Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer | Page 6

their course. But
we are still far from the falling leaf; we are hardly come to the blushing
or fading leaf. Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the
autumn; the ancient Pepperrell elms fling down showers of the
baronet's fairy gold in the September gusts; the sumacs and the
blackberry vines are ablaze along the tumbling black stone walls; but it
is still summer, it is still summer: I cannot allow otherwise!

III.
The other day I visited for the first time (in the opulent indifference of
one who could see it any time) the stately tomb of the first Pepperrell,
who came from Cornwall to these coasts, and settled finally at Kittery
Point. He laid there the foundations of the greatest fortune in colonial
New England, which revolutionary New England seized and dispersed,

as I cannot but feel, a little ruthlessly. In my personal quality I am of
course averse to all great fortunes; and in my civic capacity I am a
patriot. But still I feel a sort of grace in wealth a century old, and if I
could now have my way, I would not have had their possessions reft
from those kindly Pepperrells, who could hardly help being loyal to the
fountain of their baronial honors. Sir William, indeed; had helped,
more than any other man, to bring the people who despoiled him to a
national consciousness. If he did not imagine, he mainly managed the
plucky New England expedition against Louisbourg at Cape Breton a
half century before the War of Independence; and his splendid success
in rending that stronghold from the French taught the colonists that
they were Americans, and need be Englishmen no longer than they
liked. His soldiers were of the stamp of all succeeding American armies,
and his leadership was of the neighborly and fatherly sort natural to an
amiable man who knew most of them personally. He was already the
richest man in America, and his grateful king made him a baronet; but
he came contentedly back to Kittery, and took up his old life in a region
where he had the comfortable consideration of an unrivalled magnate.
He built himself the dignified mansion which still stands across the
way from the post-office on Kittery Point, within an easy stone's cast of
the far older house, where his father wedded Margery Bray, when he
came, a thrifty young Welsh fisherman, from the Isles of Shoals, and
established his family on Kittery. The Bray house had been the finest in
the region a hundred years before the Pepperrell mansion was built; it
still remembers its consequence in the panelling and wainscoting of the
large, square parlor where the young people were married and in the
elaborate staircase cramped into the little, square hall; and the Bray
fortune helped materially to swell the wealth of the Pepperrells.
I do not know that I should care now to have a man able to ride thirty
miles on his own land; but I do not mind Sir William's having done it
here a hundred and fifty years ago; and I wish the confiscations had left
his family, say, about a mile of it. They could now, indeed, enjoy it
only in the collateral branches, for all Sir William's line is extinct. The
splendid mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, and the
fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built herself after his death
belongs to the remotest of kinsmen. A group of these, the descendants

of a prolific sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point as
the Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard by the little grove of
drooping spruces which shade the admirable renaissance cenotaph of
Sir William's father, cherishes the family memories with due American
"proceedings."

IV.
The meeting of the Pepperrell Association was by no means the chief
excitement of our summer. In fact, I do not know that it was an
excitement at all; and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence
of our naval squadron, when for four days the mighty dragon and
kraken shapes of steel, which had crumbled the decrepit pride of Spain
in the fight at Santiago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under
my window.
I try now to dignify them with handsome epithets; but while they were
here I had moments of thinking they looked like a lot of whited
locomotives, which had broken through from some trestle, in a recent
accident, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train. The poetry
of the man-of-war still clings to the "three-decker out of the foam" of
the past; it is too soon yet for it to have cast a mischievous halo about
the modern battle-ship; and I looked at the New York and the