from the other small cities of New England, and the exclusiveness of
its first families was more strongly marked on account of the limited
size of the place. Thus it continued down to the middle of the last
century, when railroads and the tendency to centralization began to
draw away its financial prosperity, and left the city to small
manufactures and its traditional respectability.

The finest examples of American eighteenth century architecture are
supposed to exist in and about the city of Salem, and they have the
advantage, which American architecture lacks so painfully at the
present time, of possessing a definite style and character--edifices
which are not of a single type, like most of the houses in Fifth
Avenue, but which, while differing in many respects, have a certain
general resemblance, that places them all in the same category. The
small old country churches of Essex County are not distinguished for
fine carving or other ornamentation, and still less by the costliness
of their material, for they are mostly built of white pine, but they
have an indefinable air of pleasantness about them, as if they graced
the ground they stand on, and their steeples seem to float in the air
above us. If we enter them on a Sunday forenoon--for on week-days they
are like a sheepfold without its occupants--we meet with much the same
kind of pleasantness in the assemblage there. We do not find the deep
religious twilight of past ages, or the noonday glare of a fashionable
synagogue, but a neatly attired congregation of weather-beaten farmers
and mariners, and their sensible looking wives, with something of the
original Puritan hardness in their faces, much ameliorated by the
liberalism and free thinking of the past fifty years. Among them too
you will see some remarkably pretty young women; and young men like
those who dug the trenches on Breed's Hill in the afternoon of June 16,
1775. There may be veterans in the audience who helped Grant to go to