g came forth sweetness." The Beatitudes are the
natural flowering-forth of the Ten Commandments. And the happiness of
our lives was rooted in the stern, vigorous virtues of the people we
lived among, drawing thence its bloom and song, and fragrance. There
was granite in their character and beliefs, but it was granite that
could smile in the sunshine and clothe itself with flowers. We little
ones felt the firm rock beneath us, and were lifted up on it, to
emulate their goodness, and to share their aspirations.

V.

OLD NEW ENGLAND.

WHEN I first opened my eyes upon my native town, it was already nearly
two hundred years old, counting from the time when it was part of the
original Salem settlement,--old enough to have gained a character and
an individuality of its own, as it certainly had. We children felt at
once that we belonged to the town, as we did to our father or our
mother.

The sea was its nearest neighbor, and penetrated to every fireside,
claiming close intimacy with every home and heart. The farmers up and
down the shore were as much fishermen as farmers; they were as familiar
with the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as they were with their own
potato-fields. Every third man you met in the street, you might safely
hail as "Shipmate," or "Skipper," or "Captain." My father's early
seafaring experience gave him the latter title to the end of his life.

It was hard to keep the boys from going off to sea before they were
grown. No inland occupation attracted them. "Land-lubber" was one of
the most contemptuous epithets heard from boyish lips. The spirit of
adventure developed in them a rough, breezy type of manliness, now
almost extinct.

Men talked about a voyage to Calcutta, or Hong-Kong, or "up the
Straits,"--meaning Gibraltar and the Mediterranean,--as if it were not
much more than going to the next village. It seemed as if our nearest
neighbors lived over there across the water; we breathed the air of
foreign countries, curiously interblended with our own.

The women of well-to-do families had Canton crape shawls and Smyrna
silks and Turk satins, for Sabbath-day wear, which somebody had brought
home for them. Mantel-pieces were adorned with nautilus and
conch-shells, and with branches and fans of coral; and children had
foreign curiosities and treasures of the sea for playthings. There was
one imported shell that we did not value much, it was so abundant--the
freckled univalve they called a "prop." Ye