ONE of the few perfect jewels of romance, needing neither the craft of imagination nor cunning device of word-cutting lapidary, is that of Agnes Surriage, so improbable, according to every-day standards, so informed with the truest sentiment, and so calculated to satisfy every exaction of literary art, that even the most critical eye might be forgiven for tracing its shifting color to the light of fancy, and not of homely truth. Even at the present day, when the “Neck” is overrun by the too-civilized cottager, to whose gilded ease summer life everywhere most patiently conforms, Marblehead is one of our coast wonders,—a fortress perennially held by beauty, and dedicated to her use; but let the reminiscent gaze wander back a century and a half, and how entirely fitted to the requirements of fancy would it find the quaint town, the vagrant peninsula, and serenely hospitable harbor! The town itself was fantastically builded, as if by a generation of autocratic landowners, each with a wilful bee in his bonnet. Upstairs and downstairs ran the streets; they would have respected not my lady’s chamber. Their modest dwellings seem by no means the outcome of a community governed by common designs and necessities; rather do they voice a capricious and eccentric individualism.
“Well, you see,” said an old Marbleheader, indulgently, “they built the houses fust, an’ the streets arterwards. One man says to himself, ‘I’m a-goin’ to set here; you can set where you’re a mind to.’ But,” he added, in loyal justification of his forbears, “I tell ye what ’tis, they done the best they could with what they had to do with!”
For they were governed by no inexplicable and crazy fancy,—these sturdy fishermen of Marblehead; they were merely constrained by the rigid requirements of their chosen site. Building on that stony hillside, they were slaves of the rock, dominated by it, pressed into corners. The houses themselves were founded upon solid ledges, while the principal streets followed the natural valleys between; and with all such rioting of irregularity, that long-past generation was doubtless well content. A house set “catty-cornered” to the world at large, sovereign over its bit of a garden, was sufficient unto itself, overtopped though it were by the few great colonial mansions, upspringing here and there, or by the solid dignity of the old Town-House. The smaller dividing paths, zigzag as they would, led to all the Romes of local traffic, and presently the houses followed the paths, the paths developed into rocky streets, and lo! there was Marblehead, a town dropped from the skies, and each house taking root where it fell.
