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Vol. XV 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
AND REMINDER 
Manchester, Mass., Friday, June 25, 1917 
No. 25 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 
Letters Told of North Shore 
Life in Summer Years Ago 
By LILLIAN McCANN 
Though our own heads may whiten, he makes us feel young 
With his songs, through all seasons so cheerily sung. 
6OYJHERE this will find you, in a geographical point of 
view, I do not know; but I know your heart will 
be in its right place, and accept kindly the few barren 
words this sheet holds for you. Yes; barren of incident, 
of news of all sorts, but yet having a certain flavor of 
Boston, of Cape Ann, and, above all, of dear old remem- 
brances, the suggestion of any one of which is as good as 
a page of any common letter. So, whatever I write will 
carry the fragrance of home with it, and pay ‘you for the 
three minutes it costs you to read it.” So wrote Oliver 
Wendell Holmes from Beverly Farms, when he was 
eighty-three years old, to his life-long friend Mrs. James 
T. Fields. 
To wander again through his lyrics, his letters, and 
the pages and volumes written about him, with the simple 
quest of what he has said of his North Shore home in 
mind, has, indeed, been a pleasant task. 
Previous to his North Shore residence he had passed 
seven summers in Pittsfield, and after giving up this coun- 
try home, he had been in various places until he finally 
selected a little cottage in Beverly Farms, close to the rail- 
way station. A glimpse of his homelife is so charmingly 
given by John T. Morse, Jr., also of Beverly Farms, that 
we quote it extensively from his “Life and Letters of 
Oliver Wendell Holmes.” 
“When the occupants of the neighboring town of 
Manchester saw fit to christen that place ‘Manchester-by- 
the-Sea.’ he used to date his letters ‘Beverly Farms-by-the- 
Dépot ;’ but later he had to abandon this little sarcasm, 
for he moved into another house more agreeably situated. 
This seaside region is a gay one during the summer 
months; the shore is very beautiful, and for several miles 
on each side of the Doctor’s residence the summer houses 
of city people crowd each other almost too closely, and 
the ceaseless stream of their gay equipages makes the 
road lively. The Doctor found much entertainment in the 
life and bustle of the place, which moreover held many 
of his and his wife’s relatives and friends. He never 
acquired for it such an affection as he had felt for Pitts- 
field, yet in the public mind he became closely associated 
with it, because during the later years of his life his 
birthday, falling in the midsummer, came to be celebrated 
as an anniversary upon which friends sought to demon- 
strate affection and esteem. The school-children at Bev- 
erly Farms came in their holiday clothes to present their 
greetings, and to take away, each of them, some trifling 
souvenir. All the neighbors, also the festal host of the 
‘cummer residents’ came; flowers and fruit filled the 
house, often sent from long distances ; letters and _ tele- 
grams descended like a summer shower; sometime there 
were very handsome presents : there was, for instance, an 
elaborate silver cup, inscribed as given by some ladies 
from whom any token of liking would have had value; 
poems were addressed to him; and let not the dread re- 
porter be forgotten! for he invariably lent the sanction of 
his benign presence to the occasion, so that the cup of 
glory was filled quite to overflowing! The celebration be- 
came rather exhausting for the Doctor during the last 
few years, but his courteous soul would not permit him 
to say ‘not at home’ to any one who showed him the kind- 
ness of calling. Then, for days afterwards} he struggled 
to make due acknowledgment for all the tokens sent to 
him, sometimes trying to write briefly, and always insist- 
ing upon at least signing whatever had been written by 
his secretary after his own tired eyes had given out.” 
His kindness to reporters is delightfully suggested in 
one of these birthday notes to friends when he says: 
“The interviewers pressed me hard, as you may have 
learned if you happened to see Monday’s Advertiser. | 
surrendered at discretion, and answered all their questions. 
It looks a little foolish, perhaps, to be paraded as I have 
been in the Advertiser and the Globe (which reproduced 
a felonious old wood-cut of my countenance), but I could 
not avoid it without something like brutality after all the 
pains the interviewers had taken to get at me.” 
A characteristic sentence is found in a letter to Whit- 
tier. “I have passed a very pleasant summer at Beverly 
Farms, having nothing to complain of except rather more 
work of one kind and another than I wanted, I wish I 
could be utterly idle for-a while, but I do not think I 
could be except on board ship.” 
To James Russell Lowell he wrote: “Next Monday 
—the 30th, that is—we expect to return to Boston, having 
passed a delightful but exceedingly quiet summer here at 
Beverly Farms. * * * We are at a small wayside house, 
where we make ourselves comfortable, my wife, my daugh- 
ter, and myself, with books, walks, drives, and as much 
laziness as we can bring ourselves to, which is quite too 
little for none of us has a real genius for the far niente. 
All around us are the most beautiful and expensive resi- 
dences, some close to the sea beaches, some on heights 
farther back in the midst of the woods, some perched on 
the edge of precipices; one has a net spread out which she 
calls a baby-catcher, over the abyss, on the verge of which 
her piazza hangs shuddering. We go to most of these 
fine places once during the season. We see the fine equip- 
ages roll by (the constable does not take off his hat), anc 
we carry as contented faces as most of them do.” 
In another letter to Lowell, who was abroad, he 
says: “But when I sit down and think of myself looking 
over at my old neighbor digging his potatoes, taking my 
daily walks (with my wife) to the beach, to the woods, 
or to the garden (Mr. F. Haven’s), driving to Smith’s 
Point, Essex Woods, Chebacco Pond, seeing no company 
except now and then a distinguished visitor,—Mr. Evarts, 
Mr. Bayard, or estrays from Washington,—when, I say, 
I think of myself slowly oxydating in my .quiet village 
