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