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 schooner that is not so employed is,
to my eye, more attractive than any of them; it is our sole