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    The Country of the Pointed Firs: And Other Stories
    The Country of the Pointed Firs: And Other Stories
    The Country of the Pointed Firs: And Other Stories
    Ebook151 pages3 hours

    The Country of the Pointed Firs: And Other Stories

    By Sarah Orne Jewett

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    About this ebook

    A classic collection of American short stories about the lives of the late-nineteenth-century citizens of Maine.
     
    Sarah Orne Jewett’s masterpiece, The Country of Pointed Firs is a short story sequence that celebrates what the author believed were the rapidly disappearing traditions, manners, and dialect of the natives of coastal Maine at the turn of the twentieth century. In revealing snapshots—a family reunion, the ghostly vision of a seaman, and more—Jewett presents honest portraits of individual New Englanders and a warm, humorous, and compassionate vision of the Northeast. Filled with an eclectic cast of characters, the collection humanizes northeasterners from all walks of life.
     
    Like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Country of Pointed Firs masterfully illustrates the American character and experience. Although widely overlooked during her lifetime, Jewett’s tales—and the values they relate—are just as relevant today as when they were written.
     
    This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateNov 21, 2017
    ISBN9781504049146
    The Country of the Pointed Firs: And Other Stories
    Author

    Sarah Orne Jewett

    Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. As a young adult, Jewett published short stories and vignettes about countryside and seaport life in numerous magazines. She wrote three novels, but is best known for her collection of vignettes The Country of Pointed Firs. Jewett’s career was cut short by a carriage accident and a series of strokes, but her sympathetic works continue to inspire naturalist writers.  

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    Reviews for The Country of the Pointed Firs

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    • 5/5
      I loved this story. It is a quiet, loving, unpretentious story of a summer season in rural, coastal Maine. Ms. Jewett is a master of the art of character description. A reader can see and know the persons in the story. This would be a perfect "Book Club" subject. The discussion on all that the story is would be worth having.
    • 3/5
      These sparse, vignette style stories about early 20th century coastal Maine were mildly interesting to me, but not strongly captivating.
    • 4/5
      Times are changing in 19th century Maine as a visitor to the village of Dunnet Landing discovers while with various area residents and hearing their stories. I loved her descriptions of the area, particularly those of the landscape and vegetation. I loved this short little book. It's one that I'm certain to go back and revisit later.
    • 4/5
      I finished Sarah Orne Jewett's delightful view of 19th century Maine village life and have tearfully left Dunnet Landing where the constant interest and intercourse ... linked the far island and these scattered farms into a golden chain of love and dependence. The people are dependent on each other, but surprisingly independent in their every day lives with 80 year old rug beaters and 60 year old sailors. These are strong, loving women - and men - with some mystical leanings but mostly humanistic and community oriented. This is the perfect book for the Thanksgiving season.
    • 4/5
      Since there is no trip to the coast of Maine upcoming this summer, spending a few hours in the company of Mrs. Todd, Mrs. Blackett and assorted denizens of Dennett Landing and Green Island is the next best thing. The flavors, scents, sights and sounds of that most excellent of locales drift out of the pages of this slim volume like magician's smoke. The book reads like a memoir, the unnamed narrator giving us interconnected sketches of 19th century summer life in a simple time where everything is tied to the rhythm of the tides, and an herbalist's skill is respected at least as much as that of a "modern" doctor. Appropriately, there is humor of the most wicked variety, often aimed at the church and the clergy. My favorite line, however, was Mrs. Todd's observation about one of the hymn singers at a family gathering: "I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day." My edition has some stunning black and white photographs of the place and time serving as preface to the story.
    • 1/5
      If you like insipid family yarns and the nattering of old women, if you're charmed by homespun wisdom and wowed by ordinary rural New England folk saying (rarely doing) ordinary rural New England things, and if you like literature to be a gentle balm, a comforter, a restorative herbal tea naturally sweetened with honey, served lukewarm so that you barely notice it while imbibing, then you will probably like this book. I loathed it.
    • 4/5
      A lovely, charming, and occasionally haunting series of sketches set in a declining fishing village in coastal Maine. I can see why Willa Cather admired Jewett’s sense of place.
    • 4/5
      Absolutely nothing happens in this book and I love it.
    • 4/5
      [[Sarah Orne Jewett]] was a late 19th/early 20th century American author that I had not yet read. When I saw that she was from Maine and that this novel was set there, I knew I had to read it during our vacation. I really enjoyed it. There isn't a lot of plot in this slim novel - basically a woman writer goes to Maine for the summer looking for a quiet place to write and instead finds herself enamored of both the setting and the people in the community. The nature writing is beautiful and really captures the beauty of coastal Maine - the fir trees, rocky coasts, and fresh pine and ocean smells. And she captures the lifestyle as well - the reliance on the sea, coastal farming, and close-knit though reserved communities.

      I enjoyed this and recommend it to anyone who enjoys American writers from this era. It's slow and filled with conversation in dialect, but I liked it.
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure how to categorize this -- it's literary fiction, and quite beautiful literary fiction at that, but it reads like a quiet and cadenced memoir and it's a novel made up of short stories. Sarah Orne Jewett's language is a delight, and something about the structure and the telling makes the reader feel as though they are the mysterious visitor, writing, observing, and ever enjoying Mrs. Todd and her circle of community. It's a beautiful respite to visit Dunnett's Landing -- a story from a different space and time, one, I think, that was fading even as the book was written. Lovely, and like stepping through a window into historical Maine, or any secluded seaside town.
    • 3/5
      I came across a description of this book somewhere somehow and it somehow got my attention and I said to myself you should probably read this. Since I don't read a lot of fiction I decided yes it's for your own good. So I read it. And I went back and forth on whether it was a waste of my time. Overall it added to my thinking it was worthwhile.

      Written apparently around the turn of the last century it depicts the experience of a woman on a summer vacation type stint somewhere up in Maine along the rocky coast there. The woman she stays with is a fixture in the community of plain clannish types supported primarily be a seagoing and fishing workforce.

      Individual stories of some of these individuals is laid out in an enticing enough way to keep ones interest. Of special note was a woman who lived entirely by herself out in the remote due to a past incident in her life there. Having past on she is still somewhat memorialized by the locals. It winds up with a reunion of many of the related people and finally a old man who live the previous woman lives alone and mourns his wife eternally.

      The sense of life as it was in those days and how it does or does not relate to how we conduct our lives today with our rampant and intrusive technology was the impression this work left me with. Also how the human drams continues to play out much like the past no matter how the present plays itself out.
    • 5/5
      It could take you a day to read The Country of the Painted Firs. A mere 88 pages in length, you could spend just an afternoon with Ms. Jewett's novel. That being said, I urge you to take more time with this sweet little book. This is portrait of turn of the century coastal Maine living at its simplest and most honest. Jewett illustrates a time when hospitality, good manners, friendship and community mattered most. While there is not much of a plot, the characters are carefully crafted. Today, the people you meet throughout all of Maine are just as colorful and hard working as they were in Jewett's fictional town of Dunnet Landing. The statement, "One trade helps another" as one character says, is as true today as it was in 1896 when Country of the Pointed Firs was first published.
    • 4/5
      Jewett’s novel The Country of the Pointed Firs is the culmination of the regional characters, themes, and techniques that Jewett explored for so many years. It is a composite novel organized around alternating currents of separation and reunion, Jewett never wrote a conventionally-plotted novel, and in this tale a visiting writer-narrator from the city is slowly changed from an outsider into an initiated insider in the life of the largely female community of Dunnet Landing, a tiny seacoast village in Maine. The first chapter, titled “Return”, represents a reunion of sorts in that the narrator is returning to a place with which she previously fell in love. After that very short opening she is quickly drawn into the world of her landlady, Mrs. Almira Todd, the local herbalist who seems to possess a special spiritual outlook.

      Soon the narrator feels the need to separate so that she can complete the writing project she brought with her. After listening to a strange tale about a limbo-like “waiting place” between this world and the next in the fog-bound arctic regions, the narrator reunites with Mrs. Todd, and they both discover that their relationship has improved in mutual consideration and empathy as a result of the separation. They have achieved a balance between the basic human needs for both connection and separation. This alternating pattern of separation and reunion continues in a number of different ways throughout the novel, ending with the narrator’s departure from Dunnet Landing.

      Dunnet Landing and the surrounding country is populated with charming characters whose stories fill the spaces between the description of the lovely Maine north country. One of those characters, Captain Littlepage, had time for both sailing and reading. The latter activity was evidently also a pastime of the narrator who dotted the narrative with references to Shakespeare, Milton, and others.

      The scenery is captured in moments like this:
      "We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge."(p. 33)

      The chill in the air on winter nights was tempered by the heat from a Franklin Stove (no doubt very much like the one in my sister's home in the high country of northeastern Nevada). One of the best moments in the story was the Bowden family reunion that brought together many of the people from the area in a way that you can only experience in small out of the way communities like Dunnet Landing.

      The Country of the Pointed Firs was greeted with strongly positive reviews. Indeed, a few years later, Jewett's friend Willa Cather would rate it as one of the three great classics of American literature (the other two being The Scarlet Letter and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). I'm not sure I agree completely with Cather, but this is a fine short novel depicting late nineteenth century Americana.
    • 4/5
      The country of the title (where the firs and spruces are almost always described as “dark”) is coastal Maine, a little town called Dunnet, no longer an important port, where the narrator comes to write and boards at the house of Almira Todd. She’s a little coy and indirect—we don’t know until the second chapter that the woman described as arriving in Dunnet is she. The first impression is a little like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. What does it mean that a woman writer persona in 1896 quotes Darwin’s autobiography?
      Much of the first half is taken up with Mrs. Todd’s gathering of herbs (she also has an herb garden) her sale of them to the townsfolk as simples, the narrator’s assistance in these enterprises, the very pleasant visit the two of them make to Green Island, where Almira's brother William lives with her mother Mrs. Blackett, and the visit of Almira’s friend Susan Fosdick.
      It is summer when the narrator comes to Dunnet, and for fifty cents a week she rents the idle schoolhouse on the hill as a daytime office for her writing. There one day Captain Littlepage tells her of a ship’s captain colleague who is convinced he sailed north past any settlements to an illusory town on a headland inhabited by foglike specters.
      We hear from Susan Fosdick and Almira the story of poor Joanna and her self-imposed lifetime exile on Shell-heap Island, which the narrator explores one day when she’s sailing with Captain Bowden. “In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”
      In the later pages the narrator goes with Almira and her mother to the Bowden family reunion at the old Bowden house in the upper bay, a huge affair involving a picnic in the woods overlooking the bay. Returning, she comments “The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.”
      Before she leaves Dunnet at the end of the summer, she befriends an old widowed fisherman, Elijah Tilley, and spends an afternoon at his house.
    • 5/5
      This is a beautifully written book that almost makes you feel as if you have been set down in rural Maine in the late 1800's. The narrator is a house guest of Mrs. Almira Todd, a resident of Dunnette Landing and an expert in medicinal herbs and other home remedies. As we meet more residents of this small rural town, very little happens (a visit to Mrs. Todd's mother, a family reunion), but we get a rich view of the town and its people. The book is also beautifully written. Consider this description of a feast at a family reunion:

      "There was an elegant ingenuity displayed in the form of pies which delighted my heart."

      Or this description of aging:

      "So we always keep the same hearts, though our outer framework fails and shows the touch of time."

      Or this line about Mrs. Todd's elderly mother getting into a wagon:

      "Whatever doubts and anxieties I may have had about the inconvenience of the Begg's high wagon for a person of Mrs. Blackett's age and shortness, they were happily overcome by the aid of a chair and her own valiant spirit."

      I have to admit that at times, spoiled perhaps by today's page-turners, I got impatient with this slim volume. But when I took a breath, set back, and savored the words, I thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful description of lives well-lived.
    • 4/5
      In this slim volume originally published in 1896, Sarah Orne Jewett crystallizes a dying way of life along the Maine coast at the turn of the twentieth century. This novella is a loosely connected string of stories and observations recounted by our narrator, an outsider to the community. She is a writer who spends her summers in the peaceful seclusion of Dunnet Landing. But she has gained the trust of her landlady Mrs. Todd, and we see the many lives in Dunnet Landing just as our narrator does, unfolding slowly and without pretension.

      Comparison between The Country of the Pointed Firs and the work of L. M. Montgomery is irresistible. The anecdotes, the character sketches, the sense of community, the love of beauty in nature, the good-natured humor scattered here and there — all are highly reminiscent of Montgomery's style. It's clear that both authors deeply loved the communities they depict in their stories, and their themes are very similar: an old sea-captain spinning a yarn, a faithful widower grieving for his wife, a disappointed lover withdrawing from her world, and others. In some places I was also reminded of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's nonfiction book Gift from the Sea; there is something akin in the tone of the two books. I would like to have known their authors.

      The prose is just lovely, so spare and graceful. Consider the elegant constructions and poetic feel in these sentences:

      The captain was very grave indeed, and I bade my inward spirit keep close to discretion. (10)

      The poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man. (15)

      I had been living in the quaint little house with as much comfort and unconsciousness as if it were a larger body, or a double shell, in whose simple convolutions Mrs. Todd and I had secreted ourselves, until some wandering hermit crab of a visitor marked the little spare room for her own. Perhaps now and then a castaway on a lonely desert island dreads the thought of being rescued. (36)

      ...there are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude the world over,—the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding; while the old bring hearts full of remembrance. This plain anchorite had been one of those whom sorrow made too lonely to brave the sight of men, too timid to front the simple world she knew, yet valiant enough to live alone with her poor insistent human nature and the calms and passions of the sea and sky. (54–5)

      Or the sly humor here:

      I saw that Mrs. Todd's broad shoulders began to shake. "There was good singers there; yes, there was excellent singers," she agreed heartily, putting down her teacup, "but I chanced to drift alongside Mis' Peter Bowden o' Great Bay, an' I couldn't help thinkin' if she was as far out o' town as she was out o' tune, she wouldn't get back in a day." (76)

      At first he seemed to be one of those evasive and uncomfortable persons who are so suspicious of you that they make you almost suspicious of yourself. (77)

      I know very little about Jewett, but I have a notion that she was a woman who knew how to be alone. Yet it is apparent that she also enjoyed her fellow beings and found great pleasure in observing them. She shares this pleasure with her readers, and I will certainly be looking for more of her work. Thoughtful and quieting.
    • 4/5
      A quiet, peaceful read, The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett conveys both a timeless quality and a feel of yesterday. Exploring the value women place in the friendship of other women, along with the strong community ties that existed in rural regions, this short read is one to savour.

      A young woman writer spends her summer in the small coastal Maine town of Dunnet Landing. She develops a friendship with her landlady, Mrs. Todd, and through her meets other women of the area. These women tell stories of both the inhabitants of Dunnet and the surrounding islands, and their vivid descriptions of both people and places naturally includes the beauty and ruggedness of the country.

      There is no direct plot, instead the book consists of the weaving together of these stories. These reminiscences tell of a simple world with straight forward values that encourage the reader to dream of their own yesterdays. Originally published in 1896, this book still resonates with spiritual quality and merit in our busy lives today.
    • 5/5
      I love this edition of Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs. It includes a portfolio of photographs of coastal Maine during Jewett's time.

      As for the novel itself, Mrs. Almira Todd is one of my all-time favorite characters in literature. "Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-briar and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."
    • 4/5
      Life is busy in the 21st century. Much of it is our own making, but that's how we live. We need information now; can't wait 10 seconds for the page to load; too long, didn't read; kids going in different directions. I just seem to go, go, go. Go, dog, go! Reading is a way to slow things down, but I often read mysteries, or thrillers. Books that engage me and have me frantically turning pages so I don't fall asleep, because if I stop, I might fall asleep. However, as I read The Country of the Pointed Firs, this small, charming book, I could feel my body slow down and my brain slow down as I adjusted to life as told in small tales from a 19th century fishing village on the shores of Maine.

      There isn't much to this story, not really a plot, just collected stories from the unnamed narrator as she spends a summer in Dunnett Landing, meeting friends and family of her landlady. There is herb gathering, family reunions, and boat trips for the day - depending on the wind direction. There are stories from sea-faring days, and even laments of how life is changing by the end of the 1800s. But overall, there is a peacefulness, and calm that comes with Mrs Todd and the stories related in this quiet book. I'm so delighted to have discovered this gem.

      on entertaining:
      Tact is after all a kind of mindreading, and my hostess held the golden gift. p59

      on old friends:
      There, it does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that know what you know. Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out. p73

      on life near an ocean:
      [The view] gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in, - that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give. p58
    • 3/5
      I picked up this book after reading Cranford, and if you enjoy one, I think you will enjoy the other.

      This one takes you through a months-long summer visit to a small seaside town in Maine during the 19th century. It is about as eventful as a summer vacation normally would be, there is no great suspense or dramatic action. The narrator is the author, a woman writer boarding with a local herbalist (and renting the small schoolhouse as an office). Visits, meals, walks, and boat trips make up most of the narrative. There is a lot of vivid detail, and if you are going to love this book, that is likely to be what you will love: being taken back in time for a good close look around a quiet traditional village community. No-one is rich, and most of the characters are women, most of them self-sufficient and highly competent in relationships, work, and boating. The significant male characters are misfits: a very shy but sweet old man living with his mother; a retired ship's captain possessed by visions of a surreal Arctic journey that may or may not have taken place; a widowed fisherman who has never gotten over the death of his adored wife.

      It is a slow paced book, and I wanted to pick up a pencil and edit her in places, but it was worth my time, and many of the images and stories have been lingering in my mind.
    • 5/5
      This is basically my favorite book of all times. I might be biased because I am maybe a little bit in love with SOJ? Something I like to think about a lot is whether someone could write a book like this nowadays. I know that I could not. You would probably have to be a very good person.
    • 5/5
      I highly recommend this edition. Although I also have the Library of America edition of Jewett, this volume is a wonderful accessory simply for the eight-page introduction by the late Mary Ellen Chase, herself a highly regarded novelist and for many years a professor and eventually department chair in English at Smith College. As a young girl, Chase met Jewett, who was the principal influence on Chase's own fiction, and Chase is the "bridge" between Jewett and Carolyn Chute among Maine fiction writers.

      NOTE: In case it is unclear, the "edition" to which I refer is the 1968 edition "selected and introduced" by Mary Ellen Chase and published in hardcover by W.W. Norton (but not a Norton Critical Edition).
    • 2/5
      this has been on my to-read list for years, and i finally picked it up this fall. i've only just read the main novella; i'd really like to read the stories after it, but i'm just not in a place to do that with any reasonable speed right now. i really wanted to be absorbed by this more than i was, and maybe i will be some other time - it wasn't as plot driven as the stuff i've been reading lately, and i had to force myself to get chapters done here and there. maybe next time!
    • 5/5
      Sarah Orne Jewett’s THE COUNTRY OF POINTED FIRS is a visitor’s tale. Set in the fictional Maine coast town of Dunnet Landing where the author/narrator has settled for the summer to write. As a visitor, the narrator inevitably recounts only the pieces of history she comes in contact with through her landlady and the people she meets in the community. The stories are portraits, bits and pieces, of lives that exist outside the narrator’s brief visit. As a result, the reader feels like a companion on this holiday. The novella moves at the pace of a quiet seacoast village, and is refreshing to read for that very reason.

      Like a vacation, outside cares fade while focusing on the lives, habits and landscape of this place. The writing is finely wrought. A real affection for a place and people one knows briefly shines through the work and makes one wish for a time and place when travel, life and writing unfolded at a the speed of a long walk.

      Some editions incorporate other stories written about Dunnet Landing into the body of the novella. This can lead to a change in the narrator’s voice that is incongruous with the rest of the work. Look for a version that preserves the order of one of the early publications with other short works in a separate section.
    • 5/5
      Story told by a self-effacing first-person narrator who resides with an older woman, a Maine herbalist, for the summer. Her hostess is sturdy native who introduces the (nameless) narrator to a cast of seafaring folk who belong to an earlier, stronger generation. Set in late nineteenth century.Such a wonderful book, and sad yet full of light, with a host of strong, salty, companionable women sketched in these few pages. There's a deep, deep nostalgia saturating the work. The narrator does not want to look toward the future (the twentieth century). She keeps her eye pinned, instead, on the residents of a seaside, Maine village, many of them old, most childless. Her hostess is an herbalist ... a classic figure, slightly witchy, frank, healthy, and an accomplished sailer. The story of the self-exiled woman on Shell-Heap Island is key. Women's friendship ... and women's isolation.
    • 5/5
      Characters that equal Mark Twain's. One of the first books that I ever read while on Monhegan Island, and, while it is not specifically about Monhegan, I will always associate this book with my time there (hence the Monhegan Island tag).

      When I return to Monhegan Island each year, the feeling I have is captured perfectly in Sarah's words of "But the first salt wind from the east, the first sight of a lighthouse set boldly on its outer rock, the flash of a gull, the waiting procession of seaward-bound firs on an island, made me feel solid and definite again, instead of a poor, incoherent being. Life had resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness."

    Book preview

    The Country of the Pointed Firs - Sarah Orne Jewett

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    The Country of the Pointed Firs

    Sarah Orne Jewett

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    Note

    Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was born and died in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was the region’s most distinguished doctor and, as a child, Jewett often accompanied him on his round of patient visits. She began writing poetry at an early age and when she was only 19 her short story Mr. Bruce was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly. Her association with that magazine continued, and William Dean Howells, who was editor at that time, encouraged her to publish her first book, Deephaven (1877), a collection of sketches published earlier in the Atlantic Monthly. Through her friendship with Howells, Jewett became acquainted with Boston’s literary elite, including Annie Fields, with whom she developed one of the most intimate and lasting relationships of her life.

    The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered Jewett’s finest work, described by Henry James as her beautiful little quantum of achievement. Despite James’s diminutives, the novel remains a classic. Because it is loosely structured, many critics view the book not as a novel, but a series of sketches; however, its structure is unified through both setting and theme. Jewett herself felt that her strengths as a writer lay not in plot development or dramatic tension, but in character development. Indeed, she determined early in her career to preserve a disappearing way of life, and her novel can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants who lived in the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast.

    Jewett died in 1909, eight years after an accident that effectively ended her writing career. Her reputation had grown during her lifetime, extending far beyond the bounds of the New England she loved.

    I. The Return

    There was something about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

    After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there was a fine crowd of spectators, and the younger portion of the company followed her with subdued excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town.

    II. Mrs. Todd

    Later, there was only one fault to find with this choice of a summer lodging-place, and that was its complete lack of seclusion. At first the tiny house of Mrs. Almira Todd, which stood with its end to the street, appeared to be retired and sheltered enough from the busy world, behind its bushy bit of a green garden, in which all the blooming things, two or three gay hollyhocks and some London-pride, were pushed back against the gray-shingled wall. It was a queer little garden and puzzling to a stranger, the few flowers being put at a disadvantage by so much greenery; but the discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.

    At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarities among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spirits in a small caldron on Mrs. Todd’s kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled. One nostrum was called the Indian remedy, and its price was but fifteen cents; the whispered directions could be heard as customers passed the windows. With most remedies the purchaser was allowed to depart unadmonished from the kitchen, Mrs. Todd being a wise saver of steps; but with certain vials she gave cautions, standing in the doorway, and there were other doses which had to be accompanied on their healing way as far as the gate, while she muttered long chapters of directions, and kept up an air of secrecy and importance to the last. It may not have been only the common aids of humanity with which she tried to cope; it seemed sometimes as if love and hate and jealousy and adverse winds at sea might also find their proper remedies among the curious wild-looking plants in Mrs. Todd’s garden.

    The village doctor and this learned herbalist were upon the best of terms. The good man may have counted upon the unfavorable effect of certain potions which he should find his opportunity in counteracting; at any rate, he now and then stopped and exchanged greetings with Mrs. Todd over the picket fence. The conversation became at once professional after the briefest preliminaries, and he would stand twirling a sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and make suggestive jokes, perhaps about her faith in a too persistent course of thoroughwort elixir, in which my landlady professed such firm belief as sometimes to endanger the life and usefulness of worthy neighbors.

    To arrive at this quietest of seaside villages late in June, when the busy herb-gathering season was just beginning, was also to arrive in the early prime of Mrs. Todd’s activity in the brewing of old-fashioned spruce beer. This cooling and refreshing drink had been brought to wonderful perfection through a long series of experiments; it had won immense local fame, and the supplies for its manufacture were always giving out and having to be replenished. For various reasons, the seclusion and uninterrupted days which had been looked forward to proved to be very rare in this otherwise delightful corner of the world. My hostess and I had made our shrewd business agreement on the basis of a simple cold luncheon at noon, and liberal restitution in the matter of hot suppers, to provide for which the lodger might sometimes be seen hurrying down the road, late in the day, with cunner line in hand. It was soon found that this arrangement made large allowance for Mrs. Todd’s slow herb-gathering progresses through woods and pastures. The spruce-beer customers were pretty steady in hot weather, and there were many demands for different soothing syrups and elixirs with which the unwise curiosity of my early residence had made me acquainted. Knowing Mrs. Todd to be a widow, who had little beside this slender business and the income from one hungry lodger to maintain her, one’s energies and even interest were quickly bestowed, until it became a matter of course that she should go afield every pleasant day, and that the lodger should answer all peremptory knocks at the side door.

    In taking an occasional wisdom-giving stroll in Mrs. Todd’s company, and in acting as business partner during her frequent absences, I found the July days fly fast, and it was not until I felt myself confronted with too great pride and pleasure in the display, one night, of two dollars and twenty-seven cents which I had taken in during the day, that I remembered a long piece of writing, sadly belated now, which I was bound to do. To have been patted kindly on the shoulder and called darlin’, to have been offered a surprise of early mushrooms for supper, to have had all the glory of making two dollars and twenty-seven cents in a single day, and then to renounce it all and withdraw from these pleasant successes, needed much resolution. Literary employments are so vexed with uncertainties at best, and it was not until the voice of conscience sounded louder in my ears than the sea on the nearest pebble beach that I said unkind words of withdrawal to Mrs. Todd. She only became more wistfully affectionate than ever in her expressions, and looked as disappointed as I expected when I frankly told her that I could no longer enjoy the pleasure of what we called seein’ folks. I felt that I was cruel to a whole neighborhood in curtailing her liberty in this most important season for harvesting the different wild herbs that were so much counted upon to ease their winter ails.

    Well, dear, she said sorrowfully, I’ve took great advantage o’ your bein’ here. I ain’t had such a season for years, but I have never had nobody I could so trust. All you lack is a few qualities, but with time you’d gain judgment an’ experience, an’ be very able in the business. I’d stand right here an’ say it to anybody.

    Mrs. Todd and I were not separated or estranged by the change in our business relations; on the contrary, a deeper intimacy seemed to begin. I do not know what herb of the night it was that used sometimes to send out a penetrating odor late in the evening, after the dew had fallen, and the moon was high, and the cool air came up from the sea. Then Mrs. Todd would feel that she must talk to somebody, and I was only too glad to listen. We both fell under the spell, and she either stood outside the window, or made an errand to my sitting-room, and told, it might be very commonplace news of the day, or, as happened one misty summer night, all that lay deepest in her heart. It was in this way that I came to know that she had loved one who was far above her.

    No, dear, him I speak of could never think of me, she said. When we was young together his mother didn’t favor the match, an’ done everything she could to part us; and folks thought we both married well, but’t wa’n’t what either one of us wanted most; an’ now we’re left alone again, an’ might have had each other all the time. He was above bein’ a seafarin’ man, an’ prospered more than most; he come of a high family, an’ my lot was plain an’ hard-workin’. I ain’t seen him for some years; he’s forgot our youthful feelin’s, I expect, but a woman’s heart is different; them feelin’s comes back when you think you’ve done with ‘em, as sure as spring comes with the year. An’ I’ve always had ways of hearin’ about him.

    She stood in the centre of a braided rug, and its rings of black and gray seemed

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