In those days, in order to reach Boston you were obliged
to take a great yellow, clumsy stage-coach, resembling a three-story
mud-turtle--if zoologist will, for the sake of the simile, tolerate
so daring an invention; you were obliged to take it very early in the
morning, you dined at noon at Ipswich, and clattered into the great city
with the golden dome just as the twilight was falling, provided always
the coach had not shed a wheel by the roadside or one of the leaders had
not gone lame. To many worthy and well-to-do persons in Portsmouth, this
journey was an event which occurred only twice or thrice during life. To
the typical individual with whom I am for the moment dealing, it never
occurred at all. The town was his entire world; he was a parochial as
a Parisian; Market Street was his Boulevard des Italiens, and the North
End his Bois de Boulogne.

Of course there were varieties of local characters without his
limitations; venerable merchants retired from the East India trade;
elderly gentlewomen, with family jewels and personal peculiarities; one
or two scholarly recluses in by-gone cut of coat, haunting the Athenaeum
reading-room; ex-sea captains, with rings on their fingers, like Simon
Danz's visitors in Longfellow's poem--men who had played busy parts in
the bustling world, and had drifted back to Old Strawberry Bank in the
tranquil sunset of their careers. I may say, in passing, that these
ancient mariners, after battling with terrific hurricanes and typhoons
on every known sea, not infrequently drowned themselves in pleasant
weather in small sail-boats on the Piscataqua River. Old sea-dogs who
had commanded ships of four or five hundred tons had naturally slight
respect for the potentialities of sail-boats twelve feet long. But there
was to be no further increase of these odd sticks--if I may call them
so, in no irreverent mood--after those innocent-looking parallel bars
indissolubly linked Portsmouth with the capital of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. All the conditions were to be changed, the old angles
to be pared off, new horizons to be regarded. The individual, as an
eccentric individual, was to undergo great modifications. If he were not
to become extinct--a thing little likely--he was at least to lose his
prominence.

However, as I said, local character, in the sense in which the term
is here used, was not instantly killed; it died a lingering death, and
passed away so peacefully and silently as n