s a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them
is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place
has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and
down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and
private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months of
the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both have
grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
hats, who built their now decaying wharves and sent out their ships all
over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre
or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like that once
lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of
the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions--like the
Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you
mount the broad staircase)--show that there was not only wealth, but
style and state, in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is
not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in
a certain sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of
expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of
their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They have
even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and offer the
most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they had been
English, would have lived in a palazzo at Genoa or Pisa, or some other
Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for
a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls of
ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable
mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar
material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old
charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio only
when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built and
organized in the present century.

--It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be an
only child, he might have lived as his father had done, le