Martha's Vineyard

OF those who travel, by far the larger part are driven about the world by a hunger for the curious. The evil demon that pursues them hides the beauty of things near at hand with a veil of commonplace, and sets on the horizon beacons that seem to point to fresher fields beyond. It is worth while to journey, to learn how deceptive is that mirage which forms itself out of distance and nothingness ; how good is the land about us, and the life that requires no translation to be understood. Our social edifice may be newer than some others, but it is made of old timber which grew in all the old forests between India and Indiana; most of its antique-fashioned furniture was ancient before the keel of the ark was made, or the mainmast of the Mayflower was in the seed; and the people who are its tenants — why, the youngest of them is older than the wall of China. Every line of their faces has been chiseled by Father Time himself, and shaped by the working of ages innumerable. Even the “cakilate” of our thinnest and most to-dayish of Yankees carries the record of a time to which the historic period is a momentary accident. If we look upon our country and its people in this way, we shall find that every nook and cranny will pay for ransacking, for it will give to those who search it in this spirit a mass of curious things, quite as rich as those we could bring to light out of the darkest corner of Europe, and far more comprehensible.

Martha’s Vineyard, it may be well to say, is not a place where a Biblical character undertook vine culture, but a considerable island on the southern coast of Massachusetts, which came by its name in a curious fashion. With our unhappy American geographical names, it is the wit and taste, or want of these estimable qualities, in the Smiths and Browns among the first settlers which determines what sounds shall denote the rivers, hills, and islands for all time to come.

It has been the good fortune of all this shore to escape almost unscathed from the dangers of the vagarious nomenclature which has vulgarized, as far as names can, the face of so much of our land. From the time the steamboat leaves New Bedford, along our route of thirty miles or more, all the names have a reason for their being; the sonorous Indian names prevail. The two long tongues of the neighboring fjords bear the titles Sconticut and Mattapoiset. Buzzard’s Bay, across which our route lies, has a certain warrant for its name: to the sailor some winged creature is often the only companion, and the harbinger of the land; naturally enough he makes the creature the tutelar deity of the place, and gives it possession in the name. The south shore of the bay, towards which our vessel points, seems in the distance like a continuous strip of land; but as we approach it nearer it breaks into a string of islands which lead in diminuendo of many steps from the continent for thirty miles to the seaward. The archipelago bears the name of Elizabeth, but the separate islands have Indian names: Naushon, Pasque, Nashawena, Penikese, Cuttyhunk, all picturesque names and well suited to the savage front the islands present to us. Culture has taken no hold on them. They lie the same rude moraines the ancient glacier left them. Their heaps of massive stones, only half concealed by the mantle of vegetation, look like the ruins of Cyclopean architecture. Between the northernmost of these islands and the mainland is a narrow and tortuous channel called Wood’s Hole. In the rude naming of the sailors hereabouts, a “hole ” signifies any deep-cut indentation or passage between two masses of land. Through this channel the tide runs in a torrent, making a little Hell Gate of the place. We sweep through it with the rapidity of a canoe shooting a rapid, and are on the broader surface of Vineyard Sound. These almost Mediterranean waters give the pleasantest contact with the sea that the summer-worn landsman can find. Although sheltered from the ocean by a fringe of islands and reefs, so that the sickening sweep of the broad water is kept away, they have the fresh air and untainted purity of the limitless sea. The view is full of life; there is always a cloud of sails along the horizon, marking the course of the shipping from Europe to all our ports south of Boston, and in the nearer distance shoals of fishermen and yachts vie with the gulls in their effort to vary the sober beauty of the sunlit water. As we cross the sound, some five miles wide, which divides the Elizabeth Archipelago from Martha’s Vineyard, the island lies full before us, its length partly hidden from us, however, by our nearness to it. Along the western shore are a range of hills rising to the height of about three hundred feet above the sea; they are round-topped and want nobility; but as a hill is always at its best along-side of the water, they give a great deal to the landscape. To the eastward the shore sinks down into a line of plain almost as level as the sea, and rising only half a hundred feet above it. All the plain is wrapped in a dense mantle of forest and grass, for, unlike most land that faces the sea, Martha’s Vineyard retains its foliage, despite the ruthless fashion in which man has repeatedly swept the forests away.

A break in the land brings into view the deeply embayed haven of Holmes’s Hole, one of the famous refuge harbors of our coast. We thread our way through a fleet of vessels which have found some excuse in the threat of storm for seeking shelter here. Huddled together so close that abuse and badinage can be plentifully exchanged by the crews, lie the motley throng : lumber ships from Maine, their decks piled high above the bulwarks with the yellow, fragrant spoils of the pine woods; colliers from Nova Scotia with voluble Frenchmen for crew, Frenchmen still in every word and feature though their ancestry is as long on our soil as the Yankee; coal ships from Philadelphia, manned with the typical tobacco - stained, taciturn American sailor. Along with these, a herd of vessels engaged in interminable and seemingly objectless wandering up and down the seas in search of hardearned gains. Here and there trim, dandified yachts bring their white paint and polished brass into glaring contrast with the grime of utilitarian trade.

The village of Holmes’s Hole, or Vineyard Haven, as it has been renamed in deference to modern euphuism, is charmingly placed at the foot of the green slopes on the west side of the haven. It is one of those accidental villages of our shore with none of the premeditation belonging to the towns which have straight streets and well aligned houses. Each house-builder has set his home to please himself; there is in almost all of them an evident desire to face the sea; almost every house has some one window so placed that its owner can watch the varying scene of the harbor. This effort to face the sea has resulted in giving a look of size and density to the place, as we approach it, quite unsupported by the straggling town. He to whom the shore is familiar will see at a glance that he is in one of those natural asylums where old sea-captains come to end their days. The little houses are simple, with the frequent attempts at rather gingerbready decorations so common with sailors. They are always neat, for the successful sailor is a man of method, and brings a shipshapeness into all his work, on sea or land. Often some great India shell or mass of coral, among the flowers in the door-yard, shows that the owner has been to the antipodes in search of the humble fortune which will carry him in peace to his end. Almost every face we meet on the broad shoulders of the seafaring people shows marks of character the sea alone can give. Most of them have something of the leonine look which comes from long habit of command ; many are bronzed, with the deep, ingrained hue got only within the tropics, which never fades again in our darker skies, but seems as fixed as tattoo marks.

He who would know the manner of men who laid in the deep sea the firm foundations of our Anglo-Saxon or Gothic civilization must look where the old blood of the sea - kings has not been washed out, or diluted by the thinner fluid which pales in the house life of the land. He will find the old stock here, in these heavy fellows with quadrangular forms, and chests which remind one of the anthropoid ape. The ancestor of man was a big-breasted fellow; he would not have won the race with a poor breathing organ. These old sea-dogs are also long-trunked, long-armed, and short-legged, with a big place for the digestive machinery and a good record of its sound work in their vigorous limbs. They come in lineal descent from centuries of ancestors whose habits have been as much like their own as the sea and storms of to-day are like those of a thousand years ago. It is not uncommon to find men who began their career as seamen with their father for mate and grandfather for captain. The vessel, as in good Norse days, was a floating household. It is not wonderful, then, that the legs should cease to have the shape they require for walking and the arms become the stronger limbs. In a ship’s rigging a man’s work is most like that of the apes : his legs do the least of the work. We will leave it to the dextrous splitters of hairs in anatomical metaphysics to say whether natural selection or mere reversion has done the work of giving Jack Tar his peculiar ancient shape. However it may be with his body, our sailor has the better of the landsman in the brain. The old salt is the best specimen of the retired man of small means the world can show. A man gets a liberal education of a rude sort before he becomes a successful ship-master. The sea is a searching examiner, ruthlessly plucking all who do not deserve success. Not the least of its lessons is content with small things and a reasonable interest and satisfaction in the moment. After his forty years of wrestle with unruly conditions, in which he learned to be happy in the brief comforts and enduring in the long miseries of the sea, he comes again to the securer life of the land well trained in the great art of living, able to make the most of each day.

Very many of the old salts have been whaling captains, and have been brought up in the best school of courage the world has ever known. The man who has been able to show the collected energy required to lance a whale has nothing to learn in the way of courage from the warfare of man with man. It would be hard to overestimate the effect of this training in developing the best qualities of the English and American sailor. There has probably never been a naval action fought in which the flag of either nation was flown, where a large part of the combatants had not learned their best lessons of coolness and subordination in this struggle with the living ships of the sea.

The trim little boxes of the sea-faring class will soon he overshadowed and blighted by the ambitious houses of the summer visitors, who have just begun to find out the attractions of this shore. So far the new-comers have displayed the admirable lack of discrimination so characteristic of those who haunt the shore in summer; there are two or three great resorts for summer visitors growing up on the low shore of the eastern end of the island, whose interminable sand — its barrenness scarcely veiled by a thin copse of scrubby oaks — is engaged in a give-and-take struggle with the sea. Oak Bluffs, where oaks and bluffs are both on the average less than ten feet high, has grown to be a pasteboard summer town capable of giving bad food and uneasy rest to twenty thousand people. We want the good reader to have the best opinion of Martha’s Vineyard, so we will turn ourselves away from the huddled roofs of the new-made town which looks out of the bushes, the aforesaid “ oaks ” of the name, and journey towards the central part of the island. As we rise from the village we pass through no intermediate zone of cultivated land, but come at once into the forest which covers the great level region of the western half of the island. This woodland is the growth which has sprung up since the pine forests which originally covered nearly the whole island were swept away by the ax. Now a pine is a rare object; we may ride ten miles without seeing a specimen. But in the mysterious succession of the forest, there has come an amazing variety of oaks. The trees are all young; in most cases, from the saddle or carriage seat the eye ranges above their tops for miles over a billowy sea of the deepest green. The shape of the leaves varies in a confounding fashion, it being easy to make twenty species from their forms, and easier to believe that they are only exuberant variations of one. They are all of a deep, rich hue, with a wonderful gloss, surpassing in brilliancy anything we get on the main-land. The extent and unbroken character of the forest is amazing; in one direction we may journey through the woods for ten miles without a trace of habitation or culture. Through it runs a maze of old paths made before the rich foliage could bar the way. The oak seems to disdain to grow wherever a wheel has run, so the disused wood-roads remain unencumbered, though for years without a track upon them. There is an indescribable charm in the monotony of these woods; an acre would be tiresome, but the whole has the charm which comes from the limitless.

This ten miles of growing forest is, for us fortunately, a waste in the eyes of the good cits who crowd its eastern border, and, as such, shunned. It has no stage effects to tickle their dulled perceptions; besides, they get lost in it. One wight told me a doleful tale of his having driven six hours at high speed to get through it, to find himself back at his starting-point at the end. Land-lubbers can get to sea even in the woods, so they keep to their plank and asphalt walks, and leave the woods to us. In our drive of half a day through deep, cool, overarched lanes or open, new-felled woods where the fresh growth of trees only brushed their tops against our wheels, we did not meet man or woman, and passed but one house, and that was a deserted ruin. Finally we emerged from the enveloping woods into the central valley of the island, where lie the villages of North and West Tisbury. It is a beautiful valley, of broad grass and grain fields, with overgrown hedge-rows, and fences covered with vines. On the east is the interminable forest; on the west and north a range of hills rugged with the vast piles of huge, gray bowlders, and dotted with pastures and forests. At times the moraine heaps they bear look like the utter ruin of some ancient building that once had covered them. To the south the valley sinks in widening fields that merge in a vast open wold. The beautiful brook which gathers its pure waters in the hills to the westward, and becomes in a few miles a little river, expands into a great pond with irregular shores and a narrow channel, through which it escapes into the sea. Beyond the long reaches of land and inland water lies the sea, fenced from us by the great wall it has built against itself, and over which it dashes from time to time. The air here is of liquid purity, though lucent from the great store of moisture it receives.

The soft air, the broad, smooth fields, the rounded domes of foliage, and the universal green, together with the drowse in which all is steeped, carries us irresistibly to our “old home.” It needs the glaring white of yon church tower, which comes as a tower should from the leafy tents of some noble trees, to tell us that it is in the kingdom of white-painted New England that this scene belongs. From all points this island is more like the Isle of Wight than things are often like each other in this world. In its place with reference to the main, its size, form, and surface, this island is a singular reproduction of the lovely garden isle of England. It only wants the rich culture which time will surely bring, to give it an equal beauty. The likeness of the two islands is singularly extended to the details. Every one who has been to the Isle of Wight knows the gay-colored cliffs of yellow, red, and white sands at Alum Bay. In the corresponding place on Martha’s Vineyard we have the similarlypainted cliffs of Gay Head, so like to the English scene that from some points of view one picture might have served for either.

The village of West Tisbury is much like that of Holmes’s Hole in all its important features, if a hamlet of thirty houses can be said to have important features. There are the old sea-captains, looking like the animated figure-heads of old-fashioned ships, some trim cottages of their building, and a few stores looking only half alive. A little mill sits astride the dancing brook with a business-like air, but the grass and bushes of many years’ growth gathered around its doors suggest anything but work. The little houses are old-fashioned, and in a certain way picturesque, or at least quaint. They are generally shingled on the sides in the same fashion as on the roof, and thus escape the excess of horizontal lines which comes with the weather-boarding. The seasons sometimes lend a lovely coat of grayish and yellowish lichen to soften the color of the unpainted wood; the whole place blends very well with the masses of foliage which wrap it round. The people get a comfortable subsistence from the broad pastures, well stocked with cows and sheep, and the rich meadows beside the stream. The land is of an excellent quality, quick to answer any legitimate demands upon it, and not readily worn out. Some of the fields of maize and wheat are as good as one finds in the Connecticut Valley. I have never seen better ground for the gardener. Strawberries grow as in southern France; roses have a glory unattainable anywhere else in New England. Yet agriculture here, as everywhere else in Massachusetts, is in decay. One never sees a field newly won from the forest, while on every side are signs of the gain of the woods on the fields. There are many deserted houses, and every little while there is a little pile of crumbling brick, or an old well, to mark where once stood some house which has been pulled down for other uses. Along the south shore there is a number of great ponds, with vast reaches of upland plain by their side; these were once cleared and cultivated, but now the fences are falling away, and a few sheep that browse on them are all there is to mark the presence of man. At first sight it is hard to explain this neglect of the industry of the land, but the observer can easily see that there are few children, and very few of the men of the active time of life. The youth born on this island have enough of the old Viking blood in them to make them natural wanderers. While they went out for fortune on the sea, they came back here to rear their children and leave their bones in their native soil. But the paths of the land do not all lead home again, so the old people are left to live and die alone. The old, old houses, once strong, now worn thin by the beat of the weather, the crazy out-buildings and fences, with two old, weather-worn people, form the sad homes on many of the little farms. Passing one of these as a storm was coming, we saw a painful scene. On a little grassy hill-side sloping up from the door, was a tiny harvest of hay, a few hundred pounds at most. Up the slope, dragging a little sled, toiled a bent old man. His once powerful limbs were huddled together by contracting tendons until he rose scarce half his height. On that sled he was to carry the hay to the house before the storm. Age without its rightful support of youth is the common result of the insane wandering spirit of our time.

On the main-land this goes on just as it does here, but the tide of immigration recruits the ranks so that there is no great lack of population, except in some country villages. But here, where Irish and Canadian-French have not found their way, the old folk die and leave empty houses. The few of sturdy age here look to the sea for their gain. There are occasional prizes to be won in fishing, and people who are constantly drawing chances in the great lottery, as these folk do with their seines, are sure not to make the steady workers required in the prosy toil of the farmer. So between the inefficiency of the old, and the lack of interest in the few youth who remain, an admirable soil continues to be entirely neglected. There are here at least fifty thousand acres of soil of a good quick quality, able to take place with the sandy loams of Belgium or the garden region of New Jersey, which have never been turned by the plow. This land, when in the rare cases of sales it has had a value set upon it, has brought of late years less than the price of government lands in Utah or Arizona.

Besides this, the island is an oasis of salubrity in our New England bad climate. Its average warmth is at least two degrees above Boston and all the region north of the Cape; and all this gain is on the winter half of the year. The thermometer in the summer heat of the redoubtable hot term of July, 1872, when we had six days in succession above ninety, never came above eighty-four degrees in Tisbury. The winter average is probably at least ten degrees above the mean of Massachusetts Bay. There is good reason for this: Cape Cod with its sickle form, with the edge to the north, catches the icy Arctic current and bars its southward course. There is at this moment a difference of twenty degrees or more between the water which bathes Nahant and that which sweeps round this island. This difference is maintained for a good part of the year, and has a necessary effect on the climate. The Gulf Stream runs only something like a hundred miles away, and a strong southeast wind brings the warm air from its surface, and probably at times its warm waters, over to this shore. Blow from what quarter the wind may, it still comes over the water and is profoundly modified by its action. From the westby-north to north it comes over Massachusetts and Buzzard’s bays and Vineyard Sound, range enough to give it the necessary freshness; from all other directions it blows over the limitless sea. The east wind is not the atmospheric file which the people are compelled to gnaw on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. It does not come from that natural refrigerator, but from the warmer water to the south, — water which has been warmed on the shores of Florida. The summer climate, at least, is the freest from exasperation, the most calming I have ever felt, without producing lassitude. It brings a physical repose which it is impossible to get in our mountains or northern sea-shores. If the reader will glance at a map, he will perceive that there is no other point on our coast where these insular conditions’ are possible to the same extent as upon this great salient angle of the continent. The difficulty with our climate arises from the unbroken mass of land, which becomes the storehouse of heat during the summer and of cold during the winter season. Those who seek a change from its conditions should get as far from its influence as they may be able. To do this without perching one’s self on some inhospitable rock, like the Isles of Shoals, or getting into the remote summer climate of Florida, is impossible except on either Nantucket, or Martha’s Vineyard. Of these, the latter is very much the better, as it gives a rich soil, beautiful drives, brooks, and woods, features denied to its bleaker sister to the east.

Water in all its phases is at its best on Martha’s Vineyard. The Vineyard Sound on the north shore gives the perfection of quiet-water bathing. It is warm enough to tempt and hold the lover of sea-bathing; warm enough to require more courage to leave than to enter it. The faint swing it has, for it is not altogether still, is as soothing as a cradle’s rocking. If this be too tame for the sturdy bather, he has only to cross the island to the south shore to find another face on the sea. The long shore, straight as if drawn by a rule for fifteen miles or more — stand in the middle and it runs to the horizon as straight as a prairie railway — is beaten by the surges which can roll directly down upon it from six thousand miles of water. Those who see the waves on the inland beaches, such as those at Newport, where the sea finds its way through a devious course, chafing over shoals and about islands, have no idea of their force when they give their full impulse with one blow upon the land. This sand shore slopes pretty steeply, though evenly, into the deep. The great waves roll with solemn regularity on the shore; they are never still. In a calm they are stately waves; in the usual summer weather they sweep up and down the slope like the swinging of some mighty pendulum. When the storm drives them they dash like wild beasts up the rampart of the beach, and clutch over it at the land. Wherever we are on the island, their ceaseless tramp will at times each day, and through the whole night, master all the lesser sounds, and fill us with the sombre monotone. One never catches the spirit of the sea so well as upon an island. The main-land is too secure, a boat is too familiar, for the happiest contact with the great creator and destroyer, the Brahm and Vishnu of the world; but on an island, with the enemy at every gate, and striving to overwhelm, we feel truly its might. Nowhere is the calm so great as in this half-imprisonment by the sea. Occupations which seemed all the world, away from it, come to be of the smallest moment when forced into measurement with its boundlessness. Close contact with it brings energy, for that is here the price of existence; but restlessness, the irritating super-activity and bustle which are the destruction of the best part of our modern life, is no child of the sea.

The kindly air, the calm, the narrow round of life belonging to this happy island, have marked themselves upon the people as such things always do. A good town history, or any equivalent record, is wanting here, though there is no field would repay such work with better results. That key to a people’s history, the surnames, tells us that the settlement was from the south of England, and principally by families which are not represented on the main. Curious and unfamiliar names, such as Look, Luce, Athern, Lumbart, Vincent, Jernigan, abound. The first settlers were on the way from England to Virginia, tradition says, and made Edgartown harbor in distress in the autumn of the year.

Many, sick of the sea,—as they may well have been in that day of slow, comfortless voyaging,—and attracted by the plenty of fish and fowl of this region of land-locked waters, resolved to go no farther. They burrowed in the sand bluffs and so made a miserable shelter against the winter They probably were reasonably well fed, for enough survived to found the colony. Soon after there came a certain Athern, whom we may reasonably suspect to have been of gentle blood, with a patent for the island. He came from Bristol, and with him some of the families still living on the island. One of his seven sons seems to have been a remarkable character, though I have been able to get only the most shadowy outlines of his life here. A man of education and a clergyman of fervor, he seems to have won a strong hold upon the Indians of the island and gathered a large congregation about him. At length, after the custom of the time, he resolved to go to England to gather funds for a church, and new colonists for the island; his savage flock went with him from the western part of the island to near Edgartown, where they parted, the Indians building a pile of stones in memory of the separation. The good pastor was lost on the ship, which never was heard from after sailing. His father took up his work, and to the end of a long life preached the gospel as effectively as the son had done, keeping native and stranger bound in the fellowship of Christ. There is the framework of a simple epic in the outlines of this story. There was surely some strong humanizing element shaping the relation of white and native on this island; for not only was there always peace during the lapse of time when the colonists were gradually displacing the Indians, driving away their game, and diminishing the fish; but to this day there are remnants of the tribes living on the soil. The Indian blood has been almost washed away by mixture of the negro and white races; the former stock has shown its prepotency in a singular fashion. Though most of the so-called Indians live upon their reservations, they are to be seen all over the island mingling in the simpler avocations of life with the other people. They would be taken generally for negroes; their color is that of our dark mulattoes, and the hair usually has something of a kink. They are a kindly, fairly industrious, simple-minded folk, with good habits, rather religious, giving nothing to the criminal list. The State has carefully warded them from most dangers, making their land inalienable, and helping them to do the best for themselves; but they are slowly fading away despite these kindly influences.

The physical condition of the white people on this island is much better than that of the people of the mainland. The men have excellent physiques, and are sturdy and calm. The women are overworked, with the drawn look belonging, it would seem, to the American woman after thirty, and only to be avoided by a care unknown in our country districts. The local health, as shown by statistics, despite the bad food, and much worse lodging than on the main, is surprisingly good. The houses are badly ventilated, the livingrooms too near the ground, yet the expectancy of life is about double what it is in Boston. It is always to be remembered, in measuring the physical conditions of this as of all parts of the New England people, that for near a century the principal export has been men, and that the amount of the better material sent out to make the great West has been large. What remains shows that the mother has not worn out in childbearing.

From Tisbury westward we have a range of hills, monuments to the old glacial sheet which once bridged the gap between the island and the main shore. Over it were carried the enormous bowlders of pudding-stone and syenite from the neighborhood of Boston and other parts of the continent to the northward. The journey over these hills would be tolerably monotonous except for the views of the sea; these vary at every step: now, as we climb some great hill, the water widens to a vast expanse broad enough to uphold the heavens; then, when we descend to the shore line, it changes to the blue strip along the sky. The forests disappear and the land narrows as we go, until, when we reach the Indian reservation, which is the outermost point, we come upon a region which wastes each year so fast that it seems as if the waves to the north and south would soon join hands over their finished work. There is an indescribable loneliness in this rugged land, with its sullen, helpless struggle against the sea. It is indeed a fitting home for the remnant of an Indian tribe. They, too, have waged a losing fight against the fates, and have nothing but extinction before them. The substantial houses of this people gave some promise of comfort within; there is not much farming, however; the little money they get is mostly from fishing and raising a few cattle and sheep. There are some children: about the thirty houses or so we saw at least as many little ones; they are bright-looking and appear reasonably healthy and well fed. The adults seem in excellent physical condition, and some of them carry this to an old age.

The outer point of the island is provided with a light-house of a peculiar pattern, making it one of the most curious structures of that class in the country. Outside of the lamp, itself a mechanical contrivance of much ingenuity, there is a cage of glass prisms so arranged that all the light is gathered into a few horizontal beams, which, as the cage revolves, are thrown far out upon the sea; flashing in succession upon the whole path of water from the shore to the horizon. Beneath the light lie a series of great cliffs leading down to the sea; these are of sands and clays having an amazing variety of colors, giving to the whole a brilliancy unexampled except at Alum Bay. Black, red, yellow, green, and white, with many intermediate tints, are blended in bands which stand nearly vertical on the cliff. Some of the sands abound in sharks’ teeth and the bones of whales, and in other monuments of another time. Far out to sea we may perceive by the Lines of breakers where lie the remnants of the cliffs which have been eaten back for miles. The sands and clays melt in the ravenous waves; the bowlders are harder to grind, and remain after the rest has gone. We turn willingly from this sad region of wasting land and people, back to the verdant central region, where the freshness of the sea and the land are so well united.

It is worth another ride over the eighteen miles of road along the south shore to see the pretty village of Edgartown, at the easternmost end of the island. In a commercial sense it is a place far advanced in decay: of all its whale-ships, which got from the sea the hard-earned fortunes of its people, there is but one left. This lies upon the ways, stripped of its rigging, looking like a mere effigy of a living craft. But the thrift and cleanliness of the sailor is marked in every paving-stone and shingle of the village. As soon as a mariner comes to fortune his first effort is to get a comfortable home, a big, square, roomy house, which shall always be ship-shape and well painted. I never thought so well of white paint before I saw these handsome houses, actually resplendent with a hue which is so often merely garish in such uses. If there be a trace of an instinct of cleanliness, white paint is an excellent stimulant to its activity, for it makes dirt hateful by making it apparent. These comfortable homes, like those of New Bedford, mark a period of prosperity which has passed never to return. Little by little the population is drifting away; some houses stand empty, and the quick agents of decay which make havoc with our frail New England houses will soon be at work at them, and even Yankee thrift cannot keep it away.

In the new life which our growing fashion of summering by the sea is bringing to Martha’s Vineyard, it is to be hoped that the pleasant traces of the old may be well preserved. But lest it be all swept away, we advise our tourists who would see the best of their own land to see it for themselves. Certainly no part of our long shore line has as much to attract and hold the reasonable traveler.

N. S. Shaler.