was characteristic
of Portsmouth. The town did a profitable business in the war of 1812,
sending out a large fleet of the sauciest small craft on record. A
pleasant story is told of one of these little privateers--the Harlequin,
owned and commanded by Captain Elihu Brown. The Harlequin one day gave
chase to a large ship, which did not seem to have much fight aboard,
and had got it into close quarters, when suddenly the shy stranger threw
open her ports, and proved to be His Majesty's Ship-of-War Bulwark,
seventy-four guns. Poor Captain Brown!

Portsmouth has several large cotton factories and one or two corpulent
breweries; it is a wealthy old town, with a liking for first mortgage
bonds; but its warmest lover will not claim for it the distinction
of being a great mercantile centre. The majority of her young men are
forced to seek other fields to reap, and almost every city in the Union,
and many a city across the sea, can point to some eminent merchant,
lawyer, or what not, as "a Portsmouth boy." Portsmouth even furnished
the late king of the Sandwich Islands, Kekuanaoa, with a prime minister,
and his nankeen Majesty never had a better. The affection which all
these exiles cherish for their birthplace is worthy of remark. On two
occasions--in 1852 and 1873, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of
the settlement of Strawberry Bank--the transplanted sons of Portsmouth
were seized with an impulse to return home. Simultaneously and almost
without concerted action, the lines of pilgrims took up their march from
every quarter of the globe, and swept down with music and banners on the
motherly old town.

To come back to the wharves. I do not know of any spot with such a
fascinating air of dreams and idleness about it as the old wharf at the
end of Court Street. The very fact that it was once a noisy, busy place,
crowded with sailors and soldiers--in the war of 1812--gives an emphasis
to the quiet that broods over it to-day. The lounger who sits of a
summer afternoon on a rusty anchor fluke in the shadow of one of the
silent warehouses, and look on the lonely river as it goes murmuring
past the town, cannot be too grateful to the India trade for having
taken itself off elsewhere.

What a slumberous, delightful, lazy place it is! The sunshine seems to
lie a foot deep on the planks of the dusty wharf, which yields up to the
warmth a vague perfume of the cargoes of rum, molasses, and spice
that used to be piled upon it. T