Campobello: An Historical SketchWells, Kate Gannett
History
Campobello: An Historical Sketch
Wells, Kate Gannett
Campobello Island (N.B.)
=The Old Home.= On to the Owen house went the boy and found his old
haunts,--first, the nursery, then his mother's room, and next his
grandmother's; out among the pines to the places where he had played, on
to the sun-dial and the quarter-deck. All were revisited, with none of
the sadness which comes in middle life, but with the sure joy of a child
who has found again his own. He clicked the uncocked pistols of the
Admiral, and took up the battered, three-cornered hat.
In the afternoon a game of baseball was played in his honor; and never
did his great-grandfather watch more eagerly for victory over the
pirates than did this descendant watch that the game might be won by the
Campobello boys. At evening, in the little English Church, where the
bishop blessed the people and told of Lady Owen's deeds of mercy, the
boy bent his head over the narrow bookrest, and after the service was
over he again shook hands with those who had so easily and quickly
become his friends.
The next day the people gathered again at the wharf. The midshipman was
a new old friend by this time. Once more the brass-piece sounded
farewell as he crossed the bay. It had been the playmate of his boyhood,
his imaginary navy, his cavalry horse, his personal friend. By its side
he had never wanted to rest on chairs or sofas. Once more he turned to
look at it as he went down the steps to the water's edge, and waved
adieu to those who loved him for his mother's sake, with a fondness and
pride and sense of personal ownership unknown in "the States," where
ancestry counts for but little.
The old cannon still stands upright in Mr. Batson's store. No one would
ever steal it again. No one can ever buy it away. From father to child
it will descend, to tell of the English-American feudalism of a hundred
years ago, and of the happy, bright boy, who found his father's house
turned into a modern hotel.
The wonderful loveliness of Campobello can never be taken from it by any
possessor. It is a beauty partly its own, and partly borrowed from the
soft rounded headlands, the toy-like islands, the vanishing rivers, and
the far reaches up the bay, which make the opposite shore. Busy shining
Eastport, with its New England steeples, spreads itself gently in a long
line down to the water's edge.
=The Sunsets.= At evening the sunset sends its glory over the waters and
the land, blending all into the wondrous charm of changing, glowing
color. The sunsets of the Island have been likened to those of Italian
skies and Swiss lakes. They need no comparison. They make their hours
those of exceeding beauty and reverent silence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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