Atlantic Coast (U.S.) -- Description and travel -- Fiction
After the bathing it is the fashion to meet again at the Casino and take
lunch--sometimes through a straw--and after dinner everybody goes for a
stroll on the cliffs. This is a noble sea-promenade; with its handsome
villas and magnificent rocks, a fair rival to Newport. The walk, as
usually taken, is two or three miles along the bold, rocky shore, but
an ambitious pedestrian may continue it to the light on Point Judith.
Nowhere on this coast are the rocks more imposing, and nowhere do they
offer so many studies in color. The visitor's curiosity is excited by a
massive granite tower which rises out of a mass of tangled woods planted
on the crest of the hill, and his curiosity is not satisfied on nearer
inspection, when he makes his way into this thick and gloomy forest,
and finds a granite cottage near the tower, and the signs of neglect and
wildness that might mark the home of a recluse. What is the object of
this noble tower? If it was intended to adorn the landscape, why was it
ruined by piercing it irregularly with square windows like those of a
factory?
One has to hold himself back from being drawn into the history and
romance of this Narragansett shore. Down below the bathing beach is the
pretentious wooden pile called Canonchet, that already wears the air
of tragedy. And here, at this end, is the mysterious tower, and an ugly
unfinished dwelling-house of granite, with the legend “Druid's Dream”
carved over the entrance door; and farther inland, in a sandy and
shrubby landscape, is Kendall Green, a private cemetery, with its
granite monument, surrounded by heavy granite posts, every other one of
which is hollowed in the top as a receptacle for food for birds. And one
reads there these inscriptions: “Whatever their mode of faith, or creed,
who feed the wandering birds, will themselves be fed.” “Who helps the
helpless, Heaven will help.” This inland region, now apparently deserted
and neglected, was once the seat of colonial aristocracy, who exercised
a princely hospitality on their great plantations, exchanged visits and
ran horses with the planters of Virginia and the Carolinas, and were
known as far as Kentucky, and perhaps best known for their breed of
Narragansett pacers. But let us get back to the shore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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