HISTORY OF COHASSET. 



CHAPTER I. 



WHAT AND WHERE. 



TT would be a species of impertinence to the majority of 

 the readers of this narrative if one should tell where 

 Cohasset is by the number of miles from some other 

 place. Here is their home ; and a long row of ancestors, 

 born and buried here for two hundred years, establishes 

 this as the starting point from which they locate all other 

 places, but which itself needs no locating. 



But there are other homes besides this ; so for the sake 

 of them and of the much-traveled cosmopolitan, Cohasset 

 may be admitted to be distant from Boston fifteen miles 

 southeastward as the coot flies, but as the New York, 

 New Haven and Hartford Railway meanders along the coast 

 twenty-two miles. 



The blue waters of Massachusetts Bay cast their white 

 spray upon its rocky shore. If the long peninsula of 

 Cape Cod be legitimately pictured as a bended arm of 

 defense against the fierce Atlantic, then Cohasset is 

 the shoulder receiving the merciless waves that roll in 

 above the reach of that arm. 



To the mariner of the world-swathing sea, we are 

 naught but a sign of danger and of death ; for the gleam 

 of Minot's Lighthouse, rising out of the dark sea, is a 

 warning most solemn of the treacherous ledges that fringe 

 our shore. 



These rocks spread like a network to catch the unwary. 

 Nearly every ledge has crushed with its jagged teeth the 

 ribs of some luckless craft. The splinters and remnants 



