200 With Rod and Gun in New England 



published a history of his missionary work, prepared by my late uncle, 

 Rev. William A. Hallock, D. D., who was for fifty years its secretary. 



In July, 1641, the Rev. Mayhew organized an Indian church, the care 

 of which was transmitted from father to son until 1092, when the island 

 was annexed to Massachusetts. Martha has always been much more pious 

 than her godless sister of Nantucket, where, up to 1781, from 1041, a 

 period of 140 years, there had been but one settled clergyman, and out of 

 a population of 3,220 whites, in 1765, only forty-seven held pews in church. 

 But Nantucket, if not pious, was patriotic, for, from 1775 to 1781, as the 

 record shows, the Revolutionary war cost her 1,620 lives. These belonged 

 to the church militant. For one hundred years, up to 1880, the twin sisters 

 pursued the even tenor of their destiny, bathed by the churning surf and 

 fanned by the ocean breeze, blooming and blushing quite unseen in their 

 mid-ocean isolation, until the Cliff House was opened at Nantucket, the 

 railroad built, gas and water introduced, and she, like Edgartown, emerged 

 into her present butterfly life. At the same time, old traditions and 

 ancient landmarks are jealously preserved, and the child of to-day can 

 tread the walks of his ancestors and enjoy the same environment as they 

 did. He will miss only their living presence. The site of the first house 

 in Edgartown, which was built in 1630, is easily located, and in the old 

 burying ground on Tower Hill are gravestones, with legible inscriptions, 

 255 years old. The old Mayhew two-story manor-house, with its thirteen 

 rooms, spacious halls, and numerous cupboards and clothes presses, still 

 stands tenable on the east water front, built two centuries and a half 

 ago ; and away back in the fog and spoon-drift of the misty past there 

 are traditions of early voyagers who navigated, without disaster, the 

 intricate, and unbuoyed channels, sounds, and " holes " which thread and 

 divide the many islands, reefs, banks, shoals and rips which beset the 

 Vineyard, where in more recent years far stauncher vessels have gone to 

 pieces. 



By all accounts, the beaches, fresh-water ponds and estuaries are the 

 resorts of numerous shore birds and sea-fowl which congregate there in 

 their respective seasons, such as black ducks, teal, dough-birds, plover, 

 curlew, snipe, wild geese', and brant. 



August is a crack month for shore birds, and once, the day after an 

 easterly storm, I strolled down to the South beach to look at the surf, and 

 watch for movements, as there was reason to expect something of a flight. 

 It was a calm, gray day, with intervals of sunshine and occasional whiffs of 

 wind from the west. The surf was not running as was expected, and so I 

 worked my way back from the beach to the hotel at Katama, which is 

 scarcely a mile distant, scrutinizing the bits of marsh and margins of the 

 fresh-water ponds which lie just inside of the cordon of sand dunes by the 

 seaside, though with hardly satisfactory results. On one mud fiat which 



