Fourth Day.
Saturday proved to be a warm day, and Mr. Dudley proposed at breakfast that they should carry out Nathan’s plan, and that all hands should go to Nahant, the rocky peninsula which bounds the outer harbor on the northeastern side. His wife put up a substantial luncheon, which was packed in two baskets and carried by the boys.
So equipped, they took the horse car and “transferred” at Sumner Street for the steamboat, which would take them to the Lynn Railroad. They could have taken the Easton Railroad, but the Lynn Road (so called) runs along the water’s edge, and the water sail is longer.
So the young people had their first sniff of sea air from the boat which crosses from Old Boston to East Boston, where the railroad begins. Caroline had chances enough to see “ships with three masts,” brigs, schooners, sloops, barks, brigantines and barkantines, all which the learned Nathan explained to her. After a voyage of a mile or two they took the narrow guage railway and flew along Chelsea Beach, which gave a fine ocean view, and more of the glory of the infinite sea, than the steamboat had done. At Lynn they found public carriages waiting for the drive to Nahant.
Mr. Willis, in his extravagant way, said that Nahant looked like the open hand of a giant who had been struck down in the sea, and that Nahant Beach was his arm. A very thin arm he had, a mere thread-paper arm, for a big hand. For the beach is only a strip of sand and gravel about two miles long, washed by the ocean on both sides. At the southern end, rise, abrupt and bold, the rocks of Nahant. They are mostly of trap-rock, which has been forced by some volcanic effect of the fiery times, up through the hissing sea. They have a reddish color, with stripes of black stone, even harder than the rest. And the perpetual washing of the sea has worn out clefts and chasms of every strange outline and form.
One of these is the Swallow’s Cave, a long passage through wet rocks, covered above by rocks, through which at low tides adventurers can clamber. One is the Spouting Horn, where at half-tide, a sea heavily thrown in by a stiff eastern gale, bounds back in spray and water, as if indeed a sea-god had thrown it up in a great fountain. But the glory of Nahant is not in any one of these sights. It is the glory of the infinite ocean. Southeast and west you have the sea, and it is no wonder that in this perfect sea-climate, so many people are glad to make a summer home.
Mr. Dudley met, by appointment, a Boston friend, after they had crossed the beach, who husbanded their time for them in visiting different points, and before the afternoon closed, asked them to come back to town in his yacht. Their plan had been to take the steamboat, which was waiting ready to take all such children of the public as they.
But in the “Sylph” they were able to vary their voyage. Mr. Cradock showed them from her deck that nearly south of them, a string of little islands shielded the harbor, in a measure, from eastern gales. Of these the three most important are the three Brewsters, on one of which is the outer light-house. The yacht first ran by these. Then she turned inland and he pointed out to them the village of Hull, which on the southeast protects the bay, as Nahant on the northeast. He bade the helmsman bring the vessel up at Fort Warren, and the young people had then a chance to see the arrangements which a great fort makes to repel an enemy. And then, as the sun went down they ran swiftly up to Boston, saw the State House and Bunker Hill monument against the evening glow, and landed after a day of thoroughly satisfactory variety.