retofore
described, together with some of the characters that move in it, among
whom the author happened to make one.

* * * * *

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago,
in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,--but which is now
burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no
symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way
down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a
Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,--at the
head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often
overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of
buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of
unthrifty grass,--here, with a view from its front windows adown this
not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbor, stands a
spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during
precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops,
in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen
stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus
indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam's
government is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico
of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a
flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the
entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with
outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect
aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each
claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and
the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the
inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of
their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows
with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are
seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of
the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the
softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great
tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,--oftener
soon than late,--is apt to fling off her nestlings, with a scratch of
her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound