Beautiful, commanding, stirring as the scenes are about Cohasset’s bounding shores, yet the tragedies which have occurred in the treacherous approaches to the harbor are both numerous and heart- appalling. On these very rocks, where the waters usually play in such happy abandon, more than seven score of persons from a single ship—the _St. John_, in October, 1849—were dashed to their deaths, and disasters attended by less mortality became so common that the Government erected a lighthouse at Minot’s Ledge, which is two miles off Cohasset Point, where the hidden rocks are most dangerous to shipping. From Cohasset the trip was south, by the Old Colony, along the Atlantic shore, passing many points of great interest, though for scenery there is nothing but marshes and a waste of sandy beach. But on the way, Daniel Webster’s farm is pointed out, located on a level strip between the railroad and Marshfield Neck, where it would appear that raising clams might be more profitably pursued than the growing of grain or vegetable. Quaint scenes, reminders of the olden times when stage- coaching was the most luxurious mode of travel, and pot-hooks and hangers were adjuncts of the crane that rendered the fire-place the sole convenience for cooking, pass in review and are a source of the greatest interest to those of a retrospective and reflective turn of mind. Here and there we observe old Puritan churches and equally old-fashioned people, whose appearances indicate that they have not been widely distributed since the Mayflower landed. There is a Miles Standish, John Alden and Priscilla in every village, and the houses, in many cases, tell of a time quite as remote. Indeed, in the little but ancient hamlet of Greenbush, which is within a half-dozen miles of Cohasset, and twice as far to Nantasket, an intensely fashionable resort, one may see the identical old oaken bucket and the crazy sweep by which “dripping with coolness it rose from the well,” which inspired Woodworth’s immortal lay in 1817. There, too, is the same old house, hiding behind a clump of trees, under which the poet sat and drank from the “full blushing goblet,” which, alas for human weakness, he really coveted less than a beaker of good wine. [Illustration: PURGATORY CHASM, NEAR NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND.] Twenty-five miles south of Cohasset is the historic town of Plymouth, and right in front of it is a harbor made by a long neck of land, parallel with the shore, and known as the Cow-Yard, in which the Mayflower came to anchor with her precious cargo of forefathers, on a bleak December day in 1620. Mr. Samuel Adams Drake has written: