ed, until--we came to Salem, after Manchester and Magnolia.
Then--we weren't precisely being _untrue_ to Marblehead. No, never that!
_But_ Salem--perhaps it's fair after all to keep a larger place in
memory-land for the Witch City.

It would have been almost a _world_ tragedy if, when the great fire
swept over the town, it hadn't stopped short of the old part, which is
American history incarnate. That "old part" consists of "old, older,
oldest." The oldest houses of all, built about 1635, are very, very
simple, as if the Puritans had prayed over them to be delivered from
temptation and craving for beauty. Then, next are the ones not quite so
old, when people began to be rich and see that Beauty wasn't after all
the unpardonable sin. These houses of the eighteenth century look as if
architects might have been commissioned to come from the Old World to
build them, bringing traditions of gracious decoration for outside and
in. Next, there are the far grander and more stately mansions which grew
up after the Revolution, when the good folk of New England knew that
their land and their fortunes would be theirs forever, undisputed. Salem
had grown into an important place then. Merchants and shipowners had
plenty of money to spend. They spent it well, too, for they made their
dwellings very beautiful, so beautiful that the witch hunters and Quaker
persecutors of the past would have been shocked to the bottom of those
hollow places they called their hearts.

What a good thing it is that there wasn't much brick to be had when the
first old colonial houses were a-building! To be sure, some of the very
best in Salem and Boston and other towns are of brick; but brick had to
come in ships from old England, so only those persons with the most
money and possibly the most cultivated taste could use it. Consequently
the characteristic houses of New England and its borders--the white and
yellow houses we _think_ of when we say "New England"--were made of
wood; and they are unique in the world.

They say that the oldest buildings of Salem--the Gothic, steep-roofed
ones--were meant as copies of gabled cottages on the old home side of
the water. But if they were, they were as far off the originals as a
child's drawing on a slate is far from a steel engraving; and Jack and I
are glad, because these dear things are so ingenuously and deliciously
American that they could exist nowhere except on this side.

I was only too glad to stay in Sale