in New York. One day he came into the house, poured out a glass of water, and drank it eagerly. "The water is very refreshing," he said, "but how much more refreshing a drink would be from the old oaken bucket in my father's well at home."

"Wouldn't that be a pretty subject for a poem ?" his wife asked.

At this suggestion he seized his pen, and, as the home of his childhood rose vividly before his fancy, he wrote the familiar words. Nothing else he ever wrote has survived.

One of the famous dwellers on the Massachusetts coast was the great statesman, Daniel Webster. In his later life he lived at Marshfield, and there died and was buried in 1852. He had a domain of over two thousand acres, which he made one of the best farms in the country. He stocked it with blooded cattle, herds of sheep, and fine horses. Gay peacocks strutted over the lawn, and he had guinea hens, Chinese poultry, and other fowls. He embellished the grounds with a great variety of trees, many of them grown from seeds of his own planting, and there was a flower garden covering nearly an acre of ground. The ocean was only a mile distant. All the buildings on the place associated with Webster burned in 1878, except a little study which he sometimes used.

HE town of Nantucket, on the island of the same

THE

name, is the quaintest place in New England. It is comparatively little affected by the changing customs and fashions of the mainland, and has an individuality and flavor of the past in its life and homes that are

all its own. The island lies well out in the sea south of Cape Cod. It has a length of fifteen miles, an average breadth of four miles, and is for the most part a windswept moor diversified with lagoons and ponds. Nowhere does it rise to any striking height; and the trees, except in the villages, are few and stunted.

When the steamer on which you journey to the island reaches port, you observe many ancient fish-houses on the wharves, and see little fishing-vessels and power boats, dories, and pleasure craft on the water all around. The town huddles about the harbor on land that terraces steeply upward, and on the highest terrace there rises, from amid the roofs and chimneys and the green foliage of the shade trees, the dominating tower of an old white church with a gilt-domed cupola.

Some of the town streets are paved with cobblestones. Nearly all of them are both crooked and narrow, and there are numerous delightful little byways and footpath alleys. The houses are mostly wooden, with sides and roofs of shingles. Many of them were built by old sea captains and are of generous size, two or three stories high. In years gone by, when the house walls were painted red, green, or yellow, and the roofs were tarred, the town must have been even more picturesque than it is now.

The first settler of Nantucket was a man named Macy, who bought the island from the Indians for a small sum of money and two beaver hats. He had previously

"dwelt in good repute" a score of years in the Massachusetts town of Salisbury at the mouth of the Merri

mac River. But one day four Quakers stopped at his house for shelter in a severe rain 'storm, and he let them remain until the tempest was over. Quakers were persecuted at that time in New England, and it was against the law to entertain them. As a result Mr. Macy was heavily fined, and he resolved to "take up his abode among savages where religious zeal had not yet discovered a crime in hospitality." With two friends and his family, which included five little chil

dren, he went in an open boat across Massachusetts Bay, rounded Cape Cod, and at length reached Nantucket's sheltered harbor.

He was welcomed by the numerous Indian population of the island, and he built a house. Soon other families came, and the settlers taught their faith to the savages, who presently all became "Praying Indians."

The island government was so free from intolerance that it attracted the Quakers to seek homes there. Their number increased until the majority of the inhabitants were of this faith.

The early dwellers of Nantucket and other places on the New England coast used to keep long boats in which they could push out from the shore and give chase whenever they saw a whale. If they succeeded in making a capture, the yield of oil and whalebone made it a rich prize. But the whales, which for a time were plentiful in the near waters, became increasingly shy. Ships had to go after them, and longer and longer voyages had to be undertaken until vessels would fit out to go to the most distant seas, whence they would not return for three or four years.

Nantucket developed into the chief whaling port of America, and its whaleships in their voyages visited all the waters of the globe. They wandered far from the lanes of commerce, and their captains discovered no less than thirty of the islands of the Pacific. One Nantucket whaleship was lost on the coast of the Fiji