CHAPTER VII
“Blessed be them that ’spects nothin’, they won’t git fooled.”–Old Cy Walker.
Christmas Cove was never disturbed by aught except small boats, and few of them. It was a long, crescent-shaped arm of the sea, parallel to the ocean, and separated from it by a spruce-clad cliff; its placid surface scarcely more than rippled or undulated outside, and so shallow was it that each ebb tide left its sandy bottom bare.
A stream found devious way along this crescent when the outflow left it bare. Mottled minnows, schools of white and green smelts, crabs of all sorts and sizes, swam and sported up and down this broad, shallow brook while the tide was away, and few of human kind ever watched them.
Alongside this cove and inward a dozen or more brown houses and a few white ones faced its curving shore, a broad street with many elms and ruts between which the grass grew separated the houses and cove, and a small white church with a gilt fish for weather-vane on its steeple stood midway of these dwellings.
A low range of green hills to the northward of this village shut off the wintry winds, at the upper end of the street a stream from a cleft in the hills crossed it, and here stood a mill, its roof green with moss, its clapboards brown and whitened with mill dust, the log dam above it half obscured by willows. To the right of this a short flume was entirely hidden by alders, and above the dam lay a pond, entirely covered with green lily-pads, and dotted by white blossoms all summer.
Beside the mill and nearer the roadway stood an ancient dwelling, also moss-coated; two giant elms shaded it, and the entire impression conveyed by the mill’s drowsy rumble and splashing wheel on a hot August afternoon was–find a shady spot and take a nap.
These were the summer conditions existent at Christmas Cove. The winter ones may be left undescribed.
Just beyond where the mill stream crossed the road the highway divided, one fork following the trend of these hills to where a railroad crossed them, ten miles away; the other, running close to the upper and marshy end of Christmas Cove to where a spile bridge connected the two uplands and thence over to another village called Bayport. This, the larger of the two, had once contained a shipyard, now idle, a score of its dwellings were vacant, and the two hundred or more of its population existed by farming, fishing, lobster-catching, and a small factory devoted to the production of sardines duly labelled with a French name.
Christmas Cove, however, was more respectable, with its hundred residents, mostly retired sea captains with an income, and no litter of lobster pots or nets to obstruct its one long, narrow wharf which reached out to deep water at the mouth of the cove. A few small pleasure craft were tethered to the wharf, and gardens, cows, and poultry were merely diversions here.