NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
AND REMINDER 
Vol. XIV 
Manchester, Mass., Friday, May 5 
No. 18 
Lucy Larcom—“A New England Girlhood” 
By LILLIAN McCANN 
“FE I had opened my eyes upon this planet elsewhere 
than in this northeastern corner of Massachusetts, 
elsewhere than on this green, rocky strip of shore be- 
tween Beverly Ridge and the Misery Islands, it seems to 
me as if I must have been somebody else, and not myself.” 
So wrote Lucy Larcom in 1889, sixty-five years after 
her birth on March 5, 1824, in Beverly, where the Lar- 
com theatre now marks the site of her birthplace. 
In that sweet and simply told autobiography, “A 
New England Girlhood,” dedicated to her girl-friends 
in general, she has painted a picture of a girlhood of 
y° olden time on the North Shore—one that was rich in 
the healthy ideals and high aspirations of the old-time 
New Englanders. As an excuse for writing an auto- 
biography, she says: “Our life—which is the best thing 
we have—is ours only that we may share it with Our 
Father’s family, at their need. If we have anything 
within us worth giving away, to withhold it is ungener- 
ous; and we cannot look honestly into ourselves without 
acknowledging with humility our debt to the lives around 
us for whatever of power or beauty has been poured into 
ours.” 
Delightful accounts are given of her childhood, 
bringing out many of the primitive customs that were 
still lingering in the old New England towns at that 
period. 
The chapters telling of her early school days in 
Beverly, about going to “Aunt Hannah’s” school room at 
the tender age of two years, learning her letters and 
many passages from the Bible, and her love for hymns 
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which she committed, together with the descriptions of 
her childish explorations in the wood and along the sea- 
shore, form a most interesting and fascinating story. 
“We were not surfeited, in those days, with what :s 
called pleasure; but we grew up happy and _ healthy, 
learning unconsciously the useful lesson of doing without. 
The birds and blossoms hardly won a gladder or more 
wholesome life from the-air of our homely New Eng- 
land than we did.” 
Many enjoyable rambles were taken by the little 
Lucy with a brother who was somewhat older than her- 
self, and who often took her huckleberrying up the Mont- 
serrat road, through Cat Swamp, to the edge of Burnt 
Hills and Beaver Pond. Sometimes he took her on a 
tramp to the old homestead at “The Farms,” for ‘three 
or four miles was not thought too long a walk for a 
healthy child of ‘five years; and that road, in the old 
time, led through a rural Paradise, beautiful at every 
season. * * * * We stopped at the Cove Brook to hear the 
cat-birds sing, and at Mingo’s Beach to revel in the sud- 
den surprise of the open sea, and to listen to the chant cf 
the waves, always stronger and grander there than any- 
where along the shore. We passed under dark wooded 
cliffs out into sunny openings, the last of which held 
under its skirting pines the secret of the prettiest wood- 
path to us in all the world, the path to the ancestral farm- 
house.” She says she sometimes felt a little resentment 
at her fate in not having been born at the old Beverly 
Farms home-place (now the Gordon Dexter estate), as 
her father, uncles. aunts and some had 
cousins been. 
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“The Road Led Through a Rural Paradise” 
