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, letting his
meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel
in an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea
Elizabeth Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon,
and others, equally well named,--a string of them, looking, when they
stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean
pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the
air-tight stove has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well
suppose! So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an
early period, to do something to support himself, and found himself
stopped short in his studies by the inability of the good people at home
to furnish him the present means of support as a student.

You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a
certificate of his fitness to teach, and why I did not choose to urge
him to accept the aid which a meek country-boy from a family without
ante-Revolutionary recollections would have thankfully recei