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.