heir descendants. And poverty has its
privileges. When there is very little of the seen and temporal to
intercept spiritual vision, unseen and eternal realities are, or may
be, more clearly beheld.

To have been born of people of integrity and profound faith in God, is
better than to have inherited material wealth of any kind. And to those
serious-minded, reticent progenitors of mine, looking out from their
lonely fields across the lonelier sea, their faith must have been
everything.

My father's parents both died years before my birth. My grandmother had
been left a widow with a large family in my father's boyhood, and he,
with the rest, had to toil early for a livelihood. She was an earnest
Christian woman, of keen intelligence and unusual spiritual perception.
She was supposed by her neighbors to have the gift of "second sight";
and some remarkable stories are told of her knowledge of distant events
while they were occurring, or just before they took place. Her dignity
of presence and character must have been noticeable. A relative of
mine, who as a very little child, was taken by her mother to visit my
grandmother, told me that she had always remembered the aged woman's
solemnity of voice and bearing, and her mother's deferential attitude
towards her: and she was so profoundly impressed by it all at the time,
that when they had left the house, and were on their homeward path
through the woods, she looked up into her mother's face and asked in a
whisper, "Mother, was that God?"

I used sometimes to feel a little resentment at my fate in not having
been born at the old Beverly Farms home-place, as my father and uncles
and aunts and some of my cousins had been. But perhaps I had more of
the romantic and legendary charm of it than if I had been brought up
there, for my father, in his communicative moods, never wearied of
telling us about his childhood; and we felt that we still held a
birthright claim upon that picturesque spot through him. Besides, it
was only three or four miles away, and before the day of railroads,
that was thought nothing of as a walk, by young or old.

But, in fact, I first saw the light in the very middle of Beverly, in
full view of the town clock and the Old South steeple. (I believe there
is an "Old South" in nearly all these first-settled cities and villages
of Eastern Massachusetts.) The town wore a half-rustic air of antiquity
then, with its old-fashioned people and weather-worn houses;