we do not ask questions because we have the still more vicious custom of
not opening our mouths at all when with strangers.

It was a good hour after our friends got aboard before the boat left her
moorings, and then it was not without some secret dreads of sea-sickness
that Aunt Melissa saw the seething brine widen between her and the
familiar wharf-house, where she now seemed to have spent so large a part
of her life. But the multitude of really charming and interesting objects
that presently fell under her eye soon distracted her from those gloomy
thoughts.

There is always a shabbiness about the wharves of seaports; but I must own
that as soon as you get a reasonable distance from them in Boston, they
turn wholly beautiful. They no longer present that imposing array of
mighty ships which they could show in the days of Consul Plancus, when the
commerce of the world sought chiefly our port, yet the docks are still
filled with the modester kinds of shipping, and if there is not that
wilderness of spars and rigging which you see at New York, let us believe
that there is an aspect of selection and refinement in the scene, so that
one should describe it, not as a forest, but, less conventionally, as a
gentleman's park of masts. The steamships of many coastwise freight lines
gloom, with their black, capacious hulks, among the lighter sailing-craft,
and among the white, green-shuttered passenger-boats; and behind them
those desperate and grimy sheds assume a picturesqueness, their sagging
roofs and crooked gables harmonizing agreeably with the shipping; and then
growing up from all, rises the mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, and
spire, and dome,--a fair and noble sight, indeed, and one not surpassed
for a certain quiet and cleanly beauty by any that I know.

Our friends lingered long upon this pretty prospect, and, as inland people