An Old Town By the Sea | Page 4

crowded with sailors and soldiers--in the war of 1812--gives an
emphasis to the quiet that broods over it to-day. The lounger who sits
of a summer afternoon on a rusty anchor fluke in the shadow of one of
the silent warehouses, and look on the lonely river as it goes
murmuring past the town, cannot be too grateful to the India trade for
having taken itself off elsewhere.
What a slumberous, delightful, lazy place it is! The sunshine seems to
lie a foot deep on the planks of the dusty wharf, which yields up to the
warmth a vague perfume of the cargoes of rum, molasses, and spice
that used to be piled upon it. The river is as blue as the inside of a
harebell. The opposite shore, in the strangely shifting magic lights of
sky and water, stretches along like the silvery coast of fairyland.
Directly opposite you is the navy yard, and its neat officers' quarters
and workshops and arsenals, and its vast shiphouses, in which the keel
of many a famous frigate has been laid. Those monster buildings on the
water's edge, with their roofs pierced with innumerable little windows,
which blink like eyes in the sunlight, and the shiphouses. On your right
lies a cluster of small islands,--there are a dozen or more in the
harbor--on the most extensive of which you see the fading-away
remains of some earthworks thrown up in 1812. Between
this--Trefethren's Island--and Peirce's Island lie the Narrows. Perhaps a
bark or a sloop-of-war is making up to town; the hulk is hidden
amoung the islands, and the topmasts have the effect of sweeping
across the dry land. On your left is a long bridge, more than a quarter of

a mile in length, set upon piles where the water is twenty or thirty feet
deep, leading to the navy yard and Kittery--the Kittery so often the
theme of Whittier's verse.
This is a mere outline of the landscape that spreads before you. Its
changeful beauty of form and color, with the summer clouds floating
over it, is not to be painted in words. I know of many a place where the
scenery is more varied and striking; but there is a mandragora quality in
the atmosphere here that holds you to the spot, and makes the
half-hours seem like minutes. I could fancy a man sitting on the end of
that old wharf very contentedly for two or three years, provided it could
be always in June.
Perhaps, too, one would desire it to be always high water. The tide falls
from eight to twelve feet, and when the water makes out between the
wharves some of the picturesqueness makes out also. A corroded
section of stovepipe mailed in barnacles, or the skeleton of a hoopskirt
protruding from the tide mud like the remains of some old-time wreck,
is apt to break the enchantment.
I fear I have given the reader an exaggerated idea of the solitude that
reigns along the river-side. Sometimes there is society here of an
unconventional kind, if you care to seek it. Aside from the foreign
gentleman before mentioned, you are likely to encounter, farther down
the shore toward the Point of Graves (a burial-place of the colonial
period), a battered and aged native fisherman boiling lobsters on a little
gravelly bench, where the river whispers and lisps among the pebbles
as the tide creeps in. It is a weather-beaten ex-skipper or ex-pilot, with
strands of coarse hair, like seaweed, falling about a face that has the
expression of a half-open clam. He is always ready to talk with you,
this amphibious person; and if he is not the most entertaining of
gossips--more weather-wise that Old Probabilities, and as full of
moving incident as Othello himself--then he is not the wintery-haired
shipman I used to see a few years ago on the strip of beach just beyond
Liberty Bridge, building his drift-wood fire under a great tin boiler, and
making it lively for a lot of reluctant lobsters.
I imagine that very little change has taken place in this immediate

locality, known prosaically as Puddle Dock, during the past fifty or
sixty years. The view you get looking across Liberty Bridge, Water
Street, is probably the same in every respect that presented itself to the
eyes of the town folk a century ago. The flagstaff, on the right, is the
representative of the old "standard of liberty" which the Sons planted
on this spot in January, 1766, signalizing their opposition to the
enforcement of the Stamp Act. On the same occasion the patriots called
at the house of Mr. George Meserve, the agent for distributing the
stamps in New Hampshire, and relieved him of his stamp-master's
commission, which document they carried on the point of a sword
through