he
brought out hers that was over fifty years old, and all the colors were
fading.

"I wonder if I shall live fifty years," she mused.

Driving about was her great entertainment. You could go to Marblehead,
which was a peninsula. There were the fishery huts and the men curing
and drying fish. Sometimes they took passage in one of the numerous
sailing vessels and went in and out the irregular shore, and saw Boston
from the bay. It seemed in those times as if it might get drowned out,
there was so much water around it.

"And if it should float off out to sea, some day," she half inquired,
laughingly.

He was glad to hear her soft, sweet laugh again.

She thought she liked Salem best, and even now people began to talk of
old Salem, there had been so many improvements since the time Governor
Bradford had written:

"Almost ten years we lived here alone,--
In other places there were few or none;
For Salem was the next of any fame
That began to augment New England's name."

And then it went by the old Indian name and was called Naumkeag. And she
found that it was older than Boston, and had been the seat of government
twice, and that Governor Burnett, finding Boston unmanageable, had
convened the General Court here for two years. That was in 1728, and now
it was 1800.

"But no one lives a hundred years," she said.

"Oh, yes; there are a number of persons who have lived that long. Now
and then a person lives in three centuries, is born the last year of
one, goes through a whole century, and dies in the next one."

"What a long, long while!" she sighed.

And there was the old Court House where the Stamp Act was denounced. She
wanted to know all about that, and he was fond of explaining things,
the sort of teacher habit, but there was nothing dogmatic about it. Here
were houses where the Leveretts had lived, third or fourth cousins who
had married with the Graingers, and the Lyndes, and the Saltonstalls,
and the Hales. It is so in the course of a hundred or two years, when
emigration does not come in to disturb the purity of the blood.

The little girl really began to improve. Her hair was taking on a
brighter tint and in the warm weather the uneven ends curled about her
forehead in dainty rings, her complexion was many shades fairer, her
cheeks rounded out, and her chin began to show the cleft in it. She was
more like her olden self, quite merry at times.

The summer went