ight be turned towards
this very hillside, and that mine were meeting hers in sympathy, across
the graves of two hundred and fifty years. For Winthrop's fleet, led by
the ship that bore her name, must have passed into harbor that way.
Dear and gracious spirit! The memory of her brief sojourn here has left
New England more truly consecrated ground. Sweetest of womanly
pioneers! It is as if an angel in passing on to heaven just touched
with her wings this rough coast of ours.

In those primitive years, before any town but Salem had been named,
this whole region was known as Cape Ann Side; and about ten years after
Winthrop's arrival, my first ancestor's name appears among those of
other hardy settlers of the neighborhood. No record has been found of
his coming, but emigration by that time had grown so rapid that ships'
lists were no longer carefully preserved. And then he was but a simple
yeoman, a tiller of the soil; one who must have loved the sea, however,
for he moved nearer and nearer towards it from Agawam through Wenham
woods, until the close of the seventeenth century found his
descendants--my own great-great-grandfather's family--planted in a
romantic homestead-nook on a hillside, overlooking wide gray spaces of
the bay at the part of Beverly known as "The Farms." The situation was
beautiful, and home attachments proved tenacious, the family claim to
the farm having only been resigned within the last thirty or forty
years.

I am proud of my unlettered forefathers, who were also too humbly proud
to care whether their names would be remembered or not; for they were
God-fearing men, and had been persecuted for their faith long before
they found their way either to Old or New England.

The name is rather an unusual one, and has been traced back from Wales
and the Isle of Wight through France to Languedoc and Piedmont; a
little hamlet in the south of France still bearing it in what was
probably the original spelling-La Combe. There is a family shield in
existence, showing a hill surmounted by a tree, and a bird with spread
wings above. It might symbolize flight in times of persecution, from
the mountains to the forests, and thence to heaven, or to the free
skies of this New World.

But it is certain that my own immediate ancestors were both indifferent
and ignorant as to questions of pedigree, and accepted with sturdy
dignity an inheritance of hard work and the privileges of poverty,
leaving the same bequest to t