d slats
in its back. Almost anything which Joel Macomber owned needed something
and his wife and family needed most of all.

An ancient cherry tree, its foliage now thickly spotted with green fruit,
for the month was June, cast a shadow upon the occupant of the bench. At
his feet grew a bed of daffodils and jonquils which Sarah Macomber had
planted when she came, a hopeful bride, to that house. Each year they
sprouted and bloomed and now, long after Sarah's hopes had ceased to
sprout, they continued to flourish. Beside the cherry tree grew a lilac
bush. Beyond the picket fence was the dusty sidewalk and beyond that the
dustier, rutted road. And beyond the road and along it upon both sides
were the houses and barns and the few shops of Bayport village, Bayport
as it was, and as some of us remember it, in the early '70's.

In some respects it was much like the Bayport of to-day. The houses
themselves have changed but little. Then, as now, they were trim and
white and green-shuttered. Then, as now, the roses climbed upon their
lattices and the silver-leaf poplars and elms and mulberry trees waved
above them. But the fences which enclosed their trim lawns and yards
have disappeared, and the hitching posts and carriage blocks by their
front gates have gone also. Gone, too, are the horses and buggies and
carryalls which used to stand by these gates or within those barns. They
are gone, just as the ruts and dust of the roads have vanished. When
Mrs. Captain Hammond, of the lower road, used to call upon Mrs. Ryder at
West Bayport, she was wont to be driven to her destination in the
intensely respectable Hammond buggy drawn by the equally respectable
Hammond horse and piloted by the even more respectable--not to say
venerable--Hammond coachman, who was also gardener and "hired man." And
they made the little journey in the very respectable time of thirty-five
minutes. Now when Mrs. Captain Hammond's granddaughter, who winters in
Boston but summers at the old home, wishes to go to West Bayport she
skims over the hard, oiled macadam in her five thousand dollar runabout
and she finishes the skimming in eight minutes or less.

And although the dwellings along the Bayport roads are much as they
were that morning when Captain Sears Kendrick sat upon the bench in the
Macomber yard and gazed gloomily at the section of road which lay
between the Macomber gate and the curve beyond the Orthodox
meeting-house--although the houses were much