magoria of
splendor, "the magic-lantern of Nature"! What a rich contrast of
color!--the black and the gold, the green, saffron, rose and azure, and
the whole crowned with a rainbow garland of glowing flowers. I felt
assured that no sunset of Italy or Greece could fling upon the sky more
costly pictures than these.

The delicacy and accuracy of touch exhibited in _The Scarlet Letter_
and in _Oldport Days_ can hardly be appreciated to the full by those
who are unacquainted with certain mellow and crumbling towns and
hamlets of the New England coast, especially of the warm south coast.
Soft mists rise in summer like "rich distilled perfumes" from the warm
Gulf Stream off Long Island Sound and drift landward in invisible airy
volumes. Suddenly, as at a given signal, the sky becomes troubled,
grows dun: trembling dew-specks glister upon the leaves, and in a few
moments the gray fog starts out of the air on every side and clings to
tree, crag and house like shroud to corpse. It is this warm moisture
that gives to the south-coast hamlets their mellow tint. I have
especially in mind at this moment one romantic village whose stout old
yeoman elms hold their protecting foliage-shields over many a gray
mansion as rich in tradition as the House of the Seven Gables, and only
awaiting the touch of some wizard hand to become immortalized. The
prevailing tint of these old houses, and of everything that a lichen
can take hold of, is a sage-gray. There seems to be something in the
sea-breezes unusually favorable to the growth of lichens, and they hold
high carnival everywhere, growing in riotous exuberance on every tree
and rock and fence. I saw whole board fences so thickly tufted and
bearded with a rich, particolored mosaic of lichens that from
base-board to cope-board there was scarcely a square foot of the
original wood to be seen. On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you
look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms
and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere
of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not
ghostly as that is. It is a strange _je ne sais quoi_ that eludes
description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of
visible heat.

Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one
has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or
squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions
o