It is many and many a long year now since Gerald and Clotilde walked together down the high-hedged paths, but Master Simon’s garden still blooms green and fair upon the hillside. Ships coming past the rocky headlands of the harbour steer, by night, for the light streaming from that little round window of the great brick mansion, for that is an older landmark than the tall white lighthouse near the entrance of the bay. They are not now the mighty East India merchantmen that luff and tack in the narrow channel, for they, with their tall masts and towering white sails have vanished from the seas forever. Along the shore, nevertheless, you can still see the endless wharves and great, empty warehouses clinging to their rotting piles and almost slipping into the lazy, lapping tide. They manage, somehow, still to stand and tell all people who go by how great was once the trade that brought prosperity back to Hopewell. If you peep within you will see only bare, vacant floors and a long dusty sunbeam or two, dropping from rifts in the sagging roof, but you will sniff a vague scent of fruit and spices as a reminder of the days of the clipper ships of Hopewell, laden with the world’s goods and following Gerald Radpath’s long sea-road to China.

Although those wharves are idle and the warehouses empty, you need not think, however, that the products of America stop at home. No, they are carried by different ships, swift steel vessels that drop long trails of smoke behind them as they speed upon their way, they go out through different harbours, but, just the same, New England goods and New England men find their way to the very ends of the world.

The hum of the spinning-wheel and the creak of the loom that once you could hear in the warm noontide, through the open cottage doors, has increased now a thousand-fold, for rows of great brick factories crown the hill and, far out to sea, the fishermen can see, hanging over Hopewell, the cloud of smoke from hundreds of spouting chimneys. The tiny log but where Goody Parsons planted her rose, the cottage where Samuel Skerry plied his trade, even the house with its white-painted doorway where Miles Atherton used to live, have all vanished to make room for newer, greater buildings. The little meeting house still stands, but is overshadowed by a great stone church, where a huge organ ha............