Our Province of Maine is larger than all of England; it has fine harbors, rivers and mountains; exhaustless rich forests, and a wealth of game. Our people are willing and enduring—friendly when treated properly, but the very devil when put upon and their rights disregarded: as much so as Virginians, though garrulous Virginians have talked the world into thinking bravery is almost exclusively restricted to Virginia—along with chivalry, honor, hospitality and other virtues that Virginians imply are non-existent elsewhere, especially in New England. But Maine men can fight, too, if properly led; for it was mostly men from Maine who sailed to Louisburg, in 1745, and took that granite fortress from the French—as handsome a piece of fighting as any soldiers ever did anywhere.

Nor are our towns to be sneezed at. Falmouth was as beautiful as any seaport I know before the British Captain Mowat sailed up to its unprotected and undefended wharves and set the place ablaze. It’s true our towns are poor, because of the wars our people fought for England against the French and Indians for so many years; and there’s a deal of rum drinking in them, and over-much prying from behind curtains at the doings of others. We don’t have the palaces and churches and statues that dot the English countryside. But neither do we have the trulls and rakes, footpads, debtors’ prisons and diseases with which England is peppered; so all in all I think our towns are better than most.

Our home in Arundel stands a mile and a half from the sea, at the double curve in the river, where my great-great-grandfather settled when he removed from Ipswich because of being deprived of his vote by that enlightened community as punishment for harboring a Quaker.

It’s a square house of two stories, painted red, with three gables protruding from each side of the four-sided roof. Perched on the top is a cupola with windows on all four sides, from which my father can look down into the shipyard behind the house and shout at any shirking adze-man or carpenter. From this vantage-point, too, he can train his glass on the mouth of the river, and know what vessels are making port, and how they are progressing with their loading and unloading as they lie at anchor beyond the bar.