Part 6

“Americans?” cries the hitherto unfriendly foreigner. “Americans?” echoes his wife, who up to this time had not been supposed to understand a word of English. The mystery is solved. This gentleman and his wife are Hollanders and have taken us for English. It is at the time when the English-Boer war is at its height, and the Hollander has no dealings with the Englishman if he can help it. The gentleman is an Amsterdam physician, and a man of culture and wide reading. His evident effort to be friendly reaches a climax when he tells us of his hotel at Brieg, where we are to spend the night, and assures us that there we will be certain to have trout for dinner.

Now for the last half of the trip! We have only just left the hotel when the diligence is stopped and the passengers are asked to get out and walk for a mile across the debris of an avalanche which came thundering down from the terminal moraines of the Ross Boden glacier the previous spring. The diligence sways and lurches and thumps along, while we pick our way over stones and ice and around giant rocks. Halfway across we meet a young man who has spent nearly all of his waking hours for months past in search for the body of his sister who met her death under the sudden sweep of the avalanche.

Here, in this little monastery--so they tell us--is where Napoleon made his headquarters for a time when he led his troops over the mighty mountains to the sunny plains of Italy. We stop long enough to admire the St. Bernard dogs, and then on down the mountains. When we begin the descent some of the party assert that this ride will be less interesting than that of the morning when we were all the time climbing upward. Possibly it is; but it is far more exciting. Five horses going at full speed towards a precipice which drops away for a full thousand feet, the leaders seemingly pawing into space before they turn the corner, the outer wheels of the diligence constantly flirting with the edge of the precipice--these are things that lead to nervous prostration. As I look back at that trip I am satisfied that it was only by leaning hard toward the inside of the road that I saved the passengers and the whole outfit from untimely destruction.

When the Amsterdam doctor descanted upon the deliciousness of the trout served in the Brieg hostelry, he awakened memories of the Nepigon and the Adirondacks, of northern Wisconsin and the Miramichi! I formed a resolution, then and there, to catch as well as to eat some of the trout for which Brieg was said to be famous. Arriving at Brieg at 5.30 p.m. after our drive of forty miles, I at once interviewed the concierge of the hotel, who assured me that it would be no trick at all to catch a mess of trout before dinner-time. Away to a tackle store, where line and leader and hooks were bought and a cane-pole rented, an interview with the hotel “boy,” who dug a can of worms fat enough to have come from Holland, and then for the Rhone, which was rushing along the valley about half a mile distant. The first sight of the river somewhat dampened my ardour. It was of a dirty milk colour, and no respectable American trout would live in it for a moment. But then, I reasoned, Swiss trout may not know any better--so here goes. I fished in the rapids and in swirling pools, under low bending alders and by the side of huge rocks. I skittered those fat worms on the surface, and dropped them down to the bottom. Every trick of the angler learned by experience or gathered from conversation and reading, was tried in vain. Tell it not in Skegemog and publish it not on Prairie River!--but I never had a bite. And yet I was not cast down. The setting sun was turning the mountain tops into glory, the laughter of reapers in a neighbouring field, the tinkle of goats’ bells far up the mountain side, the gurgle and singing of the Rhone, the beauty of that matchless valley--I had gained all these by my efforts, even though of fish I had none.

Let no hard-hearted reader giggle over my poor luck, for when I sat down that night to dinner, and the far-famed Brieg trout were placed before me, behold! they were not trout at all, but some sort of a sucker, full of pronged bones and with soft white meat. I never had any ambition to catch suckers.

```_The sea is a jovial comrade;

````He laughs wherever he goes;

```His merriment shines in the dim-

`````pling lines

````That wrinkle his hale repose.

```He lays him down at the feet of the

````sun

````And shaking all over with glee,

```And the broad-backed billows fall

````faint on the shore

```In the mirth of the mighty sea!_

--Bayard Taylor, Wind and Sea.

VI. ON SEA AND SHORE

R. W. D. HOWELLS made a most pathetic confession some years ago in an article contributed to a well-known journal when he said concerning vacations, “Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it.” Either Mr. Howells was “out of tune with the universe” or he never tried Edgartown.

Lest some of our readers should assume some selfish motive as prompting this bold proclamation of Edgartown as an attractive spot in which to spend the summer days, let it be said that the writer does not stand in with any hotel proprietor or real estate dealer in this village by the sea--or elsewhere.

Just how Martha’s Vineyard came by its name is not certain. One tradition has it that when, in 1605, Bartholomew Gosnold sailed from England for “Northern Virginia” and chanced upon No Man’s Land, he gave it the name of Martha’s Vineyard, and that, for some unknown reason, this name was transferred to the neighbouring island.

Still another tradition alleges that the first settler on the island had a loved daughter to whom he gave a tract of land where vines grew luxuriantly; and so not only her tract, but the whole island came to be known as Martha’s Vineyard. Neither theory costs anything; they are probably about equally true--you can take your choice.

At the extreme eastern end of Martha’s Vineyard is the quaint, restful village of Edgartown. Turn your face towards the sun-rise and you look across a narrow bay to Chappaquiddick Island, lying like a giant earthwork to protect the village from the assaults of the ocean. Wouldn’t you like to ramble about a bit? We’ll start in at this ravine south of the town, for it was here that the first settler made his home. Considering that he built his log cabin in 1630, only ten years after the landing of the Pilgrims, it is not strange that nothing remains to mark the place of his abode but this grass-grown depression in the hill-side.

Going south along the main street we come to the old Mayhew house, built in 1698, and looking as if it proposed to stand for a few centuries longer. Tradition has it that during the Revolutionary War a cannon-ball passed through its walls, going in at the rear and coming out at the front. We stop just long enough to make an unsuccessful hunt for the hole, and then on to the Collins place. What is there especially interesting about this fairly modern house? Just this: that it was our home through many summer days, and we can never think of it or of its hospitable mistress without a thrill of delight. Out there in the front yard gleam the white grave-stones which mark the resting places of members of the family who died a hundred and fifty years ago. From the wide porch at the back of the house you look out over the bay to Chappaquiddick, and may even catch glimpses of the sea, looking either to the north or to the south.

We’ve rested long enough, and will resume our journey up the street to the Fisher house. Some day we will make a long stop here, for it is a pre-revolutionary mansion and full of relics of the olden days. Here are quaint old deeds, some of them in the Indian language, and no end of curios gathered by members of the family during a prolonged stay in Spain.

If you’ve leisure, let’s visit the piers. Time was when all was bustle here, but it is depressingly quiet now. Forty vessels in a single year sailed from this port in search of whales. An old record bearing date of November 11, 1652, tells us that “Thos. Daggett and Wm. Weeks are appointed whale cutters for this year; voted the day above written.” In those days whales were frequently cast upon the beach by severe storms, and whale cutters were appointed to insure a fair division of the spoil. Now the whaling industry is a thing of the past. One of the pathetic sights of the village is an old whaling vessel tied to the pier and slowly rotting away. It is many a year since the last of these vessels sailed from port, but if we are fortunate enough to meet one of the retired captains and can induce him to tell us something of his experiences, we shall come quite near enough to the hardships and privations of those heroic days. Do you see that man going along Water Street? He sailed a whaling vessel for forty years, and one of his voyages lasted six years lacking ten days.

You can take your choice between visiting the old burial ground on “Tower Hill” or going out for a sail. Take the sail? I thought so. Of course, there are brown old head-stones with quaint epitaphs up there on the hill, but who that is in possession of his senses would pass up the chance to go sailing in a Cape Cod catboat on such a day as this?

Here we are on board the “Quickstep,” one of the smartest boats on the coast, with a captain who knows the sea as a native New Yorker knows Broadway. While we are dropping down the bay before the light wind, you may like to hear of the gale when this same boat and captain were blown out to sea. The storm came up suddenly and the wind blew directly off shore. The captain was fishing just off the Muskeget shoals and tried hard to beat in, but in vain. When the gale had blown itself out, wrecks were strewn all along the coast, and the Edgartown people had given up the captain for lost; but on the fourth day he came sailing into harbour. Single-handed and alone he had fought the storm and had won the fight.