CHAPTER XIII
AFTER FIFTY YEARS
If you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered, all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home, you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus Briggs, long years retired.
Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize rest after labor, peace after strife.
From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore, rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding mystery of open Atlantic.
Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung. Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed big in history.
Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village street extended. Wandering irregularly with the broken shore line, it led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white, square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine odors with the fresh tang of the sea.
Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes insistent odors, with her own perfumes of asters and petunias, nasturtiums, dahlias, sweet fern, and fresh, revivifying caresses of poplar, elm and pine, of sumac, buttonwood and willow.
With certain westerly breezes—breezes that bore to Snug Haven the sad, slow chant of the whistling buoy on Graves Shoal and the tolling of the bell buoy on the Shallows—oakum and tar, pitch, salt and fish had the best of it in South Endicutt. But with a shift to landward, apple-tree, mignonette and phlox and other blooms marshalled victorious essences; and the little village by the lip of the sea grew sweet and warm as the breast of a young girl who dreams.