A TRIP AROUND CAPE ANN.
BY ELIZABETH PORTER GOULD.
Mr. and Mrs. Gordon allowed no summer to pass without going with their family to some place noted for its beautiful or historical attractions. Their ten days' stay in Nantucket, in July, 1883, as well as their intelligent sojourn in Concord the following summer, had been to them a fruitful source of many an hour's conversation and pleasure.
And now the summer of 1885 was approaching, and where should they go? To be sure they could not have the delightful company of Miss Ray, the young lady who had been with them for several seasons, for she had married, and gone to reside in Colorado. But their daughter Bessie was still with them, and also their son Tom. He was now a student in the Institute of Technology. This constituted the Gordon family.
After a little discussion, it was decided to yield to Mrs. Gordon's desire to visit the home of her childhood, Manchester, Mass., and take what she had not taken for twenty years, a ride round the Cape. Bessie and Tom had never taken this trip, and Manchester was a good place to start from. These were two important considerations which finally decided the matter.
As they finished talking, Mrs. Gordon, in her zeal for historical truth, begged that whenever they thought of or wrote the name of the Cape, they would spell it with an e. She could not imagine Queen Anne spelling her name Ann.
"Indeed," she added, "your Uncle Tenney in his 'Coronation' spells it with an e, and so does Smith's 'Narrative,' the first document which tells of it. That should be authority, surely."
When the middle of July came, the Gordons started, as they had planned to do, to go to the home of Mrs. Gordon's mother in Manchester (now so well known as Manchester-by-the-Sea), on old High Street. The town had changed the name of this street to Washington, but the old lady could not be tempted to call it so, for she had always lived on High Street, indeed was born there, and she didn't see "why it wasn't the same street that it always was." The good-sized brick house in which she lived was particularly dear to Mrs. Gordon, since in it she first saw the light of this world, and in it some of her pleasantest child-days had been spent. So when upon their arrival she saw Tom boyishly stop to swing on the linked iron chains which marked the front entrance to the house, she herself was swinging on them, as in the olden days.