extinct.
The splendid mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, and
the fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built herself after his death
belongs to the remotest of kinsmen. A group of these, the descendants of
a prolific sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point as
the Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard by the little grove of
drooping spruces which shade the admirable renaissance cenotaph of Sir
William's father, cherishes the family memories with due American
"proceedings."

IV.

The meeting of the Pepperrell Association was by no means the chief
excitement of our summer. In fact, I do not know that it was an
excitement at all; and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence of
our naval squadron, when for four days the mighty dragon and kraken
shapes of steel, which had crumbled the decrepit pride of Spain in the
fight at Santiago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under my
window.

I try now to dignify them with handsome epithets; but while they were
here I had moments of thinking they looked like a lot of whited
locomotives, which had broken through from some trestle, in a recent
accident, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train. The poetry
of the man-of-war still clings to the "three-decker out of the foam" of
the past; it is too soon yet for it to have cast a mischievous halo about
the modern battle-ship; and I looked at the New York and the Texas and
the Brooklyn and the rest, and thought, "Ah, but for you, and our need of
proving your dire efficiency, perhaps we could have got on with the
wickedness of Spanish rule in Cuba, and there had been no war!" Under my
reluctant eyes the great, dreadful spectacle of the Santiago fight
displayed itself in peaceful Kittery Harbor. I saw the Spanish ships
drive upon the reef where a man from Dover, New Hampshire, was camping in
a little wooden shanty unconscious; and I heard the dying screams of the
Spanish sailors, seethed and scalded within the steel walls of their own
wicked war-kettles.

As for the guns, battle or no battle, our ships, like "kind Lieutenant
Belay of the 'Hot Cross-Bun'," seemed to be "banging away the whole day
long." They set a bad example to the dreamy old fort on the Newcastle
shore, which, till they came, only recollected itself to salute the
sunrise and sunset with a single gun; but which, under provocation of the
squadron, formed a habit of firing twenty or thirty times at noon.