Across the little harbor, at nightfall populous with white sails, stretches the “Neck,” once a lonely, rock-defended treasury of beauty, besieged by wave, and alternately lashed and caressed by the fickle, but persistent foam. Well fitted are its girdling citadels for enduring warfare; their towers outlast the feet that climb them, and their masonry crumbles not below, save slowly, through the infinite patience of the eternally tossing sea. And when the eye tired of this majesty of the illimitable, when it wearied of ocean spray, spouting column-like through some gigantic cleft, and found itself oppressed by the rhythm of rolling foam, what would it have seen, on turning inland from Castle Rock, that century and a half agone? A stretch of green pasture-land, becoming yellow as August marches on,—the “Neck” itself. Then, wandering on unwearied, still traversing the “Neck,” sweet, bosky hollows, where lie to-day such treasures of shining leaf and soft-lipped flower as Paradise might claim. These are the wild, sunken gardens on the road to Devereux, glowing in the gold of a royal tansy, greenly odorous of fern, and sweet with the wild azalea,—honey-smeared and pollen-powdered, loved of the bee, and his chief tempter to drunken revels on the way from market. The button-bush holds aloft her sign of cool white balls; loosestrife stars the green undergrowth with yellow; and over stick and stone the blackberry clings and crowds. There the wild rose lives and blooms, fed on manna brought by roving winds and fleeting sunlight, never unblest, even when the purveyors of honey come winging by, to rifle her sweets, and leave her to the ripening of maturity and the solid glow of her red-hipped matron-hood. And on the left again, still facing south, is the insistent sea, dragging down its pebbly beach, and on the right, the dimpling harbor, reddened, for him who is wise enough to wander that way at sunset, with flaming banners of the sky. To cross the harbor again, and follow the mainland back to a point nearly opposite the lighthouse of the Neck, is to find, neighbored by the old graveyard, ruined and grassy Fort Sewall, to-day the lounging-place for village great-grandfathers, or vantage-ground for overlooking a yacht race, but in 1742, when Charles Henry Frankland was Collector of the Port of Boston, just a building. And one day in the previous year, the gallant young Collector, smartly dressed in the fine feathers of the period, and no doubt humming a song,—since he seems to have fulfilled all the conditions of an interesting young galliard,—came riding down on some business connected with the prospective fort. He stopped at the Fountain Inn for a draught,—not so innocent, perhaps, as that from the clear well still springing near the spot,—and, scrubbing the tavern floor, there knelt before him, in lovely disarray, the sweet beggar-maid destined to be crowned at once by the favor of this careless Cophetua. Let that phrase be swiftly amended! Agnes Surriage was no beggar-maid, but the honest daughter of hard-working fisher-folk, and patient under her own birthright of toil. Her beauty was something rare and delicate, calculated to arrest the eye and chain the heart; the simple dignity of her demeanor was no more to be affected through her menial task than a rose by clouded skies. Her fair feet were naked, and blushed not at their poverty, but Frankland’s heart ached with pity of them, and he closed her fingers over a coin, to buy shoes and stockings. Then he gave her “good-day,” and rode away,—but not to forget her; only to muse on her grace, and to start at the vision of her eyes, shining between him and his bills of merchandise and lading. Again he came riding that way, and again he found her, still barefooted; but when he reproached her for having failed to put his coin to its destined use, she blushed, and answered in the homely dialect of Marblehead, which yet had no power over the music of her voice, that the shoes and stockings were bought, but that she kept them to wear to meeting. And now the young Collector went often and more often to Marblehead, until the day came when he obtained her parents’ permission to become her guardian, and take her away to be educated. So the wild bird entered voluntarily into the life of cages, to learn the demeanor and song-notes which were approved by the fashionable Boston of the day.
The quaint, village-like, and yet all-regal Boston of the past! Perhaps this was one of the most interesting pages of its life history, before the royal insolence had roused in it an answering manhood; when fashion scrupulously followed a far-away court over sea, and the daily life of luxurious British officials was so distinct from that of the Puritan stratum of society. In England, public affairs seesawed between the policies of George II. and Walpole, and from the world of letters, Richardson and Fielding were amusing the young bloods of the day, and by no means toughening their moral fibre. The leisure of the bold Britons who ruled over us was not for a moment poisoned by fear of American defection from the royal mother-land. Rather, for men like Frankland, was this loitering in western airs their Wanderjahr, a pleasant exile, whence they would some day return, with treasures of new experience, to sit down beside the English hearthstone, and, Othello-like, rehearse the wonders they had seen. Meantime, they walked the streets, bravely attired in small-clothes and wigs, discussing the troubles brewing with the French, and seeking, so far as they might, to build up a miniature England within the savage-girdled settlements of the New World. Sir Harry Frankland stands out from the faint portraiture of the time as one of the most knightly souls of all. He was young, blest with an attractive presence, and his tastes were those of the gentleman and the scholar. That he was sensitive and refined even to the point of evincing that feminine strain of temperament so fascinating in a manly man, is very apparent from the fragmentary records of his life, but he lacked no sturdiness of temper or demeanor.
