foreign town. Nine of them ring in their high belfries within little more than a mile of distance. I do not know any other New England village which has so many pleasant bells within hearing. Three of them belong to the sister town of Rollinsford, on the other side of the river.

This region bore its part in all the wars with generosity and bravery. The famous crew of John Paul Jones and the "Ranger" was mainly gathered from the shores of the river. One of the last of his sailors was, in his extreme old age, my father's patient. There was much shipbuilding up and down the river; and hardly a household in the old seafaring days of New England did not find itself anxious when the wind blew, or the mother did not give a heavy sigh as she said that it was a hard night for sailors coming on the coast. This part of the industry of the town is so completely at an end that younger people can hardly believe that the river was once such a highway for traffic. Even so lately as forty years ago there was a picturesque fleet of twenty gundalows with lateen. sails, sailing from the Landing wharves to Portsmouth, beside a good-sized packet boat which went every other day. We know so little of the ways of the people a hundred or two hundred years ago, that it is a pleasure to be able to recall the customs of only fifty years since, and to be able to picture to ourselves, not only the people, but the way they lived in their pleasant houses and spent their time in the same pleasant houses and along the quiet streets that we ourselves know. When you see the last of the gundalows coming up the river, you will like to remember that its ancestor was copied from a Nile boat, from which a sensible old sea captain once took his lesson in shipbuilding. The high peaked sail looks like a great bird's wing, and catches the flawy wind well in the river reaches.

The northern country was covered then, for the most part, with heavy pine growth; and the chief business at Berwick was buying this from the lumbermen, and sending it to Portsmouth, there to be reshipped, or direct to the

West Indies, where the usual course of the ships was to load with rum, tobacco and molasses, and then to Russia where this second cargo was exchanged for iron, duck and cordage, then back to Liverpool for another trade, and so home. The little ships made money fast enough, and in the winter time the Berwick streets were crowded with ox teams and huge timber pines and piles of plank and boards. Sometimes gangs of teamsters, with their oxen, came in great companies from the White Mountains, and even from Vermont through the Crawford Notch. Sometimes there were two or three bronzed sea captains rolling up the street in company. It was a business full of all sorts of interests and surprises, and the cords which were fastened at one end to the Landing wharves seemed to

wind all about the other side of the world. You found a plain old man who knew all about some distant corner of the mysterious earth, not because he had read about it in a weekly newspaper, but because he had been there himself and perhaps taken his wife with him. There was somebody, perhaps your own greatgrandfather, who had wintered at Valley Forge. One might meet Dr. Usher Parsons, the biographer of Sir William Pepperell, and a distinguished writer on medical subjects, who had been Commodore Perry's surgeon, at the great fight on Lake Erie, who was of Berwick stock, and had come to pay a summer visit to his relatives in the town. There would be Judge Green, a most dignified and elegant man, wearing his cloak with scarlet facings; and Judge Hayes, who

had the instincts of an English country squire, and lived like one on his great estate, bringing up his handsome sons and daughters to be ladies and gentlemen, to walk and to speak as ladies and gentlemen should, and to be self-respecting and respectful of others. You might see his brother-in-law, President Lord, of Hanover, walking gravely past the Corner on his way to call upon his brother John, who had been the early friend of Daniel Webster, and law student with him in Jeremiah Mason's office at Portsmouth. You might meet Hon. William Burleigh,' another lawyer and member of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Congresses, who had just won great approval from his townsfolk for getting a longed-for appropriation from the government for dredging and blasting the river channel between the Upper and Lower Landings, so that commerce was expected to take a new start in these busy waters.

If you saw a dignified, straight little lady coming down a wide box-bordered

1 Hon. William Burleigh was the father of Hon. John H. Burleigh, a successful manufacturer and public-spirited citizen, who was a member of the Forty-third and Fortyfourth Congresses.

walk to the street, from a noble house that stood behind a close planted row of poplars that long ornamented the village street, you might be sure that it was old Madam Cushing, who had known Lafayette when they were young together in Boston, and the battles of the Revolution were being fought. It was she whom the old man remembered and came to Berwick to see in his last visit to America. Only the other day, a dear old friend of mine told me that she remembered seeing the old French general go "with his gentlemen" up that same

box-bordered walk to pay the visit. And with Madam Cushing might be her sonin-law, Mr. Hobbs, a tall, fine figure of a man just in the prime of his activity, and one of the most useful and careful secretaries and trustees of the academy during many years. He, too, was a lawyer, all these men were lawyers, and so were Mr. Cogswell and Mr. John Hubbard, who died young and so disappointed many hopes. They knew what was going on in the world, bought good books, knew the best men in other places, and lived handsomely at home. If Judge Hayes was the village squire, then that delightful man, called by everybody "Old Parson Allen," in spite of as young a heart as ever beat,- Old Parson Allen was the village clergyman, and stood in Parson Wise's shoes with no room to spare. Grave, compassionate, full of sympathy with the present and reverence for the past, he magnified his office in a lovely and most noble way. His contemporary, Mr. Richardson, was a younger man, to whom a great parish looked with respect and affection. The doctors were known men. The Berwick

women were famous for their housekeeping and their hospitality; they had their Social Library, which held the best books of the day; they were fond of ceremony, and they had their maternal meetings and their sewing societies, and made them answer well for discussion clubs and all the subdivisions of club life at the present day. Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Leigh and the Cushings, Hardings, Fergusons, Rices, Nasons, Parkses and Lords, what a list one might make! They make the social affairs of to-day seem pale and prosaic. Perhaps in their time, however, everybody was saying that society in Berwick was nothing to what it had been in Judge Chadbourne's and Judge Hill's day. It is natural to look at the past through the mists of glamour and imagination.

I find myself always speaking of my native town as Berwick, though the original town was long since divided and divided again. South Berwick is really the oldest of the three, to which most of the earliest history and tradition belongs; and the newer settlements and townships are its children; but the old people never seemed to make any difference in their own minds. I feel myself to be a little pedantic when I speak unnecessarily of the points of the compass. It is all one Berwick to me, except for post-office conveniences and things of that sort. The courage of

the Plaisteds, and the nameless heroine who saved all her neighbors in the Tozer garrison, are as much my inheritance as if an imaginary line had never been struck across the land in 1814. I am proud to have been made of Berwick dust; and a little of it is apt to fly in my eyes and make them blur whenever I tell the old stories of bravery, of fine ambition, of good manners, and the love of friend for friend and the kindness of neighbor to neighbor in this beloved town. Her children and the flock of her old academy are scattered everywhere. They can almost hear each other's voices round the world, like the English drumbeat. They have started. many a Western town; they are buried in Southern graves for their country's sake; they are lost in far northern seas. They sigh for the greenness of Old Fields and Pound Hill, for Blackberry Hill and Cranberry Meadow, from among the brick walls of many a crowded city; but some of the best have always stayed at home, and loved the rivers and the hills as their fathers and mothers did before them. They keep to the old ambitions, they mean to carry the flag of their town and state as high and free as they can! There is no town that has done its duty better than old Berwick, in war or in peace, in poverty or pride, in the days of her plain, hard-fighting youth, or the serenity of her comfortable prime.

T is a very beautiful and romantic coast, this of Somerset and North

IT

Devon, with the Bristol Channel flowing between it and the vapory hills and shores of South Wales. From desolate moorlands it drops into the sea by crags and precipices of red and yellow rock, sandstone and granite, with here and there a narrow sandy or shingly beach, which appears, or disappears, as the tide comes in or ebbs. Seen from the sea, without a closer acquaintance, it seems to fall inland in softly rolling valleys, high enough for the clouds to rest upon them, but easy of passage; billowed in tranquillizing curves; peaceful, and arable.

There is no wilder country in England, however, than this. It is all inoorland, wild, uncultivated, solitary; open to all the winds that blow; clothed with only gorse and heather and bracken, or clumps of scrub oaks and dwarf pines, in which the wild deer still finds shelter and multiplies. A good part of it is Exmoor, and what is not Exmoor is like Exmoor.

Pitiful the plight of the wayfarer who thinks it is as easy to cross afoot as it looks! He sees from the coast nothing between him and the horizon but one shallow basin after another, with barely a ridge between them; no steep hills to climb, or gullies to descend; a comfortable farmhouse, or a cluster of cottages, appears, perhaps, in the lap of one of the valleys. He is spent before he is undeceived. The wild moorland falls away everywhere into dark and difficult ravines, and the cottages, instead of lying in a vale, are on a cliff with a long descent to the opposite slope. There are few levels on Exmoor, few grades that do not drag the breath out of us. It is uphill and downhill all the way to Lynmouth, whether we come from Barnstable, Minehead or Dulverton; most so from Barnstable, least so from Minehead.

And a wonderful thing is something unanticipated when one sees the blackness and desolation of the moorland that while the uplands are so austere, all the valleys, or most of them, especially where they are narrowest, support a vegetation of a richness unsurpassed even in England. Here you will find the hydrangeas growing in colors never seen before; roses climbing up porch and lattice; the fuchsia as high as the chimneys and raining like the thorns of Calvary; myrtle and laurel, and hedgerows

A LYNMOUTH MARKET WOMAN.

that are nothing but solid banks of flower and leaf.

To come from above is like exploring a nature harsh on the surface but warm and generous at heart. These combes are cut and threaded by the greenest lanes, in which wild flowers follow the