most attractive residences for quiet families, which, if they had been
English, would have lived in a palazzo at Genoa or Pisa, or some other
Continental Newburyport or Portsmouth.

As for the last of the three Ports, or Portland, it is getting too
prosperous to be as attractive as its less northerly neighbors. Meant for
a fine old town, to ripen like a Cheshire cheese within its walls of
ancient rind, burrowed by crooked alleys and mottled with venerable
mould, it seems likely to sacrifice its mellow future to a vulgar
material prosperity. Still it remains invested with many of its old
charms, as yet, and will forfeit its place among this admirable trio only
when it gets a hotel with unequivocal marks of having been built and
organized in the present century.

--It was one of the old square palaces of the North, in which Bernard
Langdon, the son of Wentworth, was born. If he had had the luck to be an
only child, he might have lived as his father had done, letting his
meagre competence smoulder on almost without consuming, like the fuel in
an air-tight stove. But after Master Bernard came Miss Dorothea
Elizabeth Wentworth Langdon, and then Master William Pepperell Langdon,
and others, equally well named,--a string of them, looking, when they
stood in a row in prayer-time, as if they would fit a set of Pandean
pipes, of from three feet upward in dimensions. The door of the air-tight
stove has to be opened, under such circumstances, you may well suppose!
So it happened that our young man had been obliged, from an early period,
to do something to support himself, and found himself stopped short in
his studies by the inability of the good people at home to furnish him
the present means of support as a student.

You will understand now why the young man wanted me to give him a