s, half obliterated by the
finger of time. One does not wonder that their descendants are so eager
to trace their connection back to those men of Kent, whose sturdy title
rings so bravely down the centuries. To be sure, what is left to trace
is very slight in most cases, and quite without any savor of
personality. Too often it is merely brief and dry recital of dates and
number of progeny, and names of the same. Few have left anything so
quaint as the words of Walter Briggs, who settled there in 1651 and from
whom Briggs Harbor was named. His will contains this thoughtful
provision: "For my wife Francis, one third of my estate during her life,
also a gentle horse or mare, and Jemmy the negur shall catch it for
her."

The good people who came later (1634) from Plymouth and Boston and took
up their difficult colonial life under the pastorate of Mr. Lathrop,
seem to have done their best to make "Satuit" (as it was first called,
from the Indians, meaning "cold brook") conform as nearly as possible to
the other pioneer settlements, even to the point of discovering witches
here. But religion and fasting were not able to accomplish what the
ubiquitous summer influx has, happily, also failed to effect. Scituate
remains different.

Perhaps it was those men of Kent who gave it its indestructibly romantic
bias; perhaps it is the jealousy of the ever-encroaching sea. The gray
geese flying over the iridescent moss gleaming upon the pebbled beaches,
the solitary lantern on the point are all parts of that differentness.
And those who love her best are glad that it is so.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER VIII

MARSHFIELD, THE HOME OF DANIEL WEBSTER

[Illustration]

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free!
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge, and good out of infinite pain,
And sight out of blindness, and purity out of a stain.

It was these mighty marshes--this ample sweep of grass, of sea and
sky--this vast earthly and heavenly spaciousness that must forever stand
to all New Englanders as a background to the powerful personality who
chose it as his own home. Daniel Webster, when his eyes first turned to
this infinite reach of largeness, instinctively knew it as the place
where his splendid senses wou