Of the later group, the generation born in the fifties and the early sixties, Sarah Orne Jewett is the earliest figure. With her there was no preliminary dallying with mid-century sentiment and sensationalism; she belongs to the era of _Oldtown Folks_ rather than of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. "It was happily in the writer's childhood," she records in her later introduction to _Deephaven_, "that Mrs. Stowe had written of those who dwelt along the wooded sea-coast and by the decaying, shipless harbors of Maine. The first chapters of _The Pearl of Orr's Island_ gave the young author of _Deephaven_ to see with new eyes and to follow eagerly the old shore paths from one gray, weather-beaten house to another, where Genius pointed her the way." And again in a letter written in 1889: "I have been reading the beginning of _The Pearl of Orr's Island_ and finding it just as clear and perfectly original and strong as it seemed to me in my thirteenth or fourteenth year, when I read it first. I shall never forget the exquisite flavor and reality of delight it gave me. It is classical--historical."[109] She herself had been born by one of those same "decaying, shipless harbors of Maine," at South Berwick, a village not far from the native Portsmouth of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It was no ordinary town, this deserted little port. "A stupid, common country town, some one dared to call Deephaven in a letter once, and how bitterly we resented it."[110] It had seen better days. There was an atmosphere about it from a romantic past. In Miss Jewett's work it figures as Deephaven. "The place prided itself most upon having been long ago the residence of one Governor Chantrey, who was a rich ship-owner and East India merchant, and whose fame and magnificence were almost fabulous.... There were formerly five families who kept their coaches in Deephaven; there were balls at the Governor's and regal entertainments at other of the grand mansions; there is not a really distinguished person in the country who will not prove to have been directly or indirectly connected with Deephaven." And again, "Deephaven seemed more like one of the cozy little English seaside towns than any other. It was not in the least American."