces west, though the road may run at random on a wild slant, and though your west entry open on the midst of the sea. It does not matter whether you face the highway or not, does it? A road is a perishable and human thing at best; but the points of the compass mean business on the Cape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is hard to believe that the Mayflower came cruising over the Atlantic through just such winds. "In sundrie of these stormes," says Bradford, "the winds were so feirce & ye seas so high, as they could not beare a knote of sail, but were forced to hull, for diverce days togither." When we think how the sea can growl around an ocean-liner now, and then think how the little Mayflower went hulling for diverce days in "mighty storme," we wonder how it ever got here at all. ”