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We

We Discover New England

The Chronicle of Two Happy Motorists Part Four Along the Coast

Recorded by LOUISE CLOSSER HALE

Illustrations by Walter Hale

E saw the full swn of the harbor as we left Portlan

ing toward

Biddeford; and just at the limits lay the body of a man who had ramped for the last time, guarded by a policeman. I felt sorry that he must die on so glorious a day, for surely no man in better appreciate the tempered wind and soft sunshine than a tramp. But he lay very easily in the lap of his mother earth.

We followed the trolley to Biddeford, but it was not a busy trolley, and when we reached the town we found most of the mills shut down, with the great smokestacks, which we would gladly have had polluting the sky, unfulfilling their mission. Men and women were idle in the doorways, and hanging out of windows. We have come upon evil days for our millpeople, although I understand the owners endeavor to run the mills for half the week that the bodies of the workers may remain integral with their souls.

The blight appears to have extended itself to the trees of the open country. At least they have a blight of their own, and such trees as have been sprayed bear large placards of "Poison," doubtless to warn the educated New England cows against eating the leaves. Despite these calamities of town and country, the places were prosperous in appearance, the farmhouses were finely built, and fat cattle in the fields lent an air of solidarity to the scene. We were headed for Kennebunkport, having been told 'e that the golf-course was on this si the tombs,"

and the town beyond them. In Maine the cemeteries are given that terse name. It has a resonance that consorts well with these little patches of the dead that lie along the rocky, booming coast.

We stopped at Kennebunkport for oldtime's sake, although the cottages of our friends were closed, and the hotel where we lunched was about to. This revisiting of a locality which one associates with friends, when the friends are absent, is like sitting before a wide hearth on which no fire is burning. We did not feel the want of acquaintances in places that were new to us, but the day in Kennebunkport brought to me most poignantly that it is people, not things, which make up a large part of the world. And I offer the old thought as a solace to those who must stay at home, yet are surrounded by men and women whom they know.

I could pick out the way to Kennebunkport proper only by my recollection of a fine old colonial house on the right which had been overornamented with white incrustations like the icing on the wedding-cake. No traveler must, or will, fail to observe it. Its appearance makes one long for a building committee to restrict extravagances of architecture both of town and country. What a tearing down of towers and a removal of gingerbread porches there would be if a body of capable architects were set loose among the cottages built twenty years ago!

Before Ogunquit we were forced to make a detour, and discovered an old gen

tleman in a small car stuck in a sandy pasture bleating piteously for Portland. "Is it all sand?" he asked, under the impression that Maine had no more roads to offer. But this detour was occasioned by the process of hitching together as good a road as one can ask for. It ran now among colorful moors, for we were out of the pine forests, and the sea threw its spray among the rocks, "like," as Our chauffeur charmingly put it, "an atomizer." Studios with great north skylights were part of many of the cottages, and maidens sat in meadows, braving the cows to paint the cliffs. At one turn of the road we stopped to admire and "register," as they say in taking a moving-picture, a house and a tree beside it, and the sea beyond them both. That was all. Why does the heart go out to some habitations and remains cold to others?

The road-bed grew so extraordinarily good as we neared York Beach that the automobile association urges you to keep within bounds by posting horrible warnings of swift motor-cycle police who lurk behind every heather-bush. Even so, the Maine automobile travels with throttle wide open, a conscious look upon the face of the taxpayer, as though he would say, "As you make your own bed, so shali you ride upon it."

I believe that the beach which stretched before us on our left is the finest in the world, just as the cottages which were on our right are certainly the meanest, and in no way deserve the view, considering that the ocean has to look back at them. Every name that could be derived by mediocre minds was given to those shacks, and flaunted over the door, from (hospitably) "Letumcum," to (modestly) "The Atlantic," a very small bungalow.

In close juxtaposition was York Harbor, a summer place rich in fashion, but poor in interest. A beautiful woman with seventy-five summer gowns once told me that the large hotels get a hold on you, and

you go back year after year. Forewarned by this, we did not stop at all; for we cannot imagine any greater misery than a large hotel "getting a hold" on us.

It was the illustrator's wish to visit the navy-yard before it was closed for the day. It lies at Kittery Point, and we were as near to reaching it on time as we ever were at getting anywhere, for the gun had just fired for the closing of the shops as we brought up before the sentry. Having garnered our camera, we were allowed to motor among the buildings and visit some of the war-ships that were in dry-dock. It was here that General Cervera was pleasantly imprisoned during the SpanishAmerican War. If he had the run of the governor's beautiful house and the officers' quarters scattered along the point, I think he did well to be captured.

The workmen were going off to Portsmouth in launches, a much more festive fashion than electric cars, although they were soberly reading newspapers and paying no attention to the sunset, as Venetian laborers always seem to be doing. The vessels in dry-dock were preparing for the evening meal. I asked one neat scullion, who was carrying pails of potato-peelings to the water's-edge, if he preferred being ashore in this half-and-half fashion, and he said, upon reflection, that he did not. I was stirred by his preference for the high seas, but, after probings, learned that the advantage of the broad ocean was the pitching of the potato-peelings directly out of the port-holes. "That's the worst of being ashore," completed the tar, gloomily; "no place to throw things."

The Russian and Japanese met here daily until the peace treaty was signedcould it be as far back as 1905? A tablet on a building commemorates that period, so gay for the Americans, so gratifying to the Russians, and so bitter to the silent little Orientals, who, while the victors, received nothing.

When we reached our hotel in quaint old Portsmouth, we found a disposition on the part of the young girl at the newsstand to claim this hostelry as the one which harbored both factions; but I think she was over-zealous rather than undertruthful.

The traveler should spend some time in this only port of New Hampshire. In

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we

in an automobile labeled "Just Married," like the bride and groom's car away back (a thousand years back, it seems) near Amenia. The over-eagerness of those hiding behind a building to pelt them with confetti resulted in an attack upon us. Yet the laugh was upon them, for, as emerged from coils of colored-paper ribbon, they found that they had expended their ammunition on a couple wearing an intense, long-married expression. And as they profusely apologized, the "Just Married" drove triumphantly by, confettiless. Since it was the moon, "the inconstant moon," that had led them on, so did it us to Newburyport. We liked the idea of arriving at this old town of the musical name by night, and fortified by chestnuts, we ran into open country again. It was intensely quiet. We were by ourselves; all New England had gone to supper-all save a woman with a full, rich voice who was too much in love to eat. We had stopped to turn on the head-lights, and she gave us the charming benefit of her song as she walked in her garden. She was as lacking in self-consciousness as the thrush in the bush, but the thrush keeps its secrets; there were words to her cry:

"The night has a thousand eyes,

And the day but one,

Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the setting sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one,

Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done."

We stood motionless until she had finished, and as she sang, my mental picture of her changed. I could see her not as a young woman. There was a break in her rich voice now and then, which would suggest that the fingers of time were at her throat, making gentle indentations into the flesh, stealing her youngest notes from their ivory casing, sorry to do it, perhaps, but intent upon its eternal remodeling. Thank time or philosophy, or whatever power it is, that as our body changes, so does the spirit within us. One hopes

that the woman of middle age, singing in her garden that night, had found this accommodating spirit; one fears, from the yearning of her song, that she had not.

Long before we expected it we caught a line of silver on the horizon that betokened the port of Newbury. Little boats were riding at rest (only a boat can ride and rest at the same time), and there were big ones farther off in the harbor that evidently stayed out later, as grown-ups can, for they were all "lit up," and that means a number of things.

Once across the long bridge we asked the way to the tavern named after General Wolfe-asked of an Englishman, judging by his accent; and while his direction was faulty, we bore him no ill-will, for it gave us the opportunity of traversing a wide, lovely street which had nothing to do with the tavern. The fine colonial mansions were set far back from the road, solid and substantial. Even the glow of modern electricity coming from the windows shed its rays with dignity, as an able mind diffuses light. Only the creeping vines and the gardens were invulnerably soft.

We were too shy to ask of the tavern at these great doorways, the chauffeur demurring, as he feared the iron dogs might be live ones. No one was walking in the streets. There is a curfew law in Newburyport, yet it seems to have terrors only for the ancient, as we at last overtook some boys who ought to have been in bed. At first it was difficult to get any definite information, owing to their concerted desire to please, and when we begged that only one speak at a time, there was every promise of a fight over who should be the first one.

I sternly insisted that, being a lady, I should be allowed to pick out the dispenser of information, and, as a reward of merit, I sympathetically took the quietest boy. This created intense delight among his companions, for I had chosen the village stammerer, but by long breaths and pauses, and sticking to it, the little fellow told us all that we needed to know, and a good deal more.

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