I had a nice two days at Nantucket, which is a mere scion of
Cape Cod and sister of Plum Island; sandhills and marshes and sea; but I
enjoyed it. The people are all cousins. A few years ago the Coffin School went
into operation and they looked round for the “Coffin family” to whom it was
limited, and found them to include the whole island, so they made no distinction
but of age. They are hospitable and sociable, as such isolated people always
are; talk of “the main land” and "the continent” and “foreigners.” I
stayed at the hotel, but had plenty of hospitality, and a drive with two horses
seven miles out to Siasconset, their watering place, a shower of little
cottages, covered with honeysuckle, on a high bluff. At Siasconset they have
fish-carts made like wheelbarrows, only with a whole cask for a wheel;
and in Nantucket you see ladies riding in two-wheeled carts, standing up,
holding by a rope to steady themselves. My lectures were very well received,
only the people who had been to the Azores were astonished that I could make so
much out of them!
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 92-3
