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There are quite a lot of things to be "done" in Plymouth, you know, and if they are being done in couples or trios you can always go and gaze at the old Common House while the others are revering Forefathers' Rock. You can bow and smile as you meet them hurrying to the Museum, and search industriously for the Town Brook which decided the Pilgrims to settle at Plymouth. You can make your companion look up into your eyes by telling her what you know or pretend to know about Priscilla, and pretend that the Puritan maid gathered cowslips for her cowslip wine on the shores of the said "very sweet brook." This, and more chat of the same order, will suffice to hold the dear one's attention until you are pretty sure that if you say, "Shall we walk along to Pilgrim Hall and see the relics?" you and she will be astonished to meet the rest of the party just coming away.

Apropos of Pilgrim Hall, my only failure was there. We did meet the party issuing from the Doric doorway. I'd managed that all right, but Mrs. Shuster turned on the threshold, kindly volunteering to remain and point out objects best worth seeing. I wished her in Halifax, or almost any other place which could be catalogued under the same letter, but short of telling her to go there, I saw no escape.

Whether it was an infliction for Pat or not, I couldn't be sure. I never knew much or wanted to know much, until just lately, about the workings of girls' minds. But I will tell you what she did: she said, "Oh, that is so good of you, Mrs. Shuster! Do come with us. It's nice to have some one really interested to go about with. Now Larry, much as I love him, is a worry in a place like this. He and Idonia will just go comfortably back to the hotel and have tea in some nice nook and wait for you, so we shall know where to find them much better than if they loved sight-seeing as the others do!"

There are lilies and lilies. This Lily of ours looked suddenly like a tiger lily, rather a faded one, badly in need of water, as Pat took hold of her arm and affectionately pulled her into the marble vestibule. She did not break away with a roar and a bound, as I half expected her to do, but meekly let the cruel child lead her on. I knew then, however, that it was a question only of moments. You've seen a cat, caught up against its will into a lap, feign contentment, while with muscles braced it waits its opportunity to take the lap unawares and spring. That is about what happened with Mrs. Shuster. She pointed us out a painting of the "Mayflower on Her First Morning at Sea," all couleur de rose; she indicated the chairs of Elder Brewster and Governor Carroll which were wobbling about on the Mayflower that very morning no doubt; and having brought us to a stand before the Damascus blade of Miles Standish, she considered her duty done.

"I'm tireder than I thought I was," she said. "I believe I shall have to go back to the hotel myself, and rest a bit before we start for Boston. I wouldn't stay long here if I were you. If Mr. Storm buys a guide-book at the hotel, or some postcards, you'll have pictures of everything without standing on your feet."

Pat replied meekly that she would return to the hotel the minute she felt tired, but did want to see John Adams' Bible and a few things like that. Mrs. Shuster mustn't at all mind leaving her.

Mrs. Shuster did mind, but she went nevertheless. I longed to catch Pat's eye, and smile; but she didn't appear to have a smile in her. Such innocent gravity you never saw, and when Mrs. S. had left us, the girl made no reference to the episode.

I did buy some picture postcards, but not until we'd seen everything they represented. I bought also, at the same shop, a pretty little box containing three green candles made of bayberry wax. Both cards and candles I offered to Miss Moore, and she accepted them, sniffing with childlike ecstasy at the candles, which are supposed to give forth, in burning, the perfume which the bayberries pour out in the heat of the sun. Afterward I was told by Molly Winston the sentimental superstition about bayberry candles. I wonder if Miss Moore knew it, and if she thought I knew.

I haven't, as you see, given up hope that the forced association of this motor trip may make the child realize how impossible for her would be a permanent association with that worm C. If she breaks her engagement before anything happens, so much the better; but the thing, in one form or other, will now have to happen, of course.

A letter from you could reach me at Bretton Woods, and I should be glad to hear there just when you think affairs might be settled.

I'm hideously impatient, but I'm not unhappy.

Yours as ever, and a little more,

P. S.

We came back from Plymouth to-night, along the short road, Caspian patched up but sulky as an owl. Luckily I didn't lose the way once.

XXIV
EDWARD CASPIAN TO RICHARD MOYLE, KNOWN PROFESSIONALLY AS "CAMERA-EYED DICK"

Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Dear Mr. Moyle:

The more I think of it, the more I feel that you are keeping back something from me. You say that the face of this man Storm "recalls nothing and nobody" to you. I must accept your word. Yet I got the impression that at least he reminded you of some one. I was watching your face at the moment you met.

Since you left me, refusing to interest yourself further in the affair, I have thought of it unceasingly. A sudden and extremely interesting idea has come into my head. I cannot afford to waste it, though without the aid of a competent detective like yourself I may not be able to put it to good use. If you will not change your mind and take up the matter again on new lines, I shall be glad if you can send me a smart man from your agency, a person in whose discretion as well as intelligence you have implicit confidence.

Kindly wire me to the post-office, Ogunquit, Me.

Yours truly,

E. Caspian.

(Telegram from Richard Moyle to Edward Caspian, Post-office, Ogunquit, Maine):

Sorry have no one can recommend for job mentioned. Nothing in it. Advise you leave it alone.

(Richard Moyle to Peter Storm, Ogunquit, Maine. Try all hotels):

Excuse liberty, but look out for E. C. May make you trouble.

(Peter Storm to Richard Moyle, at New York):

Many thanks. Am looking out.

P. S.

XXV
MOLLY WINSTON TO MERCÉDES LANE

Wenham.

Mercédes Dear:

My first thought as I waked yesterday morning was Aunt Mary. I thought of her in my bath – a cold porcelain bath, rapidly filling up with hot water, and giving me rather the feeling of eating an ice with hot chocolate sauce. I thought of Aunt M. with breakfast and choked her down with my coffee. When we had left our happy home – the Boston hotel – the "chug chug" of our motor sang the song which the West Point cadets have made up for "church call."

 
"You've got to go, whether you want to or not!
You've got to go, so you'd better turn out!
Oh, h – ades!"
 

But after a while the road was so pretty that I succeeded in forgetting her now and then, as you might forget you were on the way to the dentist's when you passed splendid jewellery and hat shops.

We were also on the way to Marblehead and Salem; Aunt Mary wasn't till afterward.

Marblehead, with all its romance of ancient days, is only about sixteen miles from Boston as the automobile flies, but you pass a good many sweet things first. We went through Somerville, got lost there, and were guided in every direction but the right one by a plague of boys not much bigger than the "dimes" they didn't earn. Jack simply won't look at maps when in the car, or inquire; expects to find his way by instinct, and somehow generally does. (Are all men like that?) Crossed the Mystic River, and got on to the velvet surface of the Revere Beach Parkway. But Chelsea came before the Beach: charming old Chelsea, which probably, in its heart, thinks Boston its suburb, and prides itself on almost a century and a half of aristocratic peace since the old fighting days when Israel Putnam won his commission as Major-General there.

There couldn't be a greater contrast than between Chelsea and Revere Beach. It's a good thing that miles of parklike road – fought over once by Independents and British – lie between, or they could never stand each other, those two! Jack and I ought to have come to Revere Beach when we were little boy and girl, for, oh, the joy of it for children! What price the Dragon Gorge, the mountain railway more like the Alps than the Alps are like themselves, the theatres, the shops of every kind, the cottages which are nests for birds rather than commonplace, human habitations?

Opposite, Nahant sat looking delightful and alluring, but we went on to Lynn – Lynn, unattractive at first, and pretty when we got better acquainted, like some of the nicest women I know. It's a great place now for shoes, and was once a great place for pilgrims. What a pity the former are too late for the latter! The Pilgrims must have needed the shoes badly. They could have walked along the Old Pilgrim Road to Swampscott if their feet were equal to it. And perhaps they forgot their feet, as I forgot Aunt Mary, for it is – and must then have been – a lovely road.

Hawthorne used to walk to Swampscott, too, as well as to Marblehead, but he came the other way, from Salem. Do you remember Swampscott was where he found pink and white Susan, who gave him the sugar heart? That was pink, too, with a touch of white perhaps. She sounds so delightful as the "Mermaid!" I'm glad Hawthorne kept the heart for years, and then instead of throwing it away ate it – gave it honourable burial, so to speak – which shows that you can have your heart and eat it, too! (I must, by the by, make a parable of this for Pat, who is eating hers, though she certainly has not got it. She has given it to some one else, though I fancy she thinks she has merely mislaid it.) In apropos of hearts, they make dories in Swampscott; and it's not swampy one bit!

Of course I quoted Whittier's "Skipper Ireson's Ride" to Jack, coming toward Marblehead. It was "up to me" to show my British husband that I, too, had learned things at people's knees.

 
"Old Flood Ireson for his hard heart,
Tarred and feathered, and carried in a cart
By the women of Marblehead."
 

I wasn't certain I got it just right, but did my best to put a confident ring into my voice, which is half the battle when you're not sure of yourself. What a blow, therefore, to be told that in truth and in deed the women of Marblehead had nothing to do with the job! Jack says the men did it. And worse still, Captain Ireson was supposed to have been a victim rather than a villain, because his sailors mutinied and refused to let him go to the rescue of the sinking ship. I hate having my childish beliefs disturbed! It tears me all up by the roots, and gives me a pain in my spirit's toes. But never mind, there's plenty more romance, which no one can take away from New England, though the very man who wrote about Ireson complained that it had gone:

 
"Gone like the Indian wizard's yell
And fire dance round the magic rock.
Forgotten like the Druid's spell
At moonrise by his holy oak."
 

No, no, Whittier, surely you wouldn't say so now if you could see steamboats and trains pouring forth multitudes, and thousands and tens of thousands of motor cars stuffed full of people from all over the world drawn to New England because of its never, never lost halo of romance!

Did I tell you just now that we were coming toward Marblehead? Well, one can do that, and not get to Marblehead. You can keep on seeing Marblehead and expecting to arrive, while in reality you are going all around "Robin Hood's barn." By the way, I never saw a barn exciting enough to belong to Robin Hood till I came with Jack on this tour through New England. Here, barns are as grand as churches, and very much like them, steeples and all.

A lot of things happened to us on the way to will o' the wisp Marblehead —old Marblehead, I mean, for new Marblehead is just a very gay and jolly summer resort, such as I fancy little Susan would, in her pink sugar heart, have loved. We kept on seeing the old town to our left, across a harbour as full of white yachts and sailboats as a New England pond is of water lilies. Jack was loving everything, and utterly oblivious that beyond Salem lay Aunt Mary-ville. His face was perfectly ecstatic as we crossed a river – Whittier's beloved Merrimac – on an ancient covered wooden bridge. He said the sound of the tires on the slightly loose boards was better music than the followers of Richard Strauss could make from the "noises of life." I do love those covered bridges, don't you? They're so richly brown, some of them, that while one slowly travels along under the roof, it's like looking at the sun through a piece of cider-brown glass. Or if they're not brown, they're a soft, velvet gray – gray as shadows at full moon, gray as the light in dreams.

I hardly know how, eventually, we did get into old Marblehead, for Jack and I were both so infatuated with the way we lost sight now and then of the goal. Imagine a road lined on either side with apple trees. If you haven't seen these, you have never seen such orchards in your life, my Mercédes! If there was anything as good in Eden, no wonder Eve ate that apple. I shouldn't wonder if she fixed her eye on it when it was still a bud.

And then, behind the orchards, there were hills, playgrounds for baby cedars. Everything contrived to look at least two hundred years old (except the blossoms and the motor cars), and even the pigeons had such an air of colonial serenity that they simply refused to stir for a new-fangled thing like an automobile. They sat still, pretending not to see us, and never changed their expressions!

At last we did get into old Marblehead, and I'm so happy to tell you it was exactly like finding our way round the corner in a picture. You know that thrilling corner in pictures, leading somewhere you are dying to see and never can? Well, now I have seen it. It's Marblehead. Round the corner of the front of the picture where the new, smart things are, we cleverly slipped in. And there was the background running up the canvas, all over funny labyrinths of streets generally leading nowhere, or, if anywhere, back to the same garden we'd just passed, a darling garden boiling over with grass pinks, cabbage roses, sweet williams, and bleeding hearts. Each house was just a little quainter than the other, and Jack and I thought we were going to like Marblehead better than any that ever lived, until – we came to Salem, after Manchester and Magnolia. Then – we weren't precisely being untrue to Marblehead. No, never that! But Salem – perhaps it's fair after all to keep a larger place in memory-land for the Witch City.

It would have been almost a world tragedy if, when the great fire swept over the town, it hadn't stopped short of the old part, which is American history incarnate. That "old part" consists of "old, older, oldest." The oldest houses of all, built about 1635, are very, very simple, as if the Puritans had prayed over them to be delivered from temptation and craving for beauty. Then, next are the ones not quite so old, when people began to be rich and see that Beauty wasn't after all the unpardonable sin. These houses of the eighteenth century look as if architects might have been commissioned to come from the Old World to build them, bringing traditions of gracious decoration for outside and in. Next, there are the far grander and more stately mansions which grew up after the Revolution, when the good folk of New England knew that their land and their fortunes would be theirs forever, undisputed. Salem had grown into an important place then. Merchants and shipowners had plenty of money to spend. They spent it well, too, for they made their dwellings very beautiful, so beautiful that the witch hunters and Quaker persecutors of the past would have been shocked to the bottom of those hollow places they called their hearts.

What a good thing it is that there wasn't much brick to be had when the first old colonial houses were a-building! To be sure, some of the very best in Salem and Boston and other towns are of brick; but brick had to come in ships from old England, so only those persons with the most money and possibly the most cultivated taste could use it. Consequently the characteristic houses of New England and its borders – the white and yellow houses we think of when we say "New England" – were made of wood; and they are unique in the world.

They say that the oldest buildings of Salem – the Gothic, steep-roofed ones – were meant as copies of gabled cottages on the old home side of the water. But if they were, they were as far off the originals as a child's drawing on a slate is far from a steel engraving; and Jack and I are glad, because these dear things are so ingenuously and deliciously American that they could exist nowhere except on this side.

I was only too glad to stay in Salem as long as possible, because it put off Aunt Mary and Wenham, where Jack and I had promised to stay all night, letting the others go on to wait for us at Newburyport. Jack had a map (he doesn't mind having maps of towns, or looking at road maps when in towns), and we took a regular Hawthorne itinerary. We began at the house in Union Street where he was born – a rather pathetic, forlorn house, like the birthplaces of most geniuses; then the next, where the family lived till they moved to Raymond, in sight of the White Mountains; and so on, following to the custom-house where the bored genius weighed and gauged, and not missing a single landmark. All are picturesque to the imagination, but the landmark most picturesque to the eye is of course "The House of Seven Gables," and that, some of those dreadful people who dispute everything nice say, isn't what it pretends to be.

As if such an adorable and perfectly sincere and high-souled looking house would pretend anything! Should I hear such heresy uttered I would stop my ears, but coming on it in print was simple, because all I had to do was to snap the book shut with a bang. It is the dearest, kindest little gray house, which all new houses, no matter how big and distinguished, would be proud to have for their grandmother!

Hawthorne's cousin, Miss Ingersoll, whom he called the "Duchess," lived in the old Turner Street house, and it had had seven gables before his day. It's perfectly legitimate to put them back, and even a duty, which has been exquisitely carried out. I should like to kiss the hand of the lady who honoured Hawthorne's beautiful memory by making the house as dear as that memory itself. I suppose it was she who had the brilliant idea of using for a front door an old nailed oak one found in the attic (there must be a lovely attic!), putting the quaint oven of ancient times into the kitchen, and retrieving from oblivion the "Duchess's" toasting fork with which she used to make toast for Hawthorne. There's a creepy story about the way he thought of the murder, from seeing, through a tiny window of greenish glass, a cousin of his fast asleep and looking as if dead. But there's a story just as fascinating about every house in Salem, connected with Hawthorne. Romantic and interesting things followed him about in his life, like tame dogs, though he didn't always realize at the moment that they were romantic or interesting. Sometimes he thought only that they were tame.

All over the place you feel the thrill of witches and the torturing of Quakers. That's partly thanks to Longfellow, and Whittier, of course, but mostly from the influence which such tremendous happenings leave, I think. It's as if some picture of the past were in the atmosphere, and now and then, out of a corner of your eye, you caught a glimpse, as you do of the "ghost" of a rainbow when the rainbow seems to have gone.

The "Witch House," where Judge Corwin lived at the time of the persecution, is almost hidden away now, as if it were trying to escape from something, and at last brought to bay like a very small, fierce animal. Even now I can hardly bear to think of those days, and all those poor people suffering through a few naughty, hysterical children. I'm sure the Indian woman Tituba could haunt me in Salem even if I lived in a perfectly new, perfectly good modern hotel! I should have tried the experiment, I think, if it hadn't been for Aunt Mary being so nearby, at Wenham.

Well, quite late in the afternoon (I forgot to tell you we lunched, but you may take that for granted, with so many men in the party) we said good-bye to Salem. We said other things, too, all in praise of it; and Jack felt particularly reverential because Salem sent the first ships from America to Indian and Russian ports. Wasn't it sporting when you think of what ships were then? But these seafaring men of the New England coast were like the men of Devon, the "bravest of the brave."

Aunt Mary had plumped heavily down on my heart again, before we got to Beverly, and this time I couldn't put her out of my mind though the grandeur of the north coast was in my eyes. Oliver Wendell Holmes lived in Beverly and loved it, but then he had no Aunt Mary in the neighbourhood.

Did you ever read what Thackeray said about Wenham Lake Ice? It seems every London house of any pretension had it on its dinner table, but I don't think it travels so far in these days of artificial ice. The lake's still there, anyhow, in a hollow to the left of the road as you go, gleaming blue and mysterious as watching eyes between the dark trunks of a pine forest. Then, after that lake, there was no more excuse for lingering, unless at the monument. We came into Wenham. Jack was trying to look brave.

"In a few minutes now," said he, with galvanized cheerfulness, "we shall be having tea with your Aunt Mary."

At that instant (we had purposely dropped back to bring up the rear of the procession after Salem, letting even the lumbering Hippopotamus bumble on ahead) we beheld all our family of cars drawn up under some skyscraping elms, in front of the most delectable tea-house you ever met in your life. The Hippo was in front of a very fine old white church, with "I am one of the pillars of New England" written in every line of it; but it was certainly the tea-house which had arrested its career.

There was a large green and white striped umbrella or two protecting some little tables, and grouped round those little tables were our friends.

"I'm hanged if we'll be having tea with my Aunt Mary!" said I, with that firm-jawed look Jack has got to know and fear as characteristic of the American wife at bay.

So we had tea there, under elms so generously deep and thick that large populations of robins live in them without ever having seen each other's faces. They were, to the tree world, what Blenheim is in castle world. People can come and live there for years, they say, without the duke ever knowing they've arrived. Well, so could whole families of birds live in these elms without the leading robin hearing an alien chirp.

We drowned our sorrows in tea and cream, and buried our sinister premonitions in scones. Also cakes. A wonderful woman had made them – a lady-woman. She will be the heroine of my great American novel, if I ever write one. I hope to goodness she won't be gone from Wenham before it's finished and I can send her a presentation copy! Everything was green and white in the tea-house, except the dear little things to be sold there: weather-cocks, and door-stops, and old china. We bought specimens of these as sops to Cerberus – I mean, as presents for Aunt Mary – and when there was no longer a pretext for lingering we crept reluctantly away with the spoils.

It was absolutely no comfort to me, as we crawled through the pretty square, and approached "Miss Keddison's mansion" (only too easy to find) that Wenham would be a lovely place to spend not only one but many nights in. There, on a colonial porch, behind colonial pillars, in a colonial rocking-chair, sat Aunt Mary on the watch. She looked not only colonial but Doric!

We had got ahead of the others by this time, and my aunt, rising from her chair, with a gesture stopped the whole procession. I don't know whether she meant to do this or not, but no one would have dared pass, any more than if she had been a railway barrier with "Stop! Look! Listen!" painted on her high white forehead.

We slowed down: the Grayles-Grice, the Wilmot, the Hippo, and our Hiawatha, as we have lately named our car.

Aunt Mary descended the steps and came to the gate. Jack jumped out, forgetting he was lame, and nearly fell. I screamed. Every one scrambled or leaped or slid to the rescue; and that was the way in which Providence arranged for Peter Storm and Pat Moore and Larry, to say nothing of those who mattered less, to become Aunt Mary's guests. Providence is not too important a word, as you will see when I tell you as much as I'm allowed to tell, about – what came of the visit.

Aunt Mary has many virtues. They stick out all over her like pins, but there are some which aren't uncomfortably sharp. Her hospitality, for instance. This house of hers at Wenham isn't one of the prettiest in the place, but it is white and dignified, and the over-arching trees give it charm. Aunt Mary is proud of it, and I think she was really pleased to welcome the crowd. Besides, when she was in New York on business, cutting coupons or something, Jack and I talked to her about Larry and Pat. She was very interested, and said she had been taken to Kidd's Pines to a garden party, some fifteen years ago, by Cousin John Randolph Payton, who left me Awepesha, you know. She thought that she still had some snapshots of the garden which she had taken herself that afternoon. In those days, it seemed, she had threatened to develop a craze for photography, but had found that it "interfered too seriously with her more intellectual pursuits." However, she used to paste her trophies in scrapbooks, and she said that when she got home from New York she would look up the volume of that date. It ought to be in the attic, though she had not seen it for a number of years.

Jack and I thought she would forget about this, and we had indeed forgotten it ourselves when we arrived at Wenham. Aunt Mary, however, had not. She greeted Larry warmly (for her) and assured him that, if her niece had kept her informed of the route, she would have written or telegraphed asking the whole party to tea. Not knowing our whereabouts, she could not do this, but was delighted to find the cars stopping at her door, and hoped that their occupants would all take tea with her.

Every one was simply stuffed with scones and chocolate cake, but such was the look in Aunt Mary's eye that none dared confess the tea-house debauch. Her invitation was accepted, and, eighteen strong, we filed into her parlour. Luckily it's as big as a good-sized country schoolroom, and there's a mid-Victorian "suite" consisting of two sofas, a settee, a couple of easy chairs and eight uneasy ones. Aunt Mary is of those worthy women who upholster themselves and dress their furniture, so everything in her home is rather fussy, lots of antimacassars and tidies and scarfs and that sort of thing. Besides, she thinks flowers are for gardens, not for houses, with the exception of some wax ones made by herself when a girl and preserved under glass. Still, there's such a pet of an old Chinese wall paper, and everything is so exquisitely neat that the effect isn't so bad as you might suppose.

Aunt Mary has a flair for liking the wrong people, and wronging the right ones, so of course she took quite a fancy to Ed Caspian, and was somewhat stiff with Peter, whom Mrs. Shuster introduced as "my secretary, Mr. Storm." However, she was as nice as she could be to Larry, and asked if I had mentioned her visit to Kidd's Pines. When she heard that I had not, she was surprised and grieved at my carelessness.

"My niece was always inclined to be forgetful," said she. "I can't think where she inherited it from. The first thing I did on my return from New York was to look in the attic for my old photograph scrapbooks. I have a place for everything, and everything in its place, in this house; but I travel a great deal, and occasionally my servants, with the best intentions, upset my arrangements. I found several of the little volumes exactly where I expected to lay my hand on them, but I am very sorry to say the one I wanted was missing. If I had been sure that I should have the pleasure of seeing you and your daughter, Mr Moore, I would have looked even more thoroughly, for I'm sure the photographs exist. It was fifteen years ago this summer that I attended the garden party at Kidd's Pines, with my cousin, Mr. Payton. I met you and Mrs. Moore for a moment, I remember quite well. You both looked almost too young to be married, I thought, but your little girl was about four years old. She was not at the party officially" (Aunt Mary smiled at her own coy wit), "but I met her with a boy much older, who was playing with her. I took a snapshot of them both together, standing by a swing which was in a retired part of the grounds."

By this time Larry was bored to extinction, but still charming, as he always is with women, young or old, pretty or plain. He pretended so pleasantly to be disappointed at the loss of the book (he loathes looking at photographs) that Aunt Mary was fired to a renewed effort.

"Why, now I come to think of it," said she, "there's another place in the attic where the book quite well might be. If you will excuse me, I'll go up and try to find it."

Larry hastened to protest that he wouldn't trouble her for the world, but Aunt Mary was firm in her desire to please, though sorry to desert her guests. As the argument went on, Peter Storm abruptly got up and handed me a plate of cake. "Heavens, no more!" I murmured in an anguished whisper. "I feel as if I should never be able to look cake in the face again."

"Don't then, but look me in the face," he mumbled. I did so, surprised. "Please ask to go and search for that book, and take me with you," I saw, rather than heard, the words formed by his lips.