Richmond. Withal there is much of the spirit of the early Christians
among them, and virtue enough to save their country in any emergency.

These old churches have mostly disappeared from Salem city and have
been replaced by more aristocratic edifices, whose square or octagonal
towers are typical of their leading parishioners,--a dignified class,
if somewhat haughty and reserved; but they too will soon belong to the
past, drawn off to the great social centres in and about Boston. In the
midst of Salem there is a triangular common, "with its never-failing
elms," where the boys large and small formerly played cricket--married
men too--as they do still on the village greens of good old England,
and around this enclosure the successful merchants and navigators of
the city built their mansion houses; not half houses like those in the
larger cities, but with spacious halls and rooms on either side going
up three stories. It is in the gracefully ornamented doorways and the
delicate interior wood-work, the carving of wainscots, mantels and
cornices, the skilful adaptations of classic forms to a soft and
delicate material that the charm of this architecture chiefly
consists,--especially in the staircases, with their carved spiral posts
and slender railings, rising upward in the centre of the front hall,
and turning right and left on the story above. It is said that after
the year eighteen hundred the quality of this decoration sensibly
declined; it was soon replaced by more prosaic forms, and now the tools
no longer exist that can make it. Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones
would have admired it. America, excepting in New York City, escaped the
false rococo taste of the eighteenth century.

The Salem sea-captains of old times were among the boldest of our early
navigators; sailing among the pirates of the Persian Gulf and trading
with the cannibals of Polynesia, and the trophies which they brought