he river is as blue as the inside of a
harebell. The opposite shore, in the strangely shifting magic lights
of sky and water, stretches along like the silvery coast of fairyland.
Directly opposite you is the navy yard, and its neat officers' quarters
and workshops and arsenals, and its vast shiphouses, in which the keel
of many a famous frigate has been laid. Those monster buildings on the
water's edge, with their roofs pierced with innumerable little windows,
which blink like eyes in the sunlight, and the shiphouses. On your
right lies a cluster of small islands,--there are a dozen or more in the
harbor--on the most extensive of which you see the fading-away remains
of some earthworks thrown up in 1812. Between this--Trefethren's
Island--and Peirce's Island lie the Narrows. Perhaps a bark or a
sloop-of-war is making up to town; the hulk is hidden amoung the
islands, and the topmasts have the effect of sweeping across the dry
land. On your left is a long bridge, more than a quarter of a mile in
length, set upon piles where the water is twenty or thirty feet deep,
leading to the navy yard and Kittery--the Kittery so often the theme of
Whittier's verse.

This is a mere outline of the landscape that spreads before you. Its
changeful beauty of form and color, with the summer clouds floating
over it, is not to be painted in words. I know of many a place where the
scenery is more varied and striking; but there is a mandragora quality
in the atmosphere here that holds you to the spot, and makes the
half-hours seem like minutes. I could fancy a man sitting on the end
of that old wharf very contentedly for two or three years, provided it
could be always in June.

Perhaps, too, one would desire it to be always high water. The tide
falls from eight to twelve feet, and when the water makes out between
the wharves some of the picturesqueness makes out also. A corroded
section of stovepipe mailed in barnacles, or the skeleton of a hoopskirt
protruding from the tide mud like the remains of some old-time wreck, is
apt to break the enchantment.

I fear I have given the reader an exaggerated idea of the solitude
that reigns along the river-side. Sometimes there is society here of
an unconventional kind, if you care to seek it. Aside from the foreign
gentleman before mentioned, you are likely to encounter, farther down
the shore toward the Point of Graves (a burial-place of the colonial
period), a battered and aged native fisherman boi