from her barbed
arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we may as
well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has grass enough
growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn
by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year,
however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with
a livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of
that period before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by
itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and
ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin, while their
ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood
of commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or
four vessels happen to have arrived at once,--usually from Africa or
South America,--or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward,
there is a sound of frequent feet, passing briskly up and down the
granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may
greet the sea-flushed shipmaster, just in port, with his vessel's
papers under his arm, in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his
owner, cheerful or sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as
his scheme of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in
merchandise that will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him
under a bulk of incommodities, such as nobody will care to rid him of.
Here, likewise,--the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded,
care-worn merchant,--we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste
of traffic as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures
in his master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic-boats upon
a mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor
in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and
feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the
captains of the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the
British provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the
alertness of the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight
importance to our decaying trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with
other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time
being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently,
however, on ascending the steps, you would discern--in the entry, if
it were summer ti