The Personality of American CitiesHungerford, Edward
History
The Personality of American Cities
Hungerford, Edward
Cities and towns -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
Another day and he may lead you to still another club--this one down
under the roof of one of those solid old stone warehouses with
steep-pitched roofs that thrust themselves abruptly out into the
harbor-line. It is a yacht club, and its fortress-like windows, shaped
like the port-holes of a ship, look direct to a brisk water highway to
the open sea. Underneath those very windows is the rush and turmoil of
one of the busiest fish markets in the land. There is nothing on either
coast, no, not even down in the picturesque Gulf that can compare with
this place, which reeks with the odors and where the fishermen handle
the cod with huge forks and paint the decks of their staunch little
vessels a distinctive color to show the nationality of the folk who man
it. We remember that the Portuguese have a whimsical fancy for painting
the decks of their little fishing schooners a most unusual blue.
Of Boston harbor an entire book might easily be written--of the quaint
craft that still tie to its wharves, the brave show of shipping that
passes in and out each day, of Boston Light and that other silent,
watchful sentinel which stands upon Minot's Ledge; of the Navy Yard over
in Charlestown at which the _Constitution_, most famous of all
fighting-ships, rusts out her fighting heart through the long years. And
looking down upon that old Navy Yard from Boston itself is Copp's Hill
burying-ground, a rich grubbing-place for the seekers of epitaphs and of
genealogical lore. We remember once winning the heart of the keeper of
the old cemetery and of being permitted to descend to the vault of one
of the oldest of Boston families. In the dark place there were three
little groups of bones and we knew that only three persons had been
buried there.
Above, the sunshine beat merrily down upon Copp's Hill, with its
headstones arranged in neat rows along the tidy paths and the elevated
trains in an encircling street fairly belying the bullets in the
stones--shot there from Bunker Hill a century and a quarter before....
There are many other such burying-grounds in Boston--in the very heart
of the city the Granary and King's Chapel burying-ground where a great
owl sometimes comes at dusk and opens his eyes wide at the traffic of a
great city encircling one of God's acres. And a soul that revels in
these things will, perchance, journey to Salem, seventeen miles distant,
and see the moldering seaport that once rivaled Boston in her prosperity
and that sent her clipper ships sailing around the wide world. There are
many delightful side-trips out from Boston--the sail across the tumbling
bay to Provincetown, which still boasts a town crier, down to Plymouth
or up to Gloucester, with its smart, seaside resorts nearby. And back
from Boston there are other moldering towns, filled with fascination and
romance. Some of them have hardly changed within the century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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