oyster-like tenacity with which an old settler, over whom his
third century is creeping, clings to the spot where his
successive generations have been embedded. It is no matter that
the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old wooden
houses, the mud and dust, the dead level of site and sentiment,
the chill east wind, and the chillest of social
atmospheres;--all these, and whatever faults besides he may see
or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and
just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly
paradise. So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a
destiny to make Salem my home; so that the mould of features and
cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever,
as one representative of the race lay down in the grave, another
assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
street--might still in my little day be seen and recognised in
the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence
that the connexion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at
last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than
a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series
of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had
other birth-places, and, so far as their fortunes may be within
my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me
to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as
well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It
was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away--as
it seemed, permanently--but yet returned, like the bad
halfpenny, or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of