Fair Harbor | Page 6

They who come to them now regard them as
playthings, good-time centers for twelve or fourteen weeks. Then they
were the homes of men and women who were proud of them, loved
them, meant to live in them--while on land--as long as life was theirs;
to die in them if fortunate enough to be found by death while ashore;
and at last to be buried near them, under the pines of the Bayport
cemetery. Now these homes are used by business men or lawyers or
doctors, whose real homes are in Boston, New York, Chicago, or other
cities. Then practically every house was owned or occupied either by a
sea captain, active or retired, or by a captain's widow or near relative.
For example, as Captain Kendrick sat in his brother-in-law's yard on
that June morning of that year in the early '70's, within his sight, that is
within the half mile from curve to curve of the lower road, were no less
than nine houses in which dwelt--or had dwelt--men who gained a
living upon a vessel's quarter deck. Directly across the road was the

large, cupola-crowned house of Captain Solomon Snow. Captain Sol
was at present somewhere between Surinam and New York, bound
home. His wife was with him, so was his youngest child. The older
children were at home, in the big house; their aunt, Captain Sol's sister,
herself a captain's widow, was with them.
Next to Captain Solomon's was the Crowell place. Captain Bethuel
Crowell was in Hong Kong, but, so his wife reported at sewing circle,
had expected to sail from there "any day about now" bound for
Melbourne. Next to Captain Bethuel lived Mrs. Patience Foster, called
"Mary Pashy" by the townspeople to distinguish her from another Mary
Foster in East Bayport. Her husband had been drowned at sea, or at
least so it was supposed. His ship left Philadelphia eight years before
and had never been spoken or heard from since that time. Next to
Mary-Pashy's was the imposing, if ugly, residence of Captain Elkanah
Wingate. Captain Elkanah was retired, wealthy, a member of the
school-committee, a selectman, an aristocrat and an autocrat. And
beyond Captain Elkanah lived Captain Godfrey Peasley--who was not
quite of the aristocracy as he commanded a schooner instead of a
square-rigger, and beyond him Mrs. Tabitha Crosby, whose husband
had died of yellow fever while aboard his ship in New Orleans; and
beyond Mrs. Crosby's was--well, the next building was the Orthodox
meeting-house, where the Reverend David Dishup preached. Nowadays
people call it the Congregationalist church. On the same side of the
road as the Macomber cottage were the homes of Captain Sylvanus
Baker and Captain Noah Baker and of Captain Orrin Eldridge.
Bayport, in that day, was not only by the sea, it was of the sea. The sea
winds blew over it, the sea air smelled salty in its highways and byways,
its male citizens--most of them--walked with a sea roll, and upon the
tables and whatnots of their closed and shuttered "front parlors" or in
their cupboards or closets were laquered cabinets, and whales' teeth,
and alabaster images, and carved chessmen and curious shells and
scented fans and heaven knows what, brought from heaven knows
where, but all brought in sailing ships over one or more of the seas of
the world. The average better class house in Bayport was an odd
combination of home and museum, the rear two-thirds the home

section and the remaining third, that nearest the road, the museum.
Bayport front parlors looked like museums, and generally smelled like
them.
To a stranger from, let us say, the middle west, the village then must
have seemed a queer little community dozing upon its rolling hills and
by its white beaches, a community where the women had, most of them,
traveled far and seen many strange things and places, but who seldom
talked of them, preferring to chat concerning the minister's wife's new
bonnet; and whose men folk, appearing at long intervals from remote
parts of the world, spoke of the port side of a cow and compared the
three-sided clock tower of the new town hall with the peak of Teneriffe
on a foggy morning.
All this, odd as it may have seemed to visitors from inland, were but
matters of course to Sears Kendrick. To him there was nothing strange
in the deep sea atmosphere of his native town. It had been there ever
since he knew it, he fondly imagined--being as poor a prophet as most
of us--that it would always be. And, as he sat there in the Macomber
yard, his thoughts were busy, not with Bayport's past or future, but with
his own, and neither retrospect nor forecast was cheerful. He could see
little behind him except the mistakes