A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

Our lane came to an end at some bars that let us into another lane,--or rather a footpath or cowpath, bordered with cornfields and orchards. We were still on home ground, for my father's vegetable garden and orchard were here. After a long straight stretch, the path suddenly took an abrupt turn, widening into a cart road, then to a tumble-down wharf, and there was the river! An "arm of the sea" I was told that our river was, and it did seem to reach around the town and hold it in a liquid embrace. Twice a day the tide came in and filled its muddy bed with a sparkling flood. So it was a river only half the time, but at high tide it was a river indeed; all that a child could wish, with its boats and its sloops, and now and then that most available craft for a crew of children--a gundalow. We easily transformed the spelling into "gondola," and in fancy were afloat on Venetian waters, under some overhanging balcony, perhaps at the very Palace of the Doges,--willingly blind to the reality of a mudscow leaning against some rickety wharf posts, covered with barnacles. Sometimes a neighbor boy who was the fortunate owner of a boat would row us down the river a fearful, because a forbidden, joy. The widening waters made us tremble with dread and longing for what might be beyond; for when we had passed under the piers of the bridge, the estuary broadened into the harbor and the open sea. Then somebody on board would tell a story of children who had drifted away beyond the harbor-bar and the light-house, and were drowned; and our boyish helmsman would begin to look grave and anxious, and would turn his boat and row us back swiftly to the safe gundalow and tumbledown wharf.