lation, as frequently happens, during the busier months
of the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both
have grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
hats, who built their decaying wharves and sent out their ships all over
the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre or
the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like Lord Timothy
Dexter's, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of the fortunes amassed
in these places of old. Other mansions--like the Rockingham House in
Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you mount the broad
staircase) show that there was not only wealth, but style and state,
in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is not with any
thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in a certain
sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of
expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of
their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They
have even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and
offer the most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they
had been English, would have lived in a _palazzo_ at Genoa or Pisa, or
some other Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant
for a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls
of ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable
mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar
material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old
charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio
only when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built
and organized in the present century.

----It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be
an only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his
meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel
in an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea
Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon, and
others, equally well named,--a string of them, looking, when they stood
in a row in pra