ast from Penobscot Bay to Cape
Cod, keeping his eye open. This keeping his eye open was a peculiarity
of the little captain; possibly a family trait. It was Smith who really
discovered the Isles of Shoals, exploring in person those masses of
bleached rock--those "isles assez hautes," of which the French navigator
Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, had caught a bird's-eye glimpse through
the twilight in 1605. Captain Smith christened the group Smith's Isles,
a title which posterity, with singular persistence of ingratitude, has
ignored. It was a tardy sense of justice that expressed itself a few
years ago in erecting on Star Island a simple marble shaft to the memory
of JOHN SMITH--the multitudinous! Perhaps this long delay is explained
by a natural hesitation to label a monument so ambiguously.

The modern Jason, meanwhile, was not without honor in his own country,
whatever may have happened to him in his own house, for the poet George
Wither addressed a copy of pompous verses "To his Friend Captain Smith,
upon his Description of New England." "Sir," he says--

"Sir: your Relations I haue read: which shew
Ther's reason I should honor them and you:
And if their meaning I have vnderstood,
I dare to censure thus: Your Project's good;
And may (if follow'd) doubtlesse quit the paine
With honour, pleasure and a trebble gaine;
Beside the benefit that shall arise
To make more happy our Posterities."

The earliest map of this portion of our seaboard was prepared by Smith
and laid before Prince Charles, who asked to give the country a name. He
christened it New England. In that remarkable map the site of Portsmouth
is call Hull, and Kittery and York are known as Boston.

It was doubtless owing to Captain John Smith's representation on his
return to England that the Laconia Company selected the banks of the
Piscataqua for their plantation. Smith was on an intimate footing
with Sir Ferinand Gorges, who, five years subsequently, made a tour of
inspection along the New England coast, in company with John Mason, then
Governor of Newfoundland. One of the results of this summer cruise is
the town of Portsmouth, among whose leafy ways, and into some of whose
old-fashioned houses, I purpose to take the reader, if he have an idle
hour on his hands. Should we meet the flitting ghost of some old-time
worthy, on the staircase or at a lonely street corner, the reader must
be prepared for it.