which fortune often adjusts, but which seem
incredible in art, the wharf is now used on one side for the storage of
slate, and the hulk is approached through an avenue of gravestones. I
never find myself in that neighborhood but my steps instinctively seek
that condemned vessel, whether by day, when she makes a dark foreground
for the white yachts and the summer waves, or by night, when the storm
breaks over her desolate deck.

If we follow northward from "Queen-Hithe" along the shore, we pass into
a region where the ancient wharves of commerce, ruined in 1815, have
never been rebuilt; and only slender pathways for pleasure voyagers now
stretch above the submerged foundations. Once the court end of the
town, then its commercial centre, it is now divided between the
tenements of fishermen and the summer homes of city households. Still
the great old houses remain, with mahogany stairways, carved
wainscoting, and painted tiles; the sea has encroached upon their
gardens, and only boats like mine approach where English dukes and
French courtiers once landed. At the head of yonder private wharf, in
that spacious and still cheerful abode, dwelt the beautiful Robinson
sisterhood,--the three Quaker belles of Revolutionary days, the memory
of whose loves might lend romance to this neighborhood forever. One of
these maidens was asked in marriage by a captain in the English army,
and was banished by her family to the Narragansett shore, under a flag
of truce, to avoid him; her lover was afterward killed by a
cannon-ball, in his tent, and she died unwedded. Another was sought by
two aspirants, who came in the same ship to woo her, the one from
Philadelphia, the other from New York. She refused them both, and they
sailed southward together; but, the wind proving adverse, they
returned, and one lingered till he won her hand. Still another lover
was forced into a vessel by his friends, to tear him from the enchanted
neighborhood; while sailing past the house, he suddenly threw himself
into the water,--it must have been about where the end of the wharf now
rests,--that he might be rescued, and carried, a passive Leander, into
yonder door. The house was first the head-quarters of the English
commander, then of the French; and the sentinels of De Noailles once
trod where now croquet-balls form the heaviest ordnance. Peaceful and
untitled guests now throng in summer where St. Vincents and
Northumberlands once rustled and glittered; and the