OllIGIN OF NAME, MONTSERRAT. 5 



cart-tracks, are still to be made out across this section, 

 their firm stone fences, reared in some cases by the hands 

 of negro slaves, still marking the ancient lines ; and doubt- 

 less, amongst these reminders of a venerable past, could be 

 discovered the highway evolved from the first cowpath be- 

 tween River Head and Mackerel Cove across the plain at 

 Montserrat. 



A road bearing northerly from the station, passes the 

 long-time home of Hawthorne's favorite sister, and leads 

 by Bald Hill, Centreville and Beaver Pond to Wenham 

 Neck. To the south, an old road winds away towards 

 the old South Meeting House and Beverly Town. "Little 

 Comfort," a name borrowed from an Exmoor Combe in 

 Devon, England, is also near, and "Paradise" is not far 

 away. 



Montserrat is one of many sections, rather than villages, 

 of the old town of Beverly. Its designation is thought to 

 have been borrowed at an unknown date from one of the 

 little volcanic islets of the lesser Antilles forming a group 

 called the Leeward Islands, one of which bears the name 

 of Montserrat and is about equally distant from Nevis, the 

 birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, — from Antigua where 

 Gov. Winthrop's son Samuel lived and died as deputy 

 governor, — from Guadaloupe and other points with which 

 we have had trade from the early days of the colony. It 

 is not unlikely that some one or more of our hardy skip- 

 pers who spent their summers in the perilous husbandry 

 of Grand Menan and George's Banks and their winters in 

 threading the tortuous mazes of the tropic seas to furnish 

 "with salt codfish the Catholic tables of the Caribbean Isl- 

 anders and bring back from the Sugar Islands to our New 

 England distilleries the juice of the cane to feed "the worm 

 that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched," may have 

 resided in this part of Beverly. For it may well have 



