You
hear the noise of them by night in the village like the sound of the
sea, and this fine water power so near the coast, beside a great
salmon fishery famous among the Indians, brought the first English
settlers to the town in 1627. I know some families who still live upon
the lands which their ancestors bought from the Indians, and their
single deed bears the queer barbaric signatures.
There are many things to remind one of these early settlers beside the
old farms upon which they and their descendants have lived for six or
seven generations. One is a quaint fashion of speech which survives
among the long-established neighborhoods, in words and phrases common
in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
One curious thing is the pronunciation of the name of the town:
Berwick by the elder people has always been called _Barvik_, after the
fashion of Danes and Northmen; never _Berrik_, as the word has so long
been pronounced in modern England.
The descendants of the first comers to the town have often been
distinguished in the affairs of their time. No village of its size in
New England could boast, particularly in the early part of the present
century, of a larger number of men and women who kept themselves more
closely in touch with "the best that has been thought and said in the
world."
As I write this, I keep in mind the truth that I have no inheritance
from the ancient worth and dignity of Berwick--or what is now North
Berwick--in Maine.
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