will only point you in the right direction, by saying that there are
three towns lying in a line with each other, as you go "down East," each
of them with a Port in its name, and each of them having a peculiar
interest which gives it individuality, in addition to the Oriental
character they have in common. I need not tell you that these towns are
Newburyport, Portsmouth, and Portland. The Oriental character they have
in common consists in their large, square, palatial mansions, with sunny
gardens round them. The two first have seen better days. They are in
perfect harmony with the condition of weakened, but not impoverished,
gentility. Each of them is a "paradise of demi-fortunes." Each of them
is of that intermediate size between a village and a city which any place
has outgrown when the presence of a well-dressed stranger walking up and
down the main street ceases to be a matter of public curiosity and
private speculation, as frequently happens, during the busier months of
the year, in considerable commercial centres like Salem. They both have
grand old recollections to fall back upon,--times when they looked
forward to commercial greatness, and when the portly gentlemen in cocked
hats, who built their now decaying wharves and sent out their ships all
over the world, dreamed that their fast-growing port was to be the Tyre
or the Carthage of the rich British Colony. Great houses, like that once
lived in by Lord Timothy Dexter, in Newburyport, remain as evidence of
the fortunes amassed in these places of old. Other mansions--like the
Rockingham House in Portsmouth (look at the white horse's tail before you
mount the broad staircase)--show that there was not only wealth, but
style and state, in these quiet old towns during the last century. It is
not with any thought of pity or depreciation that we speak of them as in
a certain sense decayed towns; they did not fulfil their early promise of
expansion, but they remain incomparably the most interesting places of
their size in any of the three northernmost New England States. They have
even now prosperity enough to keep them in good condition, and offer the