Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire
in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform has swept him
out of office; and a worthier successor wears his dignity, and pockets
his emoluments.

This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it, both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did possess,
a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized
during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as its
physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered
chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to
architectural beauty,--its irregularity, which is neither picturesque
nor quaint, but only tame,--its long and lazy street, lounging
wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows
Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the
other,--such being the features of my native town, it would be quite
as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is
within me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase,
I must be content to call affection. The sentiment is probably
assignable to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into
the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and a quarter since the
original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance
in the wild and forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a
city. And here his descendants have been born and died, and have
mingled their earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion
of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a
little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment
which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few
of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation
is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to
know.

But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with
the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of
the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on
account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steep