e village leisure, perched
upon fences and stayed against house walls, is of a picturesqueness which
we should prize if we saw it abroad, and which I am not willing to slight
on our own ground.

II.

The type is mostly of a seafaring brown, a complexion which seems to be
inherited rather than personally acquired; for the commerce of Kittery
Point perished long ago, and the fishing fleets that used to fit out from
her wharves have almost as long ago passed to Gloucester. All that is
left of the fishing interest is the weir outside which supplies, fitfully
and uncertainly, the fish shipped fresh to the nearest markets. But in
spite of this the tint taken from the suns and winds of the sea lingers
on the local complexion; and the local manner is that freer and easier
manner of people who have known other coasts, and are in some sort
citizens of the world. It is very different from the inland New England
manner; as different as the gentle, slow speech of the shore from the
clipped nasals of the hill-country. The lounging native walk is not the
heavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch and the sway of the
deck in it.

Nothing could be better suited to progress through the long village,
which rises and sinks beside the shore like a landscape with its sea-legs
on; and nothing could be more charming and friendly than this village.
It is quite untainted as yet by the summer cottages which have covered so
much of the coast, and made it look as if the aesthetic suburbs of New
York and Boston had gone ashore upon it. There are two or three
old-fashioned summer hotels; but the summer life distinctly fails to
characterize the place. The people live where their forefathers have
lived for two hundred and fifty years; and for the century since the
baronial domain of Sir William was broken up and his possessions
confiscated by the young Republic, they have dwelt in small red or white
houses on their small holdings along the slopes and levels of the low
hills beside the water, where a man may pass with the least inconvenience
and delay from his threshold to his gunwale. Not all the houses are
small; some are spacious and ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns; but
most are simple and homelike. Their gardens, following the example of
Sir William's vanished pleasaunce, drop southward to the shore, where the
lobster-traps and the hen-coops meet in unembarrassed promiscuity. But
the fish-flakes which once gave these incline