I wish I could get a picture of Beverly Farms as it looked to my child's eyes. I came over to "the Road," as it was called by my maternal relatives, when I was five years old. They lived in that Paradise now occupied by millionaires, the region that holds the Gordon Dexter place, the Moore place, the Swift place, and part of the Paine place. At that time, the whole section was long green fields bordered by woods, the "log brook" running through it. There were then three roads in Beverly Farms, the road now called Hale Street, the beautiful old Sandy Hill Road (West Street) and the Wenham road (Hart Street). My two homes after my mother's widowhood were at the Gordon Dexter place, and at my father's old homestead, at Mingo's Beach (where Bishop McVickar lived). There were about twenty houses at that time, between Beach Hill and Saw Mill Brook. This was West Farms and the Schoolhouse stood just back of Pride's Crossing station--afterwards removed to where it now stands as a dwelling house, occupied by the heirs of Thomas Pierce. There was then no railroad and the main road ran by Mr. Bradley's greenhouses, and along where the railroad now is, coming out near the schoolhouse. That part of Hale Street where the Catholic church is, was then Miller's Hill, a pasture, where I have often tried to pick berries. The railroad came in 1845. The little shanties where the laborers who were building the road lived temporarily with their families, were a great curiosity. I used to run away and peep into them and I can remember how they smelled. My mother, who did the work of twenty women every day almost as long as she lived, made knotted "comforters" for these shanties. Our way of getting to Beverly and Salem was by stage coaches between Gloucester and Salem. In my few journeys in these delightful conveyances I used to clamber to the top seat and sit with Mr. Page the kindly driver, who was one of our first conductors on the railroad. To the house where I now live my happy life, I was brought at five years. I could then read about as well as I can now. I found in this old house a garret, a beautiful garret, where bundles of herbs hung from the rafters, and where books, books galore had collected in old sea chests. Fancy my delight, at finding, one red letter day, Christopher North's, "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life."