soon the repulsive pendants will be gone. Not so with the iron
belaying-pins, a few of which still stand around the mast, so
rusted into the iron fife-rail that even the persevering industry
of the children cannot wrench them out. It seems as if some
guilty stain must cling to their sides, and hold them in. By one
of those fitnesses which fortune often adjusts, but which seem
incredible in art, the wharf is now used on one side for the
storage of slate, and the hulk is approached through an avenue of
gravestones. I never find myself in that neighborhood but my
steps instinctively seek that condemned vessel, whether by day,
when she makes a dark foreground for the white yachts and the
summer waves, or by night, when the storm breaks over her
desolate deck.

If we follow northward from "Queen-Hithe" along the shore, we
pass into a region where the ancient wharves of commerce, ruined
in 1815, have never been rebuilt; and only slender pathways for
pleasure voyagers now stretch above the submerged foundations.
Once the court end of the town, then its commercial centre, it is
now divided between the tenements of fishermen and the summer
homes of city households. Still the great old houses remain, with
mahogany stairways, carved wainscoting, and painted tiles; the
sea has encroached upon their gardens, and only boats like mine
approach where English dukes and French courtiers once landed. At
the head of yonder private wharf, in that spacious and still
cheerful abode, dwelt the beautiful Robinson sisterhood,--the
three Quaker belles of Revolutionary days, the memory of whose
loves might lend romance to this neighborhood forever. One of
these maidens was asked in marriage by a captain in the English
army, and was banished by her family to the Narragansett shore,