FEW of the "carriage ladies and gentlemen" who disport themselves in Newport during the summer months, yachting and dancing through the short season, then flitting away to fresh fields and pastures new, realize that their daintily shod feet have been treading historic ground, or care to cast a thought back to the past.Oddly enough, to the majority of people the past is a volume rarely opened.Not that it bores them to read it, but because they, like children, want some one to turn over its yellow leaves and point out the pictures to them.Few of the human motes that dance in the rays of the afternoon sun as they slant across the little Park, think of the fable which asserts that a sea-worn band of adventurous men, centuries before the Cabots or the Genoese discoverer thought of crossing the Atlantic, had pushed bravely out over untried seas and landed on this rocky coast.Yet one apparent evidence of their stay tempts our thoughts back to the times when it is said to have been built as a bower for a king's daughter.
Longfellow, in the swinging verse of his "Skeleton in Armor,"breathing of the sea and the Norseman's fatal love, has thrown such a glamour of poetry around the tower, that one would fain believe all he relates.The hardy Norsemen, if they ever came here, succumbed in their struggle with the native tribes, or, discouraged by death and hardships, sailed away, leaving the clouds of oblivion to close again darkly around this continent, and the fog of discussion to circle around the "Old Mill."The little settlement of another race, speaking another tongue, that centuries later sprang up in the shadow of the tower, quickly grew into a busy and prosperous city, which, like New York, its rival, was captured and held by the English.To walk now through some of its quaint, narrow streets is to step back into Revolutionary days.Hardly a house has changed since the time when the red coats of the British officers brightened the prim perspectives, and turned loyal young heads as they passed.