THEIR ODD HISTORY. 235 several faithful clergymen, who are buried on the island. It was here that Rev. John Brook ministered, of whom the quaint historian Cotton Mather relates this anecdote illustrating the efficacy of prayer: A child lay sick and so nearly dead those present believed it had actually expired, "but Mr. Brook, perceiving some life in it, goes to prayer, and in his prayer used this expression: Lord, wilt thou not grant some sign before we leave prayer that thou wilt spare and heal this child? We cannot leave thee till we have it.' The child sneezed immediately." On the highest part of Star Island is the broken monument erected to Captain John Smith, which was put up by his admirers not many years ago. It was a triangular shaft of marble rising from a triangular base of hewn stones placed upon. the crag. It bore three heads-representing three Moslems slain by Smith and seen on his escutcheon-but vandals have thrown the structure down and the broken fragments lie there, making the monument as desolate as its bleak surroundings. Likewise the old graveyard. The little fort that defended Star Island in colonial times has been abandoned for a century, and nestling beneath it is the little graveyard, part of the walls remaining. It is overgrown with grass and weeds, and has a few gravestones which are gradually reeling over, as gravestones will when no loving hands care for them. A sorry-looking, dilapidated picketfence tries to fill some of the gaps in the walls. All the original inhabitants of the island are dead, their descendants scattered, and fashionable pleasuring now replaces their fishing-huts and nets and boats on this rocky desert and its environment of restless waters. As might be expected, a place like this was a favorite haunt for pirates in the colonial days. When they were caught and condemned, the old-time Puritan parsons, as a sort of preparative before they were hanged, would have them brought into church, and then preach long and powerful sermons to them on the enormity of their crimes and the deserved torments awaiting them in the other world. Around these islands cruised Hawkins, Phillips, and Pound, notorious pirates two centuries ago. It is related of Phillips that he seized a fishing-vessel named the Dolphin, and made her sailors all turn pirates. Among them was John Fillmore, who rebelled, and, starting a mutiny, killed the pirate chief, afterward successfully taking the Dolphin back to Boston. This brave man's great-grandson was President Millard Fillmore. Another pirate, Low, captured a fishing-smack off the islands, but, disappointed of booty, first had his captives flogged, and then gave each one the alternative of being hanged or of three times vigorously cursing old Parson Cotton Mather. With alacrity, it is said, they did the latter. Captain Kidd sailed these shores and buried his treasures here, as he did in many other places, and the ghost of one of Kidd's men is reported to still haunt Appledore. The renowned Blackbeard also haunted the Isles of Shoals. When the pirates disappeared these reefs degenerated into the haunt of the smuggler, for whose stealthy calling they seem appropriately adapted. THEIR GRAND OUTLOOK. Gazing shoreward from these islands at the close of day there is a sight worth secing. Far away are the White Mountains with sunset hues behind them. The foreground gives the broad-spreading New England shore-line, with Agamenticus and its attendant summits off to the northward, and in front the steeples of Portsmouth and Newburyport and their intervening beaches. The smoke of many inland villages rises in the distance, and the colossal Wentworth Hotel has its galaxy of electric lights in front of Portsmouth, while the eye sweeps with the south coast around Ipswich Bay to Cape Ann thrust far out into the At our feet is the little harbor bearing its galaxy of yachts and skiffs, that vary their sailing and fishing ocean. THEIR GRAND OUTLOOK. 237 with the flirtations of the place to make a round of amusements. The sun sinks and twilight comes. Then "From the dim headlands many a lighthouse gleams, The street-lamps of the ocean." Whale's Back Light, at the Portsmouth entrance, flashes six miles away, and the monster twin-lights of Thatcher's Island send their steady radiance out to us twenty miles across the waters from Cape Ann. Almost at our elbow White Island alternates its red and white revolving blaze. Far away to the north-east a single white star appears. It is eleven miles off, on the solitary rock of Boon Island out in mid-ocean, where not a pound of soil exists excepting what has been carried there. One of the worst wrecks ever known occurred here before this lighthouse was built. The Nottingham, from London, was driven ashore, the crew with difficulty gaining the rock when the ship broke up. They had no food, and day by day their sufferings from cold and hunger increased. The mainland was in full view, and they built a boat of pieces of the wreck to try and get there, but the waves dashed it to pieces. They saw vessels and signalled, but could not attract attention. They sank gradually into an almost hopeless band of miserable wretches, but thought to make another effort. A rude raft was constructed, and two of them tried to reach the shore. It, too, was wrecked, being found two days later on the beach, with a dead man lying near by. Then hope entirely failed them, and to sustain life they had to become cannibals, living on the body of the ship's carpenter sparingly doled out to them by the captain. But eventually they were rescued, the wrecked raft being their preserver. When it was found, the people on shore started a search for the builders, and they were taken off after passing twenty-four days in starvation on the island. As we muse upon this horror the fog, the bane of our northern coasts, closes in about us, the lights disappear, and in their place from far over the sea come the distant deep-voiced blasts of the fog-sirens, another warning to the mariner. Then the fog breaks to the northward—for it often goes as quickly as it comes-and again gleams out the steady white star from Boon Island: "Steadfast, serene, immovable, the same Year after year, through all the silent night "A new Prometheus chained upon the rock, Still grasping in his hand the fire of Jove, And with your floating bridge the ocean span; XXXIII. ENTERING THE PINE-TREE STATE. MUCH of the State of Maine is covered with forests, and cutting and floating the logs down her great rivers and preparing their product for market make the livelihood of many of her people. Crossing the Piscataqua River from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, we enter the border-town of Kittery, sacred to the memory of her colonial chieftain, Sir William Pepperell. Here are the remains of the old Fort Pepperell guarding the river-entrance, which had its quaint six-sided block-house loopholed for musketry. Here is his old mansion, with its gambrel roof and broad lawn, whence he had an unrivalled view over the sea and the islands of the river. He was the great man of his day, his vast landed estates stretching from the Piscataqua eastward to the Saco ENTERING THE PINE-TREE STATE. 239 River, and his name is reproduced in these parts in banks, mills, and hotels, even Kittery Town having once been called Pepperellville. But the train soon plunges into the forests, plenty of pine trees adorning the land, with piles of cordwood cut for fuel. It glides among the attendant foot-hills of Mount Agamenticus, the isolated mountain standing by the sea as a sentinel on the outpost of Maine. The country is sparsely settled, and much of its surface rough, with sawmills in the woods working up the timber from the clearings. Occasionally farms are passed, with grand hay-fields, and spacious mansions seeming to have come down in good preservation from the fine estates of the colonial times. The railroad winds among the hills and forests, which are bordered on the ocean front by the famous beaches of the Maine coast. Here is its place of earliest settlement in 1624, the quiet old town of York, "the ancient city of Agamenticus," almost shadowed by that mountain, and once a thriving, busy port. At the eastern end of York Beach, Cape Neddick is thrust out into the sea, with the curious rocky islet of the Nubble off its extremity, and a deep channel between. There projects beyond the frowning promontory of the Bald Head Cliff and its lofty Pulpit Rock an almost perpendicular wall rising ninety feet, with the breakers beating at its base. Then comes the town of Wells, with more magnificent beaches, having hard and firm sands that are fine, white, and sharp, being greatly prized by builders. The farmers haul these sands away as bedding for cattle and also to mix with too heavy soils. Plenty of seaweed comes ashore, being used for fertilizers, furnishing soda, lime, and salt. Above the verge of the sands the pebbles heap up in long rows by the action of the waves. The broad road furnished by these successive beaches is the chief highway along the coast, always kept in elegant repair by old Neptune. There are occasional piles of shingle, and rocky ledges protrude, while the boom of the breaker and the roar of the sea are the eternal accompaniment. |