NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
AND REMINDER 
Vol. XI 
Manchester, Mass., Friday, June 20, 1913 
No. 5 
Behind Quaint Doorways 
By MARY EMERY SMITH 
Ho you a streak of hopelessly plebeian curiosity 
about other people’s affairs? 
I have. 
Do you just love to peer into other people’s back 
kitchens as the elevated train carries you whizzing by? 
I do. 
If you are one of these pleasantly vulgar creatures 
and ever visit old Portsmouth, you would, I am sure, 
be as curious as I was to know what, in the past, had been 
lived behind some of the prim doorways of this old New 
Hampshire town. For something must have been lived be- 
hind them. No other houses in Christendom could have a 
past quite as sanctimonious as those angelically respectable 
doorways bespeak—-not even in beautiful Portsmouth, 
whose “gigantic elms,” as Thomas Bailey Aldrich says, 
“span the avenues with arches graceful enough to be the 
handiwork of fairies.” And so I began rummaging. 
There was Benning Wentworth, Governor of New 
Hampshire in 1741. He was 
a rare old character. When 
left a widower he began look- © 
ing about for a substitute for 
his lost helpmate. It seems to 
have been seldom the practice 
to remain inconsolable in 
those days, and sometimes the 
number of matrimonial ven- 
tures in one lifetime was quite 
appalling. 
Well, his eye fell on one 
Molly Pitman, a pretty buxom 
girl, to judge from his ordin- 
ary taste, and he proposed » | 
marriage.’ But'she—the inde- | |, 
pendent little minx—had the _ 
audacity to refuse him, say- 
ing that she loved a poor me- 
chanic, one Shortridge, and 
him she intended to marry. 
Marry him she did too—— 
but while her wedding joy 
was still very new, the stra- 
mary old governor took mat-~ 
ters into his own hands. He 
got together a press gang 
which waylaid poor Short- 
ridge, and put him aboard a 
British frigate in the harbor 
which sailed with the tide in 
the morning. The young hus- 
band was carried to sea, away 
from his winsome bride, and 
for seven long years, like the 
man without a country, the 
poor fellow never saw land. 
DOORWAY OF THE WARNER HOUSE WHERE FRANKLIN 
SET UP THE LIGHTNING ROD 
He was changed from one ship to another on the high 
seas—and never a word of love, never an assurance of 
faithfulness, could reach him from home. 
Governor Wentworth had ordered him to be thus carried 
about to the end of his life, but one old captain, learning 
the story, was moved by its cruelty, and took him to port. 
Shortridge was told that if he chose to run away, none 
would be the wiser for it. And so in time for his eighth 
anniversary, though he and his wife had never had their 
first together, came Richard Shortridge home. 
But this version of Enoch Arden had another ending. 
The impressed sailor found his wife as he had left her, 
scornful of the Governor’s attention and with her faith- 
fulness unchanged by the long years. 
But you have not seen the summer home of Governor 
Wentworth, and once you see its charming location you 
will regard the owner as something better than the villain 
of this story. Leaving town behind you, through twink- 
ling birch copses, through 
sweet straight pine groves, you 
come suddenly upon the smell! 
of old ocean and the glint of 
the sea where “Little Harbor” 
stretches out to the southward. 
See this large nondescript 
edifice, a funny rambling mass 
of lean-tos but so capacious, 
so weatherbeaten and dignified 
withal. Fifty rooms it once 
boasted but the changes of 
time have left only forty-five. 
In the cellar were kept the 
horses in times when barns 
were unsafe from raids and 
depredation. And here resi- 
ded in summer the crochety 
old widower who had treated 
Richard Shortridge so high 
handedly years ago. 
By his sixtieth birthday he 
had decided not to let the 
sun sink on single blessedness 
another time. So he arranged 
a great stag dinner—his six- 
tieth birthday party. That does 
not sound very promising, but 
you could have trusted the old 
Governor to accomplish what 
he desired—even if it were 
the evolving of a wedding 
ceremony from a stag dinner. 
Notice that he had a minis- 
ter, Rev. Arthur Brown, tuck- 
ed thriftly among his guests. 
“Now, my dear Sir,”. said 
aa 
