and the granite quarries against the hills. They may see the little
cottages and the great houses made famous by those who have passed over
their thresholds; they may linger in the old burial ground and trace out
the epitaphs under the portico of the golden-belfried church. But after
they have touched and handled all of these things, they will not
understand Quincy unless they look beyond and recognize her greatest
contribution to this country--the noble statesmen who so bravely and
intelligently toiled to construct America's Ship of State.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER IV

THE ROMANCE OF WEYMOUTH

[Illustration]

The paintings of John Constable, idyllic in their quietness, dewy in
their serenity--how many travelers, how many lovers of art, superficial
or profound, yearly seek out these paintings in the South Kensington
Museum or the Louvre, and stand before them wrapt in gentle ecstasy?

The quality of Constable's pictures delineates in luminous softness a
peculiarly lovely side of English rural life, but one need not travel to
England or France to see this loveliness. Weymouth, that rambling
stretch of towns and hamlets, of summer colony and suburb, possesses in
certain areas bits of rural landscape as serene, as dewy, as
idyllically tranquil as Constable at his best.

Comparatively few people in New England, or out of it, know Weymouth
well. Every one has heard of it, for it is next in age to the town of
Plymouth itself, and every one who travels to the South Shore passes
some section of it, for it extends lengthily--north and south, east and
west--being the only town in Massachusetts to retain its original
boundaries. And numbers of people are familiar with certain parts of it,
for there are half a score of villages in the township, some of them
summer settlements, some of them animated by an all-the-year-round life.
But compared with the other towns along this historic route, Weymouth as
a whole is little known and little appreciated. And yet the history of
Weymouth is not without amusing and edifying elements, and the scenery
of Weymouth is worthy of the detour that strangers rarely make.

"Old Spain" is the romantic name for an uninteresting part of the
township, and, conversely, Commercial Street is the uninteresting name
for a romantic part. It is along a highway stigmatized by such a name
that one gets the glimpses of a Constable country: glimpses of rolling
meadows, of fertile groves, of cattle