not always amiable,
and no wonder, for even doves may have their rheumatism; but such as
they were, they were cherished in young hearts, and are, I take it,
impossible to-day.

When I look back to Portsmouth as I knew it, it occurs to me that it
must have been in some respects unique among New England towns. There
were, for instance, no really poor persons in the place; every one had
some sufficient calling or an income to render it unnecessary; vagrants
and paupers were instantly snapped up and provided for at "the Farm."
There was, however, in a gambrel-roofed house here and there, a
decayed old gentlewoman, occupying a scrupulously neat room with just a
suspicion of maccaboy snuff in the air, who had her meals sent in to her
by the neighborhood--as a matter of course, and involving no sense of
dependency on her side. It is wonderful what an extension of vitality is
given to an old gentlewoman in this condition!

I would like to write about several of those ancient Dames, as they were
affectionately called, and to materialize others of the shadows that
stir in my recollection; but this would be to go outside the lines of my
purpose, which is simply to indicate one of the various sorts of changes
that have come over the vie intime of formerly secluded places like
Portsmouth--the obliteration of odd personalities, or, if not the
obliteration, the general disregard of them. Everywhere in New England
the impress of the past is fading out. The few old-fashioned men and
women--quaint, shrewd, and racy of the soil--who linger in little,
silvery-gray old homesteads strung along the New England roads and
by-ways will shortly cease to exist as a class, save in the record of
some such charming chronicler as Sarah Jewett, or Mary Wilkins, on whose
sympathetic page they have already taken to themselves a remote air, an
atmosphere of long-kept lavender and pennyroyal.

Peculiarity in any kind requires encouragement in order to reach flower.
The increased facilities of communication between points once isolated,
the interchange of customs and modes of thought, make this encouragement
more and more difficult each decade. The naturally inclined eccentric
finds his sharp outlines rubbed off by unavoidable attrition with a
larger world than owns him. Insensibly he lends himself to the shaping
hand of new ideas. He gets his reversible cuffs and paper collars from
Cambridge, Massachusetts, the scarabaeus in his scarf-pin from Mexico,
a