"We New England folk think that most of the real virtues of life are seated in red apples," he says--and there is something in his way of saying it that makes you believe that he is right.
Another day and he may lead you to still another club--this one down under the roof of one of those solid old stone warehouses with steep-pitched roofs that thrust themselves abruptly out into the harbor-line. It is a yacht club, and its fortress-like windows, shaped like the port-holes of a ship, look direct to a brisk water highway to the open sea. Underneath those very windows is the rush and turmoil of one of the busiest fish markets in the land. There is nothing on either coast, no, not even down in the picturesque Gulf that can compare with this place, which reeks with the odors and where the fishermen handle the cod with huge forks and paint the decks of their staunch little vessels a distinctive color to show the nationality of the folk who man it. We remember that the Portuguese have a whimsical fancy for painting the decks of their little fishing schooners a most unusual blue.
Of Boston harbor an entire book might easily be written--of the quaint craft that still tie to its wharves, the brave show of shipping that passes in and out each day, of Boston Light and that other silent, watchful sentinel which stands upon Minot's Ledge; of the Navy Yard over in Charlestown at which the _Constitution_, most famous of all fighting-ships, rusts out her fighting heart through the long years. And looking down upon that old Navy Yard from Boston itself is Copp's Hill burying-ground, a rich grubbing-place for the seekers of epitaphs and of genealogical lore. We remember once winning the heart of the keeper of the old cemetery and of being permitted to descend to the vault of one of the oldest of Boston families. In the dark place there were three little groups of bones and we knew that only three persons had been buried there.
Above, the sunshine beat merrily down upon Copp's Hill, with its headstones arranged in neat rows along the tidy paths and the elevated trains in an encircling street fairly belying the bullets in the stones--shot there from Bunker Hill a century and a quarter before.... There are many other such burying-grounds in Boston--in the very heart of the city the Granary and King's Chapel burying-ground where a great owl sometimes comes at dusk and opens his eyes wide at the traffic of a great city encircling one of God's acres. And a soul that revels in these things will, perchance, journey to Salem, seventeen miles distant, and see the moldering seaport that once rivaled Boston in her prosperity and that sent her clipper ships sailing around the wide world. There are many delightful side-trips out from Boston--the sail across the tumbling bay to Provincetown, which still boasts a town crier, down to Plymouth or up to Gloucester, with its smart, seaside resorts nearby. And back from Boston there are other moldering towns, filled with fascination and romance. Some of them have hardly changed within the century.
