Rockhaven

efiant as when Leif Ericson's crew of fearless Norsemen sailed into its beautiful harbor. With a coast line of bold cliffs, indented by

fishing smacks tied up at its small wharves, and a little steamboat that daily journeys back and forth to the main land, thirty miles distant, entitles it to be called inhabited. In that history also is incorporated many ghastly tales of shipwreck on its forbidding and wave-beaten shores, of long winters when its ledges and ravines were buried beneat

ept over its poorly fed people, to be followed by a split in its one Baptist church on the

d roses smile between its granite ledges, and the sea-gulls sail leisurely over them; or else gloomy and sol

nd larger village is called Rockhaven, the other Northaven. Each has its little church and schoolhouse, also used for town meetings, its one or two general stores, and a post-office. Those in Rockh

off a portion of the harbor, and here was an old tide mill, built of unhewn stone, but now unused, its roof

is known as the Devil's Oven. On either side of this gorge, and extending back from it, is a thicket of stunted spruce. The bottom and sides of this inlet, semicircular in shape, are coated thick with rockweed and bare at low tide. On the side of the harbor opposite Rockhaven, and facing it, is a small granite quarry owned and occasionally operated by one of the natives, a quaint old bachelor named Jesse Hutton. In summer, a

ionable pleasure-seekers ashore. Here they ramble along the one main street, with its plank walk, peeping curiously into the open doors and windows of the shops, at the simply clad women

h, Baptist in denomination, the one at Rockhaven the oldest and known as Hard-Shell; that at Northaven as Free-Will. Each calls together most of the womenkind and grown-up children, as well as a few of the men, every Su

urches that dancing is to be abjured, nevertheless old Jess Hutton, whose fiddle was his wife, child, and sole companion in his solitude, w

appy when at it; 'sides, when they get old they won't want to.

ds the office of selectman and chairman of the school committee for life, is accepted as referee in all disputes, and the friend, counsellor, and adviser of all. Such a man in Rockhaven was Jesse Hutton. Though

is jest as necessary to livin' and happiness as sparkin' on

and his philosophy may be summed up by saying that he had the happy faculty of looking upon the dark s

one small brown schoolhouse served as a place of worship on Sundays as well as a temple of learning on week-days. Here the two boys Jesse and Jethro, received scant education, and at th

dmiration, and in a fair way to secure a home, with her as a chief incentive. Jess made no comment when he saw which way the wind blew in that quarter, but, philosopher that he was, even then, quietly but promptly turned his face away from the island and for a score of years Rockhaven knew not of his whereabouts. Gossips, recalling how he and Le

was left a widow with one child, a little girl named Mona, a small wh

ess Hutton

as he seemed to have brought back sufficient means to at once build a respectabl

nal caller at the cottage in Rock Lane and usually walked to church with the widow and little Mona on Sundays, the store and its customers by day or night were his chief care, and his solitary home merely a place to sleep in. And yet not; for beyond that, during his many years of wandering on the mainland, he had contracted the hab