Fair Harbor | Page 5

I was here last? And do you
realize how long it has been since I was here?"
"Why, yes, I do, Sears. It's been almost six years; it will be just six on
the tenth of next September."
The speech was illuminating. He looked at her curiously.
"You do keep account of my goin's and comin's, don't you, old girl?" he
said. "Better than I do myself."
"Oh, it means more to me than it does to you. You live such a busy life,
Sears, all over the world, meetin' everybody in all kinds of places. For
me, with nothin' to do but be stuck down here in Bayport--well, it's
different with me--I have to remember. Rememberin' and lookin' ahead
is about all I have to keep me interested."
He was silent for a moment. Then he said: "It looks as if rememberin'
was all I will be likely to have. Think of it, Sarah! Four months in
Bayport and I haven't been to the post-office. That'll stand as a town
record, I'll bet."

"And--and you'll keep up your courage, Sears? You won't let yourself
get blue and discouraged, for my sake if nobody else's?"
He nodded. "I couldn't, Sarah," he said earnestly. "With you around I'd
be ashamed to."
She ran to help him down the step, but he waved her away, and, leaning
upon the cane and clinging fast to the lattice with the other hand, he
managed to make the descent safely. Once on the flat level of the walk
he moved more rapidly and, so it seemed to his sister, more easily than
he had since his accident. The forty odd feet of walk he navigated in
fair time and came to anchor, as he would have expressed it, upon the
battered old bench by the Macomber gate. The gate, like the picket
fence, of which it was a part, needed paint and the bench needed slats
in its back. Almost anything which Joel Macomber owned needed
something and his wife and family needed most of all.
An ancient cherry tree, its foliage now thickly spotted with green fruit,
for the month was June, cast a shadow upon the occupant of the bench.
At his feet grew a bed of daffodils and jonquils which Sarah Macomber
had planted when she came, a hopeful bride, to that house. Each year
they sprouted and bloomed and now, long after Sarah's hopes had
ceased to sprout, they continued to flourish. Beside the cherry tree grew
a lilac bush. Beyond the picket fence was the dusty sidewalk and
beyond that the dustier, rutted road. And beyond the road and along it
upon both sides were the houses and barns and the few shops of
Bayport village, Bayport as it was, and as some of us remember it, in
the early '70's.
In some respects it was much like the Bayport of to-day. The houses
themselves have changed but little. Then, as now, they were trim and
white and green-shuttered. Then, as now, the roses climbed upon their
lattices and the silver-leaf poplars and elms and mulberry trees waved
above them. But the fences which enclosed their trim lawns and yards
have disappeared, and the hitching posts and carriage blocks by their
front gates have gone also. Gone, too, are the horses and buggies and
carryalls which used to stand by these gates or within those barns. They
are gone, just as the ruts and dust of the roads have vanished. When

Mrs. Captain Hammond, of the lower road, used to call upon Mrs.
Ryder at West Bayport, she was wont to be driven to her destination in
the intensely respectable Hammond buggy drawn by the equally
respectable Hammond horse and piloted by the even more
respectable--not to say venerable--Hammond coachman, who was also
gardener and "hired man." And they made the little journey in the very
respectable time of thirty-five minutes. Now when Mrs. Captain
Hammond's granddaughter, who winters in Boston but summers at the
old home, wishes to go to West Bayport she skims over the hard, oiled
macadam in her five thousand dollar runabout and she finishes the
skimming in eight minutes or less.
And although the dwellings along the Bayport roads are much as they
were that morning when Captain Sears Kendrick sat upon the bench in
the Macomber yard and gazed gloomily at the section of road which lay
between the Macomber gate and the curve beyond the Orthodox
meeting-house--although the houses were much the same in external
appearance, those who occupy them at the present day are vastly
different from those who owned and lived in them then. Here is the
greatest change which time has brought to old Bayport. Now those
houses--the majority of them--are open only in summer; then they were
open all the year.