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

It was fortunate for me that I liked to be out of doors a great deal, and that I had a brother, John, who was willing to have me for an occasional companion. Sometimes he would take me with him when he went huckleberrying, up the rural Montserrat Road, through Cat Swamp, to the edge of Burnt Hills and Beaver Pond. He had a boy's pride in explaining these localities to me, making me understand that I had a guide who was familiar with every inch of the way. Then, charging me not to move until he came back, he would leave me sitting alone on a great craggy rock, while he went off and filled his basket out of sight among the bushes. Indeed, I did not want to move, it was all so new and fascinating. The tall pine-trees whispering to each other across the sky-openings above me, the graceful ferns, the velvet mosses dotted with scarlet fairy-cups, as if the elves had just spread their table for tea, the unspeakable charm of the spice-breathing air, all wove a web of enchantment about me, from which I had no wish to disentangle myself. The silent spell of the woods held me with a power stronger even than that of the solemn-voiced sea. Sometimes this same brother would get permission to take me on a longer excursion,--to visit the old homestead at "The Farms." Three or four miles was not thought too long a walk for a healthy child of five years; and that road, in the old time, led through a rural Paradise, beautiful at every season,--whether it were the time of song-sparrows and violets, of wild roses, of coral-hung barberry-bushes, or of fallen leaves and snow-drifts. The wildness of the road, now exchanged for elegant modern cultivation, was its great charm to us. We stopped at the Cove Brook to hear the cat-birds sing, and at Mingo's Beach to revel in the sudden surprise of the open sea, and to listen to the chant of the waves, always stronger and grander there than anywhere along the shore. We passed under dark wooded cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of which held under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest woodpath to us in all the world, the path to the ancestral farmhouse.