Ebook Pleasant Places in Rhode Island, and How to Reach Them

In Preparing this little book for a summer public in quest of pleasant places to be found within our boundary lines, the writer is only too conscious how insufficient it is as a representative of even our own small State. It would be hard to find elsewhere on our coast an equally limited amount of territory in which are found so many phases of life, so great variety of scenery and so large a fund of legend and history as lie latent or discovered within our own borders. Aristocratic South County, with its wealth of legendary lore, traditions of slave days and Indian occapancy, the bleak hills and shores of Charlestown where the last of the Narragansetts still abide; the craggy hills of Cumberland, breeze-swept and bracing of air as true mountain regions; the limestone crags and kilns of Lime Rock, sitting remotely on the Lincoln hills; the dreamy old town of Bristol, its quaint architecture and sleepy, green-arched streets like a bit out of a past century, and the teeming foreign factory villages of the Pawtuxet and Blackstone valleys; all these have their own peculiar life and atmosphere; and on the remote and desolate shores of Quonocontaug or the rocky point of sea-beaten Sakonnet are counterparts of the bleak Maine coast that dawn like a revelation on Rhode Islanders who know only the familiar shores of our fair bay.

By no means a complete or even comprehensive guide-book of the State is this volume of sketches to be considered, but merely as its name indicates, an index to a few of the pleasant places to which accident or design has led. No doubt many readers will aver, and justly, that they know within their own precincts, many spots fairer and more interesting than those pictured in these pages; but if one will but trouble himself to glance at the list of abiding places, small and great, in fair Rhode Island, he will realize that long years would be required, in visiting and familiarizing ones self with all. Only those most typical and most picturesque which have come under the writers notice have been selected, while the field of exploration is practically limitless.