Oldport Days | Page 7

of another old man
about a certain equinoctial gale, I saw my friend draw his right hand
slowly and painfully from his pocket, and let it fall by his side. It was
really one of the most emphatic gesticulations I ever saw, and tended
obviously to quell the rising discord. It was as if the herald at a
tournament had dropped his truncheon, and the fray must end.
Women's faces are apt to take from old age a finer touch than those of

men, and poverty does not interfere with this, where there is no actual
exposure to the elements. From the windows of these old houses there
often look forth delicate, faded countenances, to which belongs an air
of unmistakable refinement. Nowhere in America, I fancy, does one see
such counterparts of the reduced gentlewoman of England,--as
described, for instance, in "Cranford,"-- quiet maiden ladies of seventy,
with perhaps a tradition of beauty and bellehood, and still wearing
always a bit of blue ribbon on their once golden curls,--this headdress
being still carefully arranged, each day, by some handmaiden of sixty,
so long a house-mate as to seem a sister, though some faint suggestion
of wages and subordination may be still preserved. Among these ladies,
as in "Cranford," there is a dignified reticence in respect to
money-matters, and a courteous blindness to the small economies
practised by each other. It is not held good breeding, when they meet in
a shop of a morning, for one to seem to notice what another buys.
These ancient ladies have coats of arms upon their walls, hereditary
damasks among their scanty wardrobes, store of domestic traditions in
their brains, and a whole Court Guide of high-sounding names at their
fingers' ends. They can tell you of the supposed sister of an English
queen, who married an American officer and dwelt in Oldport; of the
Scotch Lady Janet, who eloped with her tutor, and here lived in poverty,
paying her washerwoman with costly lace from her trunks; of the
Oldport dame who escaped from France at the opening of the
Revolution, was captured by pirates on her voyage to America, then
retaken by a privateer and carried into Boston, where she took refuge in
John Hancock's house. They can describe to you the Malbone Gardens,
and, as the night wanes and the embers fade, can give the tale of the
Phantom of Rough Point. Gliding farther and farther into the past, they
revert to the brilliant historic period of Oldport, the successive English
and French occupations during our Revolution,and show you gallant
inscriptions in honor of their grandmothers, written on the
window-panes by the diamond rings of the foreign officers.
The newer strata of Oldport society are formed chiefly by importation,
and have the one advantage of a variety of origin which puts
provincialism out of the question. The mild winter climate and the
supposed cheapness of living draw scattered families from the various
Atlantic cities; and, coming from such different sources, these visitors

leave some exclusiveness behind. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of
power, are doubtless good things to have in one's house, but are
cumbrous to travel with. Meeting here on central ground, partial
aristocracies tend to neutralize each other. A Boston family comes,
bristling with genealogies, and making the most of its little all of two
centuries. Another arrives from Philadelphia, equally fortified in local
heraldries unknown in Boston.
A third from New York brings a briefer pedigree, but more gilded.
Their claims are incompatible; but there is no common standard, and so
neither can have precedence. Since no human memory can retain the
great-grandmothers of three cities, we are practically as well off as if
we had no great-grandmothers at all.
But in Oldport, as elsewhere, the spice of conversation is apt to be in
inverse ratio to family tree and income-tax, and one can hear better
repartees among the boat-builders' shops on Long Wharf than among
those who have made the grand tour. All the world over, one is
occasionally reminded of the French officer's verdict on the garrison
town where he was quartered, that the good society was no better than
the good society anywhere else, but the bad society was capital. I like,
for instance, to watch the shoals of fishermen that throng our streets in
the early spring, inappropriate as porpoises on land, or as Scott's pirates
in peaceful Kirkwall,--unwieldy, bearded creatures in oil-skin
suits,--men who have never before seen a basket-wagon or a liveried
groom and, whose first comments on the daintinesses of fashion are far
more racy than anything which fashion can say for itself.
The life of our own fishermen and pilots remains active, in its way, all
winter; and coasting vessels come and go in the open harbor every day.
The only