etite for antiquity. These deserted piers
and these long rows of empty barracks, with their sarcastic cranes
projecting from the eaves, rather puzzle the stranger. Why this great
preparation for a commercial activity that does not exist, and evidently
had not for years existed? There are no ships lying at the pier-heads;
there are no gangs of stevedores staggering under the heavy cases of
merchandise; here and there is a barge laden down to the bulwarks with
coal, and here and there a square-rigged schooner from Maine smothered
with fragrant planks and clapboards; an imported citizen is fishing at
the end of the wharf, a ruminative freckled son of Drogheda, in perfect
sympathy with the indolent sunshine that seems to be sole proprietor
of these crumbling piles and ridiculous warehouses, from which even the
ghost of prosperity has flown.

Once upon a time, however, Portsmouth carried on an extensive trade with
the West Indies, threatening as a maritime port to eclipse both Boston
and New York. At the windows of these musty counting-rooms which
overlook the river near Spring Market used to stand portly merchants,
in knee breeches and silver shoe-buckles and plum-colored coats with
ruffles at the wrist, waiting for their ships to come up the Narrows;
the cries of stevedores and the chants of sailors at the windlass used
to echo along the shore where all is silence now. For reasons not worth
setting forth, the trade with the Indies abruptly closed, having ruined
as well as enriched many a Portsmouth adventurer. This explains
the empty warehouses and the unused wharves. Portsmouth remains the
interesting widow of a once very lively commerce. I fancy that few
fortunes are either made or lost in Portsmouth nowadays. Formerly it
turned out the best ships, as it did the ablest ship captains, in the
world. There were families in which the love for blue water was
in immemorial trait. The boys were always sailors; "a grey-headed
shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the
homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the
mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blasted against
his sire and grandsire." (1. Hawthorne in his introduction to The
Scarlet Letter.) With thousands of miles of sea-line and a score or two
of the finest harbors on the globe, we have adroitly turned over our
carrying trade to foreign nations.

In other days, as I have said, a high maritime spirit