Scribner's Magazine
THE NORTH SHORE OF MASSACHUSETTS
By Robert Grant
Illustrations by W. T. Smedley
TO those who live in Boston and its vicinity the North Shore of Massachusetts, or The North Shore, as it is always called, has come to have an identity as a summer-resort quite as distinct as that of Bar Harbor, Newport, or Lenox. Even New Yorkers, enlightened as to its advantages by those who go down to the sea in yachts, have learned to think of it respectfully as a very pretty place to which Bostonians who wish to keep cool, and yet be able to see the gilded dome of the State-house through a telescope, hie themselves from June to October, One would suppose that its accessibility, its coolness, its freedom from either democratic or plutocratic crowds, and the unique combination of the seaside and the country which it affords would have attracted before this the people from large cities who wish to be comfortable without being devoured by mosquitoes, to be cheerful without having to be riotous, to get enough to eat without being obliged to fight for it, and to sit on their piazzas without exposure to kodaks, picnickers, or surf flirtation. And yet the comfort-seeking public still passes it by in favor of abandoned farms, sylvan camps, islands on the coast of Maine, and the various other refuges from the life of the average summer watering-place. Perhaps the reason is to be found in the argument that it is too near Boston, which is a polite way of expressing reluctance to invade the sacred precincts of the most critical society in America for fear of not pleasing. If such be the case, this attitude of caution acts as a two-edged sword, for if there is any plea to be urged against the attractiveness of the North Shore it is that the society is so exclusively Bostonese. The families from a distance are almost to be numbered on the fingers of one hand, and you meet in your walks and drives and social intercourse the self-same people with whom you have dined and slummed, or whom you have seen at the Symphony Concerts all winter. If it is meet that man should not live alone, it is almost equally desirable that he should for a month or two in every year lose sight of all his family, except
Copyright, 1891, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.
