*J
 
 OLD SALEM 
 
 BY ELEANOR PUTNAM 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 ARLO BATES 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 <k fiitoewiDe tfrejij?, damfcriDge 
 1899
 
 Copyright, 1886, 
 BY ARLO BATES. 
 
 AU rights reserved. 
 
 SIXTH IMPRESSION 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., V. S. A. 
 Printed by II. O. lloughton & Company.
 
 For the son too young to remember her, 
 have been gathered these fragments of his 
 mother's work, broken by death. 
 
 202GPS2
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 Old Salem Shops 27 
 
 A Salem Dame-Scbool 43 
 
 Two Salem Institutions 6) 
 
 Salem Cupboards 68 
 
 My Cousin the Captain 705
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I. 
 
 T is with unspeakable tenderness 
 and pain that I attempt to gather 
 up the broken threads of this un- 
 finished web, but I appreciate that per- 
 sonal feeling would be out of place here, 
 and that what I say must be confined to 
 the subject of this volume. 
 
 The first paper in the brief collection, 
 "Old Salem Shops," was written for the 
 Contributors' Club of the " Atlantic Month- 
 ly," a fact which accounts for its brevity. 
 The editor gave it a place in the body of 
 the magazine, and its reception was suffi- 
 ciently kind to encourage the writing of 
 other papers in the same vein. It was the 
 writer's intention to publish a series of
 
 8 Introduction. 
 
 sketches which should afterward be put 
 together under the title which this volume 
 bears, and she had noted down the sub- 
 jects of several which were destined never 
 to be written. 
 
 " A Salem Dame-School " and " Salem 
 Cupboards " followed in the " Atlantic ; " 
 "Two Salem Institutions" was written for 
 " The Spinnet," a paper published at a 
 Salem fair; while "My Cousin the Cap- 
 tain" was left a fragment at her death. 
 
 There were in her portfolio few notes, 
 it being her custom to depend upon her 
 remarkable memory almost entirely, but 
 she had in conversation spoken of many of 
 the things which it was her wish to include 
 in these sketches of the quaint old town 
 which she loved and where now her grave 
 is made. 
 
 The subjects she had set down were: 
 "The Marine Museum," where "it was as 
 if each sea-captain had lounged in and 
 hustled down his contributions in any con- 
 venient vacant space," "Derby and Char-
 
 Introduction. g 
 
 ter Streets," "Old Burying Grounds," 
 " ' New Guinea ' and Witch Hill," and "The 
 Witch Records (?) ; " while besides these 
 she spoke with the most genuine tenderness 
 of a paper she wished to write on " Salem 
 Gentlewomen." There was also some talk 
 of a sketch of " Salem Oddities," to include 
 some notice of " Billy Cook " and other 
 erratic individuals ; and she wrote thus 
 much upon " The Bundle Handkerchief : " 
 
 " The bundle handkerchief is as essential 
 a figure in Salem history as the witches 
 themselves." 
 
 " My Cousin the Captain," upon which 
 she was engaged when she laid down for- 
 ever her pen, was in a vein in which, from 
 her extreme fondness for all things nau- 
 tical, she delighted especially. The fascina- 
 tion of the sea was strong upon her, and 
 in some of her magazine stories she has 
 shown how lively was her interest in all 
 that pertains to the life of a mariner. 
 There is in the history of Salem enough 
 of" nautical romance to excite the most
 
 10 Introduction. 
 
 sluggish imagination, and far more one so 
 responsive as was hers. There is an irre- 
 sistible suggestiveness in the record of the 
 voyages of Salem vessels to cannibal Fe- 
 jee, to Zanzibar, to Mauritius, to Surinam, 
 to Madagascar, to Russia, and to Calcutta. 
 The fancy is aroused by the simple enu- 
 meration of the cargoes the ships brought 
 from far over- seas : " Wine and prunes ; " 
 "nutmegs, mace and cinnamon ;" "raisins, 
 almonds and sweet wines ; " " palm - oil, 
 gum copal and ivory ; " "sugar, indigo and 
 spices ; " or the drolly incongruous mix- 
 ture, " gin, cheese and steel," brought by 
 the brig Minerva from Amsterdam. There 
 is, too, an opulence in the amounts paid 
 for tariff the Sumatra, a ship of but 287 
 tons burden, on three cargoes from Canton 
 handed over duties of $128,363.13, $138,- 
 480.34 and $140,761.96 which throws 
 a sort of halo of magnificent and fabulous 
 wealth over even this prosaic side of the 
 marine history of the old town. The se- 
 cret voyages of Captain Jonathan Carnes
 
 Introduction. i r 
 
 to Sumatra, moreover, with an allusion to 
 which " My Cousin the Captain " so abrupt- 
 ly closes ; the messages from Captain Ea- 
 gleston, who in Southern seas caught sev- 
 eral albatrosses, fastened to the neck of 
 each a quill in which was a slip of paper, 
 bearing the words, " Ship Leonidas, of Sa- 
 lem, bound for New Zealand," and by 
 means of a French vessel which recaptured 
 one of the birds off the Cape of Good 
 Hope, hundreds of miles away, sent tidings 
 to his friends at home, who during the six 
 months that had elapsed since his sailing 
 had received no news of him ; the robbery 
 of the Mexican by the Spanish pirate 
 Pinda, with the unsuccessful attempt to 
 burn alive the imprisoned crew ; the adven- 
 tures of the Charles Daggett among the 
 treacherous cannibals in Fejee, and in trans- 
 porting the Pitcairn islanders from "sen- 
 sual Tahiti " to their former home, all 
 these and many another wild tale of adven- 
 ture, peril, and shipwreck might be com- 
 bined to form a most thrilling chapter. It
 
 12 Introduction. 
 
 is no wonder that one who loved both Sa- 
 lem and the sea should be moved by such 
 a history. 
 
 The sketch of Derby Street was one of 
 the first projected, but there are scarcely 
 any notes for it. In it was to figure the 
 house of Mr. Forrester, where upon the 
 parlor walls were painted scenes from the 
 life of the owner, showing his rise from 
 poverty to grandeur ; the place of his birth, 
 a humble cottage in Ireland ; with his vari- 
 ous places of business, the Salem wharves 
 and the vessels which had brought his 
 merchandise to them. The Old Ladies' 
 Home, too, was to be spoken of, with rem- 
 iniscences of certain of its inmates whose 
 memories took hold upon the romantic and 
 palmy days of the town. And there was to 
 be a sketch of the strange old shop of a 
 Sol Gibbs like instrument maker, which 
 stood upon a corner of Derby Street, 
 wherein were the relics of many a good 
 ship and many a voyage ; where among 
 quaint rubbish from all over the world an-
 
 Introduction. 13 
 
 cient mariners sat and gossiped garru- 
 lously, in endless review of their past and 
 tireless bewailings of the degeneracy of 
 the present ; where antique chronometers 
 ticked patiently, awaiting the return of 
 owners whose bones were bleaching on the 
 sands of islands in seas of the under world 
 or " suffering a sea change " in caves be- 
 neath some ocean near the poles ; where 
 the wizened proprietor and the storm-beaten 
 antiques who consorted with him were ir- 
 resistibly suggestive of the mummies some 
 adventurous Salem captain, perhaps one of 
 these, had brought from Peru ; where time 
 had no value save as its measure served 
 to test the accuracy of venerable time- 
 pieces ; and where the quadrants, the sex- 
 tants, and the compasses reposing in shabby 
 cases upon the dusty shelves would not 
 have been out of place on the deck of the 
 Flying Dutchman or the Dead Ship of 
 Harpswell. " If fine old Leisure is dead," 
 runs one of the scanty notes, "surely he 
 spent his last days in Salem ; " and in this
 
 14 Introduction. 
 
 quaint nook good old Leisure may well 
 have dreamed through his placid dotage. 
 In the sketch of Derby Street, too, it is 
 to be supposed there would have been 
 mention of the famous Custom House in 
 which Hawthorne wrote, and where he 
 feigned to have found the manuscript of 
 that greatest of all American books, " The 
 Scarlet Letter ; " while it was no less in- 
 tended to picture the dusky sail-lofts, fra- 
 grant with the smell of new canvas and 
 of tar, where were stitched on the smooth 
 floor the great white sheets that were to 
 be the wings of many a craft more stout 
 than even the strong-penned albatross, and 
 were to be mirrored in the waves of har- 
 bors as far asunder as the world is wide. 
 The writer of these sketches spoke more 
 than once of the suggestive charm of these 
 sail-lofts, where men sat upon the floor like 
 Turks, sewing, with their thimbles curi- 
 ously fastened in the middle of their palms, 
 and where the children went for bunches of 
 " thrums," to be used at home for tying up
 
 Introduction. 75 
 
 bundles. Lifted above the stir of Derby 
 Street, the silence of the loft must have 
 been doubly impressive, and have accorded 
 well with the softened light which fell 
 through small dusty panes, to be reflected 
 from the polished floor and great snowy 
 sails. 
 
 But most of all would this paper have 
 been likely to deal with the indefinable 
 charm of the days when Derby Street was 
 alive with bustle and excitement ; when 
 swarthy sailors were grouped at the cor- 
 ners, or sat smoking before the doors of 
 their boarding-houses, their ears adorned 
 with gold rings, and their hands and wrists 
 profusely illustrated with uncouth designs 
 in India ink ; when every shop window 
 was a museum of odd trifles from the Ori- 
 ent, and the very air was thick with a 
 sense of excitement and of mystery. 
 
 Of what would have been included in 
 the other papers one may conjecture, but 
 beyond the fact that "The Bundle Hand- 
 kerckief " was to show the staid people of
 
 1 6 Introduction. 
 
 Salem carrying home in that useful article 
 their weekly baked beans and brown bread, 
 and equally their mental food in the shape 
 of books from the Athenaeum, or, indeed, 
 for that matter, anything that they ever 
 had to carry home at all ; and that it was 
 to give a half-humorous and half-pathetic 
 history of an old gentleman not unlike him 
 who figures in " The Last Leaf," there is 
 nothing that can be said authoritatively. 
 
 II. 
 
 She who wrote under the name of Elea- 
 nor Putnam a name which was in truth 
 borne by her great-grandmother in maid- 
 enhood went to live in Salem in 1865, 
 being then nine years old. Her ances- 
 tors had dwelt there almost from the 
 foundation of the town, and like all genu- 
 ine Salem families cherished that feeling 
 of local pride and attachment which left so 
 strong a mark upon her character. Half 
 a dozen years she lived here before the 
 family moved temporarily to the West, in
 
 Introduction. 77 
 
 search of health for the mother. In that 
 time she attended the dame-school she has 
 described, spent her pennies at the quaint 
 shops she has pictured, and stored in a 
 memory which was wonderful for its fidel- 
 ity and its exactness a thousand details of 
 which we now shall have no record. 
 
 She was naturally not a little amused 
 when a Boston journal commented upon 
 her second " Atlantic " paper : " Eleanor 
 Putnam describes a Salem dame-school of 
 fifty or sixty years ago in a charming es- 
 say." The truth is, however, that Salem 
 forms a sort of eddy, deliciously shady and 
 quiet, beside the rushing stream of modern 
 progress, and the state of things existing 
 there a score of years ago was similar to 
 that which passed away half a century 
 since in more progressive communities. 
 
 III. 
 
 I cannot deny myself the pleasure of 
 quoting here from two letters, both writ- 
 ten -by persons unaware of the identity of
 
 1 8 Introduction. 
 
 Eleanor Putnam, and both total strangers 
 to her. The first is of interest as showing 
 the kindly and generous appreciation of a 
 man of letters, who has himself, unhappily 
 for literature, passed beyond all earthly 
 work ; the second as proving how truthful 
 are the pictures these essays present. 
 
 335 EAST 17 STREET, 
 STUYVESANT SQUARE. 
 
 DEAR Miss PUTNAM : 
 
 Pray allow me the pleasure of expressing to 
 you my great admiration and enjoyment of 
 your " Old Salem Shops " in the " Atlantic " for 
 September, which I spoke of often to friends 
 at the time of its appearance. I am led to re- 
 vert to it now by having recently read Miss 
 Mitford's " Our Village " and " Belford Regis." 
 These I heard spoken of in my boyhood, when 
 they were in great favor ; but I never saw them 
 until lately among a heap of books with which 
 I beguiled hours of illness. I was reminded 
 at once of your sketch, say, rather, highly fin- 
 ished genre-picture, and could not but think 
 of its superiority, superiority in everything, 
 in style, in vivid portraiture, in gentle humor.
 
 Introduction. jg 
 
 And then I thought that I would venture to 
 suggest to you that you should write and pub- 
 lish a group of such pictures of the now 
 alas! fading New England life. They could 
 not but be welcome ; and they would have at 
 least one admiring and grateful reader. 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 RICH. GRANT WHITE. 
 Sunday, 2d Oct. '84. 
 
 Of the second letter I have let the per- 
 sonalities remain, because they concern 
 only the dead and can do no harm. 
 
 BOSTON, Feb. 20, 1886. 
 
 To THE LADY WHO SIGNS HERSELF ELEANOR 
 PUTNAM. 
 
 I have often thought of asking your proper 
 address that I might thank you for the charm- 
 ing tales about dear old Salem ; but the Feb- 
 ruary number of the " Atlantic " " Salem Cup- 
 boards" is too much for me, and I cannot 
 delay thanking you, and saying what delight 
 I have taken in it. I trust you will pardon 
 the liberty I take in addressing you, though I 
 am a. stranger, for it renews my youth, makes
 
 2o Introduction. 
 
 my blood thrill, and my heart beat when I 
 recall my early home and see it so faithfully 
 described. 
 
 The Hersey Derbys were my first cousins. 
 The old house contained stores of cut glass, 
 such as you describe, which was preferred to 
 silver in those days. Aunt Hersey had much 
 humor and was a mimic. I remember her 
 coming into our house on Court Street one 
 day and describing a call at old Mrs. B.'s shop. 
 Mary and Nancy were in the store. How per- 
 fectly I remember them ! Severe, staid and 
 formal ; talking slowly and whining over their 
 private affairs even before customers. Mary 
 would say : " Mother, Miss So-and-so is com- 
 ing to dinner ; what shall we have for her ? " 
 After due deliberation, the old lady would 
 squeak out : " Coffee and nimble-cake is a very 
 pretty dinner, Mary." And so it was settled. 
 
 The old cupboard is all so natural. At my 
 father's we had stores of the ginger in blue and 
 wickerwork, and on the upper shelf a sticky 
 fork might often be seen. I remember mamma, 
 to shame me, once put the jar and fork on my 
 pillow, but I, in triumph, transferred it to my 
 closet and feasted on it at will.
 
 Introduction. 21 
 
 I remember well the rock candy in such 
 great quantities ; and mamma had a huge box 
 of maccaroni and vermicelli from Leghorn in 
 every variety of form, and as they said : 
 " A box of such enormous size 
 Great Holyoke's years would not suffice 
 To eat it all before she dies." 
 
 I have now some dainty relics, a needle-book 
 with drawings in India ink, bee-hive, etc., 
 most delicately done, and tender mottoes. 
 
 In Mr. Hoppin's " Auton House " I see 
 again our nursery : the back of the fire-place 
 in iron with a pot of tulips cast on it and the 
 sides always kept so nice with redding; and the 
 smell of the herbs in the closet and the row of 
 bottles that we would uncork and sniff till we 
 came to paregoric, that would ease our pain. 
 
 I have rambled on, but I have enjoyed it all 
 so much ; the " Gibraltars and Black-Jacks," 
 all that you have given us, and long for more. 
 
 Excuse my venturing to address you. I 
 have been unable to walk for sixteen years, 
 am seventy-nine years old, and old age may be 
 pardoned for being garrulous. ... I am the 
 ast of my line, not even a cousin left 
 I am your friend,
 
 22 Introduction. 
 
 IV. 
 
 There is perhaps no excuse for adding 
 here the following fragments, since they 
 have no connection with the subject of this 
 little volume. They seem to me worth 
 preserving, however, and while I have de- 
 nied myself the pleasure of writing a sketch 
 of my wife's life, lest it might seem an 
 effort forcibly to claim attention which she 
 unhappily had not lived long enough to 
 win, it -does not appear so wholly out of 
 place to insert these few extracts, which 
 may help such readers as care to do so the 
 better to form a correct estimate of her 
 powers. The habit, already alluded to, of 
 depending upon memory, has reduced her 
 note-books to the most melancholy brevity. 
 From what there is I have made a few se- 
 lections which seem to me to show her 
 delicate humor, close observation, and fe- 
 licitous diction.
 
 Introduction. 2) 
 
 " Most of us would read our own caricatures 
 with bland unconsciousness and be immensely 
 amused thereat." 
 
 " Apples all gnarled and twisted, as if their 
 faces were drawn awry and puckered and 
 pursed up by their own sourness." 
 
 " One may say hard words of her, but not to 
 her." 
 
 " I have often noticed in deserted ship-yards 
 the flights of stairs which once led up to the 
 vessel's deck, but which now, the vessel having 
 slipped the ways and sailed to foreign shores, 
 lead to nowhere and stop abruptly in mid-air, 
 as if like the ladder in the vision of Jacob of 
 old some one had started to build steps to 
 heaven, but had failed and stopped, discouraged 
 long ere he attained his end." 
 
 " He had the face of a young Greek god ; 
 as for his soul, well, perhaps we can say no 
 worse of him than that he had also the soul of 
 a young Greek god." 
 
 " She said she did it for the best, but things 
 which are ' done for the best ' are seldom pleas- 
 ant." 
 
 " On Kneeland Street about noon of a burn-
 
 24 Introduction. 
 
 ing July day, an Italian wine-seller sat at the 
 door of his little shop. The old swing door 
 behind him was of a cotton which had been 
 originally of a vivid orange, but which from 
 standing half-open, and thus meeting irregularly 
 the rays of the sun, was now exquisitely shaded 
 from a dull cream tint on the hinge side to the 
 original brilliant hue on the edge where was 
 placed the latch. This door, made more gor- 
 geous than common by the blaze of the sun's 
 rays which fell upon it, served as a screen 
 which set off to perfection the dark face of the 
 Italian, his shock of black hair, his sleepy dark 
 eyes, his crisp bushy beard, the gold rings in 
 his ears, and his handsome, full throat, from 
 which the shirt was carelessly rolled away. 
 He was doing nothing, and doing it with a 
 thoroughness only possible to an Italian or an 
 African." 
 
 " That man is not wise who tries to induce 
 one woman to be kind to another on the ground 
 that she is young." 
 
 " It was, I believe, what physicians call ' sus. 
 spended animation,' only that in his case the 
 suspension was chronic."
 
 Introduction. 25 
 
 " It stopped raining very suddenly, diminish- 
 ing from a shower of heavy drops to a thin 
 mist of silver ; then the pearl gray tint of the 
 sky all at once broke, and began to sweep 
 away toward the northeast in long trailing lines 
 of opal and amber vapor, leaving behind a 
 heaven blue and cool with a pale radiance as 
 of early spring-time." 
 
 " He kept a secret as closely as a new cone 
 holds its seeds, which are never delivered an 
 instant before the appointed time." 
 
 " She had bent to kiss the baby, who was 
 babbling upon the floor, and as she recovered 
 her standing position a strange thing happened. 
 She extended her hand in recovering her bal- 
 ance, and somehow gave it a twist which at 
 once transformed it from its white plumpness 
 into the hand of an old woman, smooth like 
 parchment and crackled finely like old china. 
 It passed like a flash of lightning. Had it 
 not been that both hands wore the same ring, 
 a ruby set about with diamonds, I should 
 have thought that the two hands belonged to 
 different persons. It was the hand of an old 
 woman, but a woman in the prime of life stood
 
 26 Introduction. 
 
 before me, golden-haired, pink-cheeked, bright- 
 eyed, and vigorous, smoothing the folds of her 
 satin gown and laughing like a girl of twenty." 
 
 " When rats desert a sinking ship where do 
 they go ? " 
 
 " Story of the Old Ladies' Home in Derby 
 Street. A crazy old woman, once a beauty 
 living in the same house, finds love-letters hid- 
 den behind a panel in the wall." 
 
 V. 
 
 Nothing that any one else can write 
 will replace the Salem papers which now 
 we have lost forever, and, however reluc- 
 tantly, it is necessary to bring to a close 
 this brief review of what it was planned to 
 make this volume. It must remain a 
 promise of which death prevented the 
 fulfillment ; a proof, merely, of what might 
 have been. 
 
 A. B.
 
 OLD SALEM SHOPS. 
 
 WONDER how many people have 
 memories as vivid as mine of the 
 quaint shops which a score of 
 years ago stood placidly along the quiet 
 streets of Salem. In the Salem of to-day 
 there are few innovations. Not many 
 modern buildings have replaced the time- 
 honored landmarks ; yet twenty years ago 
 Salem, in certain aspects, was far more 
 like an old colonial town than it is now. 
 When the proprietor of an old shop died 
 it was seldom that a new master entered. 
 Nobody new ever came to Salem, and 
 everybody then living there had already 
 his legitimate occupation. The old shops, 
 lacking tenants, went to sleep. Their 
 green shutters were closed, and they were 
 laid up in ordinary without comment from 
 any one.
 
 28 Old Salem Shops. 
 
 I remember one shop of the variety 
 known in Salem as "button stores." It 
 was kept by two quaint old sisters, whose 
 family name I never knew. We always 
 called them Miss Martha and Miss Sibyl. 
 Miss Martha was the older, and sported 
 a magnificent turban, of wonderful con- 
 struction. Miss Sibyl wore caps and lit- 
 tle wintry -curls. Both had short-waisted 
 gowns, much shirred toward the belts, and 
 odd little housewives of green leather, 
 which hung from their apron-bindings by 
 green ribbons. 
 
 Their wares were few and faded. They 
 had a sparse collection of crewels, old- 
 fashioned laces, little crimped cakes of 
 white wax, and emery balls in futile im- 
 itation of strawberries. They sold hand- 
 kerchiefs, antiquated gauze, and brocaded 
 ribbons, and did embroidery stamping for 
 ladies with much care and deliberation. I 
 remember being once sent to take to these 
 ladies an article which was to be stamped 
 with a single letter. Miss Martha con-
 
 Old Salem Shops. 2g 
 
 suited at some length with her sister, and 
 then, with an air of gentle importance, said 
 to me, "Tell your mother, dear, that sister 
 Sibyl will have it ready in one week, cer- 
 tainly." 
 
 On another occasion Miss Sibyl had 
 chanced to give me a penny too much in 
 change ; discovering which before I was 
 well away, I returned to the shop and told 
 her of the mistake. Miss Sibyl dropped 
 the penny into the little till, so slender 
 were the means of these old gentlewomen 
 that I believe even a penny was of im- 
 portance to them, and in her gentle 
 voice, she asked, " What is your name, 
 dear?" and when I told her she replied, 
 approvingly, "Well, you are an honest 
 child, and you may go home and tell your 
 mother that Miss Sibyl said so." To this 
 commendation she added the gift of a bit 
 of pink gauze ribbon, brocaded with little, 
 yellow and lavender leaves, and I returned 
 to my family in a condition of such con- 
 scious virtue that I am convinced that I
 
 jo Old Salem Shops. 
 
 must have been quite insufferable for some 
 days following. 
 
 The only article in which these ladies 
 dealt which specially concerned us chil- 
 dren was a sort of gay-colored beads, such 
 as were used in making bags and reticules 
 that fine old bead embroidery which 
 some people show nowadays as the work 
 of their great-grandmothers. These beads 
 were highly valued by Salem children, and 
 were sold for a penny a thimbleful. They 
 were measured out in a small mustard- 
 spoon of yellow wood, and it took three 
 ladlefuls to fill the thimble. I cannot for- 
 get the air of placid and judicial gravity 
 with which dear Miss Martha measured 
 out a cent's worth of beads. 
 
 One winter day Miss Sibyl died. The 
 green shutters of the shop were bowed 
 with black ribbons, and a bit of rusty black 
 crape fluttered from the knob of the half- 
 glass door, inside of which the curtains 
 were drawn as for a Sunday. For a whole 
 week the shop was decorously closed.
 
 Old Salem Shops. 31 
 
 When it was reopened, only Miss Martha, 
 a little older and grayer and more gently 
 serious, stood behind the scantily filled 
 show-case. My mother went in with me 
 that day and bought some laces. Miss 
 Martha folded each piece about a card and 
 secured the ends with pins, after her usual 
 careful fashion, and made out the quaint 
 little receipted bill with which she always 
 insisted on furnishing customers. As she 
 handed the parcel across the counter she 
 answered a look in my mother's eyes. 
 
 " I did not think she would go first," she 
 said, simply. " Sibyl was very young to 
 die." 
 
 In the following autumn came Miss 
 Martha's turn to go. Then the shutters 
 were closed forever. Nobody took the 
 store. The winter snows drifted un- 
 checked into the narrow doorway, and the 
 bit of black crape, affixed to the latch by 
 friendly hands, waved forlornly in the 
 chilly winds and shivered in the air, a 
 thing to affect a child weirdly, and to be
 
 }2 Old Salem Shops. 
 
 hastened past with a "creepy" sensation 
 in the uncertain grayness of a winter twi- 
 light. 
 
 Another well-remembered Salem shop 
 was the little establishment of a certain 
 Mrs. Birmingham. This store was really 
 a more joyous and favorite resort for chil- 
 dren than the aristocratic precincts of Miss 
 Martha and Miss Sibyl. One reason for 
 this was that, while two gentler souls never 
 lived, these ladies belonged to a generation 
 when children were kept in their places, 
 and were to be seen and not heard. This 
 fact flavored their kindly treatment of 
 young people, and we felt it. Then, too, 
 save for the beads, their wares were not 
 attractive to little folk ; and, lastly, there 
 was a constraint in the prim neatness, the 
 mystic, half-perceived odor of some old 
 Indian perfume, and the general air of de- 
 cayed gentility that hung about the shop 
 of the two old gentlewomen, which per- 
 tained not at all to the thoroughly vulgar 
 but alluring domain of Mrs. Birmingham.
 
 Old Salem Shops. 33 
 
 This shop was not on Essex Street, the 
 street of shops, but upon a quiet by-way, 
 devoted to respectable dwelling-houses, 
 and for this reason we were free to visit 
 Mrs. Birmingham's whenever we chose. 
 It was a tiny house, and I believe it had 
 beside it a very shabby and seedy garden. 
 There were two windows with green 
 wooden shutters, and a green door with 
 the upper half of glass. This was once 
 the fashionable manner of stores in Salem. 
 Inside the door was a step, down which 
 one always fell incontinently ; for even if 
 one remembered its existence, it was so 
 narrow and the door closed on its spring so 
 suddenly behind one that there was no 
 choice but to fall. The very name of Bir- 
 mingham brings up the curious odor of 
 that shop. There was, above all, a close 
 and musty and attic-like perfume. Min- 
 gling with this were a perception of cellar 
 mould, a hint of cheese, a dash of tobacco 
 and cabbage, a scent of camphor, a sus- 
 picio"n of snuff, and a strong undercurrent
 
 }4 Old Salem Shops. 
 
 of warm black gown scorched by being 
 
 too near an air-tight stove. 
 
 Mrs. Birmingham's stock equaled But- 
 tercup's in variety. Along the floor in 
 front of the left-hand counter was always 
 a row of lusty green cabbages and a basket 
 of apples. A small glass show-case held 
 bread and buns and brick-shaped sheets of 
 livid gingerbread. If one came to buy 
 milk, Mrs. Birmingham dipped it from a 
 never empty pan on the right-hand coun- 
 ter, wherein sundry hapless flies went, like 
 Ophelia, to a moist death. Then there 
 were ribbons, and cotton laces ; needles, 
 pins, perfumed soaps, and pomatums. 
 There were a few jars of red-and-white 
 peppermint and cinnamon sticks, a box of 
 pink corncake, which Mrs. Birmingham 
 conscientiously refused to sell to children, 
 for fear the coloring matter might be poi- 
 sonous, and, in season and out, on a line 
 above the right-hand counter hung a row 
 of those dismal creations, the valentines 
 known as "comic." All these articles,
 
 Old Salem Shops. 35 
 
 though shabby and shop-worn enough, 
 probably, possessed for us children a 
 species of fascination. There was a gla- 
 mour in the very smell before referred to, 
 and the height of our worldly ambition 
 was to have a shop "just like Mrs. Bir- 
 mingham's." 
 
 The things for which we sought Mrs. 
 Birmingham's were, however, chiefly of 
 two sorts. The first was a kind of small 
 jointed wooden doll, about three inches 
 high. In the face these generally looked 
 like Mrs. Birmingham, and they had little 
 red boots painted on their stubby feet. 
 These ugly little puppets cost a cent apiece, 
 and were much prized as servant dolls, 
 nurses particularly, because their arms 
 would crook, and they could be made to 
 hold baby dolls in a rigid but highly sat- 
 isfactory manner. This flexibility of limb 
 had also, by the by, its unpleasant side; 
 for my brother Tom had a vicious habit, 
 if ever the baby-house were left unguarded, 
 of bending the doll's joints, and leaving
 
 $6 Old Salem Shops. 
 
 the poor little manikins in all manner of 
 ungainly and indecorous attitudes. An- 
 other thing which could be bought for one 
 cent the limit of our purses when we 
 went shopping, and it required six or seven 
 of us to spend this sum was a string of 
 curious little beads made of red sealing- 
 wax. They were somehow moulded on the 
 string while warm, and could not be 
 slipped off. We really did not like them 
 very well, yet we were always buying them, 
 and despite our experience trying to slip 
 them from the string. 
 
 There was a bell fastened to the top 
 of Mrs. Birmingham's shop door, which 
 jangled as one precipitately entered, and 
 summoned Mrs. Birmingham from an 
 inner room. Mrs. Birmingham was a stout 
 Irishwoman, with black eyes, fat hands, 
 and a remarkably fiery nose. She wore a 
 rusty black gown the same, probably, 
 which was always scorching before the 
 stove in the back room and a false front 
 dark as the raven's wing. I believe she
 
 Old Salem Shops. 37 
 
 must have worn some sort of cap, because, 
 without recalling just where she had them, 
 I never think of her without a distinct im- 
 pression of dark purple ribbons. She was 
 by no means an amiable woman, and in 
 serving us she had a way of casting our 
 pennies contemptuously into the till which 
 was humiliating in the extreme. She had 
 likewise a habit of never believing that we 
 had a commission right, and persisted in 
 sending us home to make sure that we 
 were sent for a ten and not a five cent loaf, 
 or for one and not two dozen of eggs. 
 This was painful and crushing to our 
 pride, but the bravest never rebelled 
 against Mrs. Birmingham. My brother 
 used, indeed, to lurk around the corner a 
 few minutes, and then return to the shop 
 without having gone home ; but I always 
 feared Mrs. Birmingham's sharp black 
 eyes, and felt that a dies ires would cer- 
 tainly come for Tom, when all would be 
 discovered. 
 
 Ih addition to the shop Mrs. Birming-
 
 38 Old Salem Shops. 
 
 ham conducted an intelligence office in the 
 back room. I never saw one of the girls, 
 nor knew of any person's going to Mrs. 
 Birmingham to seek intelligence ; but 
 sometimes we heard laughter, and very 
 often Mrs. Birmingham's deep bass voice 
 exclaimed, " Mike, be off wid yer jokin' 
 now ! Le"t alone tellin' stories til the gur- 
 rels ! " 
 
 " Mike " was Mr. Birmingham, a one- 
 legged man, whom I never saw. We knew 
 that he was one-legged because Tom had 
 seen him, and we secretly believed this to 
 be the reason of Mrs. Birmingham's 
 dressing in mourning. We children had 
 asked and been told the nature and pur- 
 pose of an intelligence office, and yet there 
 was ever a sort of uncanny mystery about 
 that back room, where unseen girls 
 laughed, and Mr. Birmingham was always 
 being told to "be off wid his jokin'." 
 
 But tempora mutantur. Alas for Mike ! 
 He is off with all joking now for good. 
 Alas, too, for Mrs. Birmingham ! I cannot
 
 Old Salem Shops. 39 
 
 believe that she died, she was so invinci- 
 ble ; but she is gone. The rusty black 
 gown, the purple ribbons, and the ruddy 
 nose have passed somewhere into the shad- 
 ows of oblivion. 
 
 One more shop there was in which, at 
 a certain season, the souls of the children 
 rejoiced. It was not much of a shop at 
 ordinary times ; indeed, it was but a small 
 and unnoticeable building just around a 
 corner of Essex Street. It was only at 
 holiday time that it blossomed out of insig- 
 nificance. This was before the days of any 
 extent of holiday decoration, and very lit- 
 tle in the way of Christmas trimming was 
 done by Salem tradesmen. The season 
 was celebrated with decorous merriment in 
 our homes, but almost no church adorn- 
 ment was seen, and most of the shops re- 
 laxed not from their customary Salem air 
 of eminent and grave respectability. No 
 butcher sent home a spray of holly with 
 the goose, and no Christmas cards dropped, 
 as-now, from the packages of baker or can-
 
 40 Old Salem Shops. 
 
 dlestick maker. It was therefore the more 
 delightful to witness the annual transfor- 
 mation of the little shop around the Essex 
 Street corner. The very heart and soul 
 of Christmastide must have dwelt in the 
 plump body of the man who kept that 
 shop. His wooden awning was converted 
 into a perfect arbor, under which the front 
 of his little store showed as an enchanted 
 cavern of untold beauty ; a bower of lusty 
 greenery, aglow at night with the starry 
 brilliance of many candles, gay with the 
 scarlet berries of holly, set off by the 
 mystic mistletoe, and rich with Aladdin 
 treasures of sugary birds and beasts, ropes 
 of snowy popped corn, bewildering braids, 
 twists and baskets of pink-and-white sugar, 
 golden oranges, a rarer fruit then than 
 now, white grapes in luscious clusters, 
 and bunches of those lovely cherries of 
 clear red barley candy with yellow broom 
 corn for stems. 
 
 After all, though, it was not so much 
 that the wares were more delightful than
 
 Old Salem Shops. 41 
 
 those kept by other folk. Probably the 
 very same things could have been bought 
 at any fruit store. It was simply that this 
 tiny shop and its plump, red-cheeked owner 
 were overflowing with the subtle and joy- 
 ous spirit of keeping holiday. We children 
 used always to call his place " the Christ- 
 mas shop ; " and I well remember the 
 thrill of joy which ran over me when, re- 
 turning from school one afternoon, I saw 
 my own parents entering the jovial pre- 
 cincts. I sped home on winged feet to 
 tell the other children that " mother and 
 father were in the Christmas shop ; " and 
 we all sat about the fire in the twilight 
 and "guessed" what they were buying, 
 and reveled in the dear delights which 
 were to result from a visit to that treasure 
 house. 
 
 Where is he now, that child-like man who 
 loved the holidays ? The merry wight was 
 twenty years before his time, but it warms 
 one's heart to think of him to-day. Alas, 
 a visit to Salem last year showed his 
 wooden awning torn away, and in his dis-
 
 42 Old Salem Shops. 
 
 mantled bower a dry and wizened stationer 
 among law books and school-room furnish- 
 ings. What a direful change from the 
 halcyon days of old ! I wonder that the 
 chubby ghost of the former owner does 
 not walk o' nights to bemoan the times 
 that are no more. 
 
 The shop of Miss Martha and Miss 
 Sibyl, too, seemed to be entirely done 
 away with, and Mrs. Birmingham's, al- 
 though still standing, was but a wreck. I 
 would gladly have bought there, for old 
 times' sake, a jointed doll or a string of 
 sealing-wax beads ; but the green wooden 
 shutters were closed, the green door sunken 
 sadly on its hinges, its glass half grossly 
 boarded. The grass grew high before the 
 doorstone. The mossy roof was concave. 
 The chimney was almost tottering. The 
 little shop was drawing itself together and 
 dying ; asking no sympathy of the be- 
 holder, but meeting its appointed fate with 
 that gray and silent resignation which 
 alone is considered the proper thing in 
 Salem society.
 
 A SALEM DAME-SCHOOL. 
 
 N English journal recently devoted 
 some space to a discussion of the 
 so-called " dame-school " of the rus- 
 tic district, and concluded that its virtue, 
 if indeed it possessed any, was of the 
 smallest. It appears from this article that, 
 while the authorities urge the superior ben- 
 efit and training to be found in the parish 
 schools, the villagers, with the doggedness 
 of true lower-class ignorance, persist in 
 sending their children to the old dame, 
 the same, perchance, who taught them 
 their own letters thirty or forty years be- 
 fore, and who depends upon the pittance 
 earned by her labors to keep herself alive 
 and out of the parish workhouse. 
 
 Certainly all this is most ungrateful and 
 vicious of the peasantry, and if they were 
 a little more intelligent they would see that
 
 44 d Salem Dame-School. 
 
 they have really no right to cut off the 
 educational advantages of their children, 
 just for the sake of a snuffy old woman, 
 who makes her pupils sing the multiplica- 
 tion table through their noses, and who 
 calls z "izzard." It is, however, a singular 
 fact that this conservative clinging to old 
 methods is not confined to English plough- 
 men, for it was not long ago that a well- 
 known American divine spoke very warm- 
 ly, at a meeting of the Round Table Club, 
 in favor of the old methods of teaching. 
 A lady of high breeding and of rather 
 unusual culture added her opinion, say- 
 ing, 
 
 " I want my boy to learn his letters ex- 
 actly as I did, from a primer laid upon his 
 teacher's knee ; and I want the letters to 
 be pointed out with a great brass pin, as 
 mine were, and no other way." 
 
 Such of us as have ever been to one of 
 these dame-schools must, I think, always 
 hold them in kindly and loving remem- 
 brance, and particularly is this true in re-
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 45 
 
 gard to the dame-schools of Salem. In 
 this ancient city these schools differed 
 from their English counterparts in being 
 kept by gentlewomen for the benefit of 
 well-born children. The lower classes at- 
 tended the public schools. In those days 
 it would have been unutterably vulgar to 
 allow one's children to go to any but a pri- 
 vate school until they were old enough to 
 enter the higher grades. 
 
 Perhaps the most exclusive of all these 
 private schools was one kept by a pair 
 of gentlewomen living in the upper and 
 eminently respectable portion of Essex 
 Street. Their name was not Witherspoon, 
 but for purposes of disguise it may be well 
 to call it thus. The Misses Witherspoon's 
 school was not opened to whomsoever 
 might chance to knock. Only an intro- 
 duction by some person with untarnished 
 'scutcheon, who could vouch for one's pos- 
 session of an undoubted great-grandfather, 
 could gain admission to this small but ar- 
 istocratic symposium. I have reason to
 
 46 A Salem Dame-Scbool. 
 
 believe that I was not accepted without 
 a thorough examination of family docu- 
 ments, and that the scale was finally turned 
 in my favor by the production of an an- 
 cestress who was down in the witch rec- 
 ords as having testified against some poor 
 old goody or other, and signed "Phoebe 
 Chandler, her -{- mark." Once a pupil at 
 the Misses Witherspoon's school, however, 
 one's social superiority was firmly estab- 
 lished forever. In after years one might 
 elope with a grocer, become a spiritualis- 
 tic medium, or start a woman's bank, but 
 one could never be regarded as quite be- 
 yond the pale who could claim ever to 
 have been admitted to the select circle at 
 the Misses Witherspoon's. 
 
 Our way to school lay along the quieter 
 part of Essex Street. We always stopped 
 to sharpen our slate-pencils by rubbing 
 them upon the granite bases of the great 
 columns before Mechanic's Hall, and there 
 was one little drug shop before which we 
 always loitered to admire the crimson and
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 47 
 
 purple jars which adorned the windows. 
 The quaint little house where the witches 
 were tried was attached by one corner to 
 this shop. It was a quiet and common- 
 place building, occupied at that time by a 
 maker and mender of sun-umbrellas. It 
 stood back in a green yard, and from an 
 upper window projected, for a sign, a tri- 
 colored parasol. There was nothing at all 
 uncanny about the silent, weather-beaten 
 old house, yet we eyed it askance, and 
 once felt a thrill of genuine horror at the 
 gaunt apparition of a black cat stealing 
 with soft feet over the gray roof. 
 
 The Misses Witherspoon's house faced 
 Essex Street, but not to ruin the front 
 stair carpet we always went in by a door 
 which opened into the little side-yard. 
 This brought us into the kitchen, from 
 which the back stairs ascended. In order 
 that we might not look profanely upon the 
 domestic priestess of the household, a long 
 curtain of gay-colored patch was hung be- 
 side" the stairway, and we were further-
 
 48 A Salem Dame-Scbool. 
 
 more charged not to look over the top of 
 it when we reached a height upon the 
 stairs which made this possible. As a 
 natural result, the space behind the cur- 
 tain became a sort of Bluebeard's Cham- 
 ber, and one inevitably did peep now and 
 then, though one never saw anything more 
 wonderful than Miss Abby Witherspoon 
 wiping tea-cups. 
 
 The stairs led directly into a little back 
 chamber, in which we hung our outside 
 garments, and from this chamber we en- 
 tered the school-room. This was a low, 
 square apartment in the left-hand front 
 corner of the house, having two windows 
 on Essex Street, and I think only one 
 which looked upon the side-yard. The 
 walls had a wooden dado painted white, 
 while the paper, in brown and blue, re- 
 peated a meaningless pattern. There were 
 two rows of single desks, with hard, slip- 
 pery little yellow chairs. These were for 
 the girls. There was one row of seats 
 for boys, the female sex was the dom-
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 49 
 
 inant one at the Misses Witherspoon's, 
 and that was decorously removed to the 
 furthest possible limit. The Misses With- 
 erspoon had no great liking for boys. 
 They regarded them always with sus- 
 picion, as one might a Norwich torpedo, 
 and I do not believe that they ever came 
 wholly to consider it proper to allow them 
 to attend the school at all. 
 
 There were three Misses Witherspoon. 
 The oldest, Miss Emily, was rather severe 
 in outward appearance, with an upright 
 figure and remarkably keen dark eyes. 
 One fancied that she might have been 
 handsome as a young woman, but some- 
 thing too sharp and clever with her tongue. 
 She taught arithmetic, and put down on a 
 little slate marks for our misdemeanors. I 
 can hear now the brisk tap of her pencil, 
 and the measured and awful " Little girls, 
 my sharp eye is on you ! " Sometimes 
 this remark was personal instead of gen- 
 eral, and dire indeed was the shame which 
 overwhelmed that one of us whom she
 
 50 A Salem Dame-Scbool 
 
 named. Miss Lucy, the second sister, was 
 not made of such stuff as Miss Emily. 
 She was milder of face and gentler of 
 voice, and had a kindly, caressing way with 
 those pupils whose youth forced them to 
 spell out their lessons from a book upon 
 her knee. The third sister, Miss Abby, 
 was the housekeeper, and never appeared 
 in the school-room. All the sisters wore 
 scz.nt-skirted gowns, and their hair was 
 scalloped low over their ears and turned 
 up oddly behind to a tight fastening of 
 shell combs. 
 
 At recess we did not go to romp rudely 
 out-of-doors, but amused ourselves in the 
 house with A Ship from Canton and The 
 Genteel Lady, as became well-bred chil- 
 dren. An exception was made in favor of 
 the boys, who were told to go out into the 
 yard to shout. Miss Emily seemed to 
 think that boys must go somewhere oc- 
 casionally to shout, as a whale must come 
 up to blow. The boys never did shout. I 
 fancy they were too much depressed by
 
 A Salem Dame-SchooL 51 
 
 the great gentility of everything. There 
 were but two of them, and they generally 
 sat on a deserted hen-coop and banged 
 their heels and looked very dismal till the 
 little bell tinkled for them to come in. 
 When there had been a fall of moist snow, 
 the boys would sometimes snowball each 
 other in a perfunctory way, being bidden 
 to the sport by Miss Lucy ; and on such 
 occasions we of the gentler sex were al- 
 lowed to go and look upon the stirring 
 sight from the back-chamber window. 
 
 The elder of these two boys was a tall, 
 very pale, light-haired lad, who was called 
 by Miss Emily " Danyell." He had a 
 highly satisfactory disease of the eyes, 
 which often prevented him from studying 
 for an entire day, but which was fortu- 
 nately not aggravated by drawing pictures 
 on the slate and making Jacob's ladders. 
 On a Wednesday, when the girls all sewed, 
 Danyell did a deed without a name by 
 means of four pins stuck into a spool and 
 some bits of colored worsted. We heard
 
 52 A Salem Dame-School. 
 
 that he was making a lamp-mat for his 
 aunt, but I fear it was never finished, for 
 the other boy, one direful day, called Dan- 
 yell " a sissy knitting a night-cap for his 
 granny," and, although he was obliged to 
 stand for some time in a corner as a pun- 
 ishment, I think the iron of his sneering 
 words entered the soul of Danyell ; at all 
 events, the spool disappeared. 
 
 This same " other boy," whose name has 
 entirely faded from my memory, was de- 
 cidedly more masculine in character than 
 Danyell. He was a short, fat lad, and he 
 wore a bottle-green jacket, which was cov- 
 ered with .brass buttons, and fitted as 
 tightly as Tommy Traddles' own. His 
 hair was remarkably thick, and' he was a 
 very sullen boy, with a revengeful disposi- 
 tion. It was his standing grievance that 
 he went to a private school. He one day 
 confided to me that his cousin, who went 
 to the Broad Street school, had been 
 thrown down in a foot-ball rush, and had 
 had three teeth knocked in. He added
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 53 
 
 that a fellow could have some fun at a pub- 
 lic school, but that Miss Witherspoon's was 
 a baby-class. I did not like this slur on 
 our dear little school, and I totally disa- 
 greed with the sullen boy as to what was 
 fun. A short time after this Danyell was 
 withdrawn from the Misses Witherspoon's 
 to go to an academy somewhere, and the 
 green-jacketed boy was left to sit in a 
 row by himself, to go out to shout alone at 
 recess, and to sit gloomily by himself on 
 the hen-coop and swing his heels. 
 
 A certain air of gentle good-breeding 
 prevailed at the Misses Witherspoon's 
 school, which affected the children so far 
 that quarrels and sharp words seem to 
 have been practically unknown. This may 
 have been owing partly to the fact that we 
 were always under the eyes of our teach- 
 ers, even at recess ; but it is quite true 
 that we were little gentlewomen in school, 
 whatever we may have been out of it. 
 There are, for example, few schools to-day 
 where a child made conspicuous by her
 
 54 A Salem Dame-Scbool. 
 
 dress could escape unkindly jests and un- 
 timely displays of wit from her mates. It 
 chanced to be my lot at this time to be 
 arrayed in the cast-off raiment of a pair of 
 venerable great-aunts, whose taste in fab- 
 rics was, to say sooth, a little antiquated. 
 Accordingly, while other children wore 
 warm-colored plaids and soft cashmeres of 
 lovely hues, I was clad in gowns of dull 
 browns and smutty purples, or, still worse, 
 in flowered chintzes, which even in those 
 days looked hopelessly old-fashioned, and 
 resembled upholstery stuffs. My rubbers, 
 too, instead of being of the shiny, blue- 
 lined sort so dear to childish souls, were 
 literally what Miss Lucy called "gum- 
 shoes," being made of pure rubber spread 
 while hot over a last. They had an im- 
 pression of a clover leaf stamped on each 
 toe. After a little wear ugly pits began to 
 appear in the rubber, as if the shoes had 
 had small-pox. One side was thicker than 
 the other, and when taken off they closed 
 in a hateful way, and persisted in lying
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 55 
 
 upon the side. I used to think I could 
 have borne the other peculiarities with res- 
 ignation, but there was something partic- 
 ularly aggravating in having one's rubbers 
 shut up when taken from the feet. Other 
 children had neat little twine school-satch- 
 els, but I used the old green baize bag in 
 which my grandfather had carried his law 
 papers. It was so long and I so short that 
 it nearly touched the ground as I walked, 
 and my book and my apple rolled about 
 unpleasantly in the bottom. In these days, 
 what rude sport would not be directed by 
 school-girls against a child with such odd 
 belongings ! But so perfect was the kindly 
 good-breeding of the little dame-school that 
 I never remember a smile or significant 
 glance, though I must have been indeed an 
 odd and antiquated figure. 
 
 Beside these invaluable teachings of 
 kindness and courtesy the lessons were 
 few and simple. We read and spelled and 
 wrote copies on our slates. We chanted 
 the multiplication table to an "adapted"
 
 56 A Salem Dame-ScbooL 
 
 Yankee Doodle. We learned addition and 
 subtraction by an abacus, which was an 
 article like a wire broiler strung with col- 
 ored wooden beads, and which had the ef- 
 fect of at once destroying any possibility 
 of original effort on the part of the pupil. 
 When we were marked for any misde- 
 meanor we had to go to Miss Emily and 
 ask what we should do to " make up our 
 marks." Before doing this it was the fash- 
 ion to cry or pretend to cry for a 
 few moments, with one's head resting upon 
 the desk. I do not think any of us ever 
 really shed a tear, but it was a perfunctory 
 way we had of showing our sense of the 
 disgrace of having a mark. The " making 
 up a mark" was by no means a heavy 
 penance. It usually consisted of writing 
 one's name ten times, or making some fig- 
 ures, or " doing sums " on a slate. 
 
 We recited in arithmetic to Miss Emily, 
 but as we had all sorts of odd books each 
 child was in a class by herself. Most of 
 the pupils had arithmetics of the compara-
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 57 
 
 tively modern sort, wherein were rows of 
 pinks and apples, and little sparrows oblig- 
 ingly sitting on fences in the twos and 
 threes necessary for teaching the first two 
 of the four simple rules. My own book, 
 however, was of a far earlier time, rum- 
 maged out of the attic for my special use. 
 It was a thin, brown volume, with an hon- 
 est enough outside, but the contents were 
 of a peculiarly misleading and beguiling 
 character. It opened with an apparently 
 artless tale of an old woman whose name 
 was Jane, who lived " all alone by herself 
 in a small hut upon the lea." She was 
 further described as being very poor, so 
 poor that she depended for her living upon 
 selling the few little things raised in her 
 tiny garden patch and the eggs laid by her 
 three speckled hens. The wind blew about 
 her humble cot, and in winter time often 
 drove the snow through the cracks in the 
 old walls. Jane was, however, a good and 
 thrifty old woman, and did her best to 
 make an honest living. Each of her spec-
 
 ?8 A Salem Dame-School. 
 
 kled hens laid her a nice white egg every 
 day : now how many days would it take 
 for old Jane to save a dozen eggs to 
 carry to market ? All the problems in the 
 book were of this same deceitful sort, and 
 the way in which the youthful attention 
 was ensnared by the semblance to a tale, 
 and then suddenly brought up by a point- 
 blank demand of "how much" or "how 
 many," was calculated to kill forever one's 
 faith in human nature. 
 
 In addition to our book lessons, we were 
 taught various quaint little accomplish- 
 ments, such as courtesying prettily and the 
 like, and every Wednesday Miss Lucy in- 
 structed us in needlework. A brother of 
 the ladies had been a captain in the East 
 India merchant service. We children were 
 dimly aware of a never quite dissipated 
 odor of sandal-wood and camphor about 
 the old house, there was always a waft 
 of it when the front entry door was opened, 
 and we believed that the guest chamber 
 contained much treasure in the way of fans,
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 59 
 
 silks, and embroidered crape shawls. We 
 never saw anything, however, except on 
 some afternoons, when we were judged to 
 be especially deserving, and were rewarded 
 by the sight of a whale's tooth curiously 
 carved, an ivory-tinted ostrich egg, and a 
 lump of golden amber in which a tiny 
 hapless fly was mysteriously imprisoned. 
 These treasures, although not at all un- 
 common in Salem, the seat of the old East 
 India trade, yet had always a mystic charm 
 for us. I recall now the delightful air of 
 pride with which the sisters would refer to 
 "our brother, Captain Witherspoon," and 
 the tone, slightly tinged with incredulity, 
 with which they described to us the man- 
 ners and customs of foreign lands. I have 
 seen much amber since that time, but none 
 with the magic charm which surrounded 
 that bit held on dear Miss Lucy's palm, or 
 seriously rubbed upon Miss Lucy's silk 
 apron and made to attract bits of paper 
 scattered on the table. 
 " The one holiday which was held in high
 
 60 A Salem Dame-Scbool. 
 
 favor by our teachers was New Year's Day. 
 Miss Lucy told us that her mother used to 
 receive many visitors upon that day, and 
 that the sisters wished always to keep it as 
 long as she lived. At this time it was the 
 custom for two of the pupils to visit the 
 homes of the others, and collect a certain 
 small sum from each as a holiday gift to 
 our teachers. This sum was neatly in- 
 closed in an envelope, and handed to Miss 
 Emily, with a wish for a happy New Year. 
 It was always received with a well-bred 
 air of surprise, though the gift had been 
 collected and presented in exactly the 
 same manner ever since the school was 
 opened. 
 
 On the other hand, our teachers had a 
 surprise of like sort for us. After the 
 morning devotions, we were marshaled 
 into an orderly line, and conducted down 
 the back stairs and through the kitchen to 
 the door of the sunny parlor, where old 
 Madam Witherspoon sat. She was a tiny 
 and rigidly dignified old lady, in a scant
 
 A Salem Dame-School. 61 
 
 black satin gown and a white lace cap. 
 Before crossing the threshold each one of 
 us was required to draw out her dress- 
 skirts correctly, make a courtesy, and 
 say, 
 
 " I wish you a happy New Year, Madam 
 Witherspoon." 
 
 To this she replied by a stately bow. 
 Before her, upon a small table, was ranged 
 a collection of gifts, from which we were 
 allowed to choose. The first year I was in 
 the school there were knives and harmoni- 
 cums for the boys, and for the girls little 
 cabinets painted red and quite sticky with 
 varnish, and dolls so stiff and antiquated 
 and with such old-fashioned faces that I 
 cannot imagine where they were discov- 
 ered, unless the old ladies had conjured 
 them out of the memory of some shop of 
 their childhood. There clung to these 
 gifts, though we had prettier ones at home, 
 the same aroma of quaint delight which ex- 
 haled from everything about the charming 
 old house. After this ceremony we were
 
 62 A Salem Dame-School. 
 
 graciously dismissed, and the rest of the 
 day was our own. 
 
 It may, perhaps, be true that there was 
 no great wisdom to be gained at the little 
 dame-school. Our lessons were few and 
 simple, and the methods were undoubtedly 
 old-fashioned. However, what we learned 
 we learned thoroughly, and there were les- 
 sons not to be found in books to be gained 
 from the daily example of the two fine 
 old gentlewomen, with their rigid ideas of 
 right and wrong and the quaintly elegant 
 manners of an age gone by. 
 
 Many are the children, now grown and 
 scattered, who have sat under their gentle 
 sway, and surely not one of them can think 
 to-day without a thrill of kindly affection 
 of the little dame-school in the gray old 
 house on Essex Street
 
 TWO SALEM INSTITUTIONS. 
 
 history of the charming and ven- 
 erable town of Salem would be 
 complete which omitted the men- 
 tion of those two purely Salem institutions, 
 Black-jacks and Gibraltars. They possess 
 all the prestige and dignity of respectable 
 age. They are no modern and frivolous 
 confection, such as cream caramels or 
 chocolates duchesse. Our fathers knew 
 Black-jack. Gibraltars met with the se- 
 date approval of our grandmothers. Black- 
 jacks and Gibraltars are prehistoric. 
 
 Since there may chance to be alive some 
 free-born American who does not know 
 these highly proper confections, it is, per- 
 haps, as well to state that a Black-jack is 
 a generous stick of a dark and saccharine 
 compound which combines a variety of 
 flavors. In tasting Black-jack you imagine
 
 64 Two Salem Institutions. 
 
 that you detect a hint of maple syrup, a 
 trace of butter, a trifle of brown sugar and 
 molasses, and a tiny fancy of the whole 
 mixture's having been burnt on to the 
 kettle. Make no mistake, however. This 
 burnt flavor is not accidental, but inten- 
 tional. It is one of the mysteries, not par- 
 ticularly pleasant perhaps, but it is the cor- 
 rect Black-jack flavor, and no Black-jack 
 worthy of the name would consent to be 
 without it. To the youthful palate Black- 
 jack possesses a taste at once sweet and 
 bitter, rich and slightly medicinal, but alto- 
 gether joyous and delightsome. 
 
 The Gibraltar, on the other hand, is a 
 white and delicate candy, flavored with 
 lemon or peppermint, soft as cream at one 
 stage of its existence, but capable of hard- 
 ening into a consistency so stony and so 
 unutterably flinty-hearted that it is almost 
 a libel upon the rock whose name it bears. 
 The Gibraltar is the aristocrat of Salem 
 confectionery. It gazes upon chocolate 
 and sherbet and says :
 
 Two Salem Institutions. 65 
 
 " Before you were, I was. After you are 
 not, I shall be." 
 
 Black jack decidedly has not that air of 
 exclusiveness which marks the Gibraltar. 
 Black-jack has about it a reckless and some- 
 what riotous devil-may-carishness. It is 
 preeminently the joy of the youthful It 
 satisfies young ambition. It fills all one's 
 desires as to stickiness and sweetness. It 
 is of convenient size if one be generously 
 disposed to offer bites. It is a consoler of 
 grief, and a sympathizer in time of joy. 
 
 The Gibraltar is the daintier sweet- 
 meat. One may eat a dozen could one 
 be so ill-bred without soiling one's finger 
 tips. The Gibraltar, although well loved 
 in childhood, grows with our growth, ever 
 increasing in value through the years, to 
 become in time the cherished companion 
 of our age. The taste in flavors is apt to 
 change, lemon being preferred by youth. 
 Indeed, I remember the pathetic saying of 
 a charming old Salem dame : 
 
 <C I know I must be growing old, because 
 S
 
 66 Two Salem Institutions. 
 
 a peppermint Gibraltar is so comforting to 
 me!" 
 
 It is related of a Salem lady who went 
 abroad for an extended tour that she car- 
 ried with her a plenteous supply of Gibral- 
 tars, and that whenever she found herself 
 feeling lonely, or ill with home-longing, 
 she ate a Gibraltar, and was straightway 
 consoled. 
 
 The Gibraltar is the confection of age, 
 to the exclusion of Black-jack. One could 
 not imagine my dear old friend, Miss Mary- 
 Ellen, rioting in the sticky delight of Black- 
 jack, but I think she was never without a 
 neatly wrapped Gibraltar in her work, 
 basket, which from time to time she nibbled 
 with much dignity and serious enjoyment. 
 
 In spite of their differences of constitu- 
 tion, however, Black-jack and Gibraltar are 
 firm friends, united by the bonds of age 
 and long companionship. Together they 
 have lived. Together they have rejoiced 
 the souls of generations. Witch Hill may 
 blow away ; the East India Museum may
 
 Two Salem Institutions. 67 
 
 be swallowed up in earth ; Charter Street 
 Burying Ground may go out to sea ; but as 
 long as a single house remains standing in 
 Salem Village, so long will Black-jack and 
 Gibraltar wisely reign, and retain their 
 honorable place in the inmost hearts of the 
 Salem people.
 
 SALEM CUPBOARDS. 
 
 HERE were cupboards in Salem. 
 Whether they are there still, or 
 have been built up, or pulled down, 
 or swept away, in the march of modern im- 
 provement, I know not, but in my child- 
 hood there were cupboards in Salem. 
 
 They were, moreover, real cupboards ; 
 no after-thoughts, built across the end of 
 an entry here or the corner of a room 
 there, places into which to huddle um- 
 brellas and overcoats, or to hustle mend- 
 ing and children's litter out of the sight of 
 visitors. Salem cupboards were always in- 
 tentional. The builder understood his re- 
 sponsibility, and acted accordingly. The 
 housewife regarded her cupboards as the 
 inner and most sacred portion of her trust. 
 It was no light task even to keep the keys 
 always counted and polished. As for los-
 
 Salem Cupboards. 6$ 
 
 ing one, or forgetting which was which, 
 that would indicate a mind so utterly friv- 
 olous that one could hardly conceive of it. 
 
 The genuine, old-time Salem housekeeper 
 realized that there was a conscience in her 
 work. She took her cupboards seriously. 
 To her there was nothing trivial about 
 them. To do her duty by her cupboards 
 was one of the most inviolable principles 
 of her sober and decorous life. 
 
 It took no ordinary brain to keep watch 
 and ward over these cupboards. They 
 were many in number. They were con- 
 fusing as to size and shape. They pos- 
 sessed the charm of the unexpected. One 
 never knew quite when or where one 
 should chance upon them. They were tall 
 and narrow beside the fireplace, or low and 
 chubby above it ; they lurked behind the 
 wainscoting, like Polonius back of the arras. 
 One of them was to be reached only by a 
 step-ladder; another jolly pair occupied 
 crannies under two deep window-seats. In 
 one "house was a cupboard which pretended
 
 70 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 to be solid wall, but was really a deep re- 
 cess for the concealment of firearms ; and 
 in yet another was a narrow closet about 
 which hung the horror of an old Ginevra- 
 like legend of smothering to death. 
 
 There was literally no end to the num- 
 ber and variety of Salem cupboards. They 
 possessed a charm quite their own, and 
 this charm was felt to the utmost by the 
 children, who were only occasionally al- 
 lowed to view the treasures kept under 
 strict lock and key by the high priestesses 
 of these sacred nooks and shrines. 
 
 Foremost in the memory of delightful 
 Salem cupboards stands the dining-room 
 closet of a second-cousin of ours, whom we 
 called Cousin Susan. She was a widow of 
 some fifty odd years, and kept house for a 
 bachelor brother, who was a retired sea- 
 captain. She was a round, trim, black- 
 eyed woman, greatly afflicted with rheu- 
 matism, for which reason she always 
 walked with a cane. The cane was of 
 some dark, foreign wood, highly polished,
 
 Salem Cupboards. ji 
 
 and the top was carved to resemble a fal- 
 con's head, with shining eyes of yellow 
 glass. 
 
 Cousin Susan was a kindly soul, who 
 would, I think, have even been merry, had 
 not the austerity of her youthful training 
 warped her natural instincts and given her 
 a certain rigidly virtuous air. She be- 
 lieved very sincerely in the old-time maxim 
 that "children should be seen, and not 
 heard," and she had rather an alarming 
 way at times of saying "Tut, tut!" But 
 she was really fond of young people, and 
 whenever we went to see her she would 
 say seductively, 
 
 " I wonder, now, if we could find any- 
 thing nice in Cousin Susan's dining-room 
 cupboard." 
 
 And truly that person who failed to do 
 so must have been hard to please ; for, in 
 our eyes at least, that cupboard held a lit- 
 tle of everything that was rare and de- 
 lightful. 
 
 A most delicious odor came forth when
 
 J2 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 the door was opened : a hint of the spici- 
 ness of rich cake, a tingling sense of pre- 
 served ginger, and a certain ineffable 
 sweetness which no other closet ever pos- 
 sessed, and which I know not how to de- 
 scribe. It might well have proceeded from 
 the walls and shelves of the cupboard it- 
 self, for they were indeed emblems of pur- 
 ity. The paint was varnished to a high 
 degree of glossiness, and was so exqui- 
 sitely kept as to look like white porcelain. 
 The china here, as in all genuine Salem 
 cupboards, was chiefly of the honest old 
 blue Canton ware. There were shining 
 piles of those plates which, while they are 
 rather heavy to handle, always surprise 
 one by being so thin at the edges. There 
 were generous teacups like small bowls, 
 squat pitchers with big noses, and a tureen 
 whose cover had the head of a boar for a 
 handle. And in all this the blue was dull 
 and deep in tint, with a certain ill-defined, 
 vaporous quality at the edges of the lines, 
 and the white of the cool greenish tinge of
 
 Salem Cupboards. 73 
 
 a duck's egg. You can buy blue Canton 
 to-day, but it is not old blue Canton. Such 
 china is matchless now, but in this cup- 
 board there were shelves of it. 
 
 Cousin Susan possessed also another set 
 of china, which she valued far above her 
 blue. It was always singularly attractive 
 to us as children, though I have come to 
 believe that it is far less beautiful than the 
 Canton. It was a pure, thin white ware, 
 delicately fluted at the edges and deco- 
 rated with little raised lilac sprigs. It was 
 used only upon occasions of solemn com- 
 pany tea-drinkings, and Cousin Susan al- 
 ways washed it herself in her little cedar 
 dish - tub. We children considered this 
 china so choice and desirable that a bit 
 of a broken saucer, which included one of 
 the pale, tiny sprays, was cherished far 
 above our real doll's dishes. We lent it 
 from one to another, each of us keeping 
 it for one day ; but it was always one of 
 those unsatisfactory treasures of childhood 
 for which we could never find any adequate
 
 74 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 use. We could think of nothing to do 
 with this bit of china which seemed at all 
 worthy of so lovely an object. 
 
 At the left hand of Cousin Susan's 
 shelves of china was a little cupboard with 
 a diamond-paned glass door. This was the 
 sanctum sanctorum, a cupboard within a 
 cupboard ; and here, as one might have ex- 
 pected, were stored the choicest treasures 
 of all. It was not the domestic preserve 
 closet. Cousin Susan was thrifty, and 
 had good store of home-made dainties, but 
 they were kept in the cool seclusion of a 
 dark cellar store-room. This little glass 
 cupboard held the stock of foreign sweet- 
 meats : the round-shouldered blue jars, in- 
 closed in a network of split bamboo, which 
 contained the fiery, amber ginger ; the flat 
 boxes of guava jelly, hot curry powders, 
 chilli sauce, and choleric Bengal chutney. 
 Here were two miniature casks of tam- 
 arinds, jolly and black, Cousin Susan's 
 favorites. She had a certain air of dis< 
 approval toward most of these strange
 
 Salem Cupboards. 75 
 
 conserves. " They are not good for little 
 people," she averred ; and indeed she al- 
 ways maintained that these ardent sweet- 
 meats were fitter for the delectation of 
 rude men than for the delicate palates of 
 gentlewomen. Of tamarinds, however, 
 Cousin Susan did approve. Properly di- 
 luted with cool water, they made what she 
 called a " very pretty drink." She was 
 fond of sending a glass to any neighbor 
 who was ill and feverish, and she was al- 
 ways following our cousin the sea-captain 
 about with a blue china bowl of the mix- 
 ture, begging him to partake of it. 
 
 " Susan, I hate tamarind- water," our 
 cousin would protest. 
 
 " It will cool your blood, William," his 
 sister would urge. 
 
 " But I don't want my blood cool. I 
 want it warm," the captain would reply. 
 
 As a general thing, however, Cousin Su- 
 san came off triumphant. The captain 
 grumblingly partook of his dose, and was 
 always most generous in sharing it with
 
 76 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 us children. The beautiful little brown 
 stones also fell to our lot, and we hoarded 
 the useless things with great care, although 
 it always seemed to us a great oversight 
 on the part of nature that tamarind seeds 
 did not have holes through them, that one 
 might string them as beads. 
 
 Cousin Susan's cupboard also contained 
 stronger waters than tamarind, for side by 
 side sat two corpulent cut-glass decanters, 
 of which one was half filled with madeira 
 wine, and the other with honest rum. A 
 variety of sweet cakes was near by, to be 
 served with the wine to any chance visitor. 
 There were black fruit cake in a japanned 
 box ; " hearts and rounds " of rich yellow 
 pound cake ; and certain delicate but inane 
 little sponge biscuit, of which our cousin 
 spoke by the older-fashioned name of diet 
 
 or, as she chose to pronounce it, "dier" 
 
 bread. She always called the sponge 
 cakes " little dier breads." Pound and fruit 
 cakes were forbidden to our youth, but we 
 might have our ladylike fill of " dier breads,"
 
 Salem Cupboards. 77 
 
 and also of delightful seed-cakes, which 
 were cut in the shape of an oak-leaf, and 
 were marvels of sugary thinness. 
 
 These seed-cakes, by the bye, were kept 
 in a jar which deserves at least a passing 
 mention. It was, I suppose, some two or 
 three feet high, though it looked to me 
 then much higher. It was of blue-and- 
 white china, and was fitted with a cover of 
 dull silver. Tradition stated that some sea- 
 faring ancestor had brought it home from 
 Calcutta, filled with rock-candy. What 
 was done with so large a supply of this 
 confection I never knew. In those days 
 choice sugar-plums were not as plenty as 
 they have since become; possibly at the 
 time "Black-jacks" and "Gibraltars" were 
 unknown, and this was Salem's only candy. 
 At all events, it is somewhere recorded 
 that the ship Belisarius brought from Cal- 
 cutta " ten thousand seven hundred and 
 sixty-seven pounds" of this same rocky 
 and crystalline dainty. The fact of such a 
 quantity of candy had for us children a
 
 78 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 superb and opulent significance. What an 
 idea, to have a choice confection, not by 
 the stick or beggarly ounce, but by the jar- 
 ful ! To think of going and casually help- 
 ing one's self at will ! To imagine lifting 
 that silver lid, and gazing unreproved into 
 the sugary depths ! Perhaps nice, white- 
 haired spinsters used it in glittering lumps 
 to sweeten their tea, or even served it at 
 table by the plateful, as one might serve 
 cake. Fancy exhausted itself in all sorts 
 of delightful speculations. The whole le- 
 gend had a profuse and mythical sound. 
 It was like a fairy tale, a scene from Ara- 
 bian Nights. It threw about the jar and 
 the cupboard a mystic charm which time 
 fails to efface. Even now a stick of spar- 
 kling rock-candy has power to call up 
 Cousin Susan's dining-room cupboard, its 
 sweet, curious perfume, the quaint old sil- 
 ver and blue china, and the huge turkey- 
 feather fan, with its carved ivory handle 
 and wreath of brilliant painted flowers, 
 which hung on the inside of the door.
 
 Salem Cupboards. jg 
 
 Out of the shadows of the past comes 
 another memory, the picture of that strange 
 old Salem homestead which has been made 
 known to fame as the House of the Seven 
 Gables. Some alterations have done away 
 with two of the gables, but the old house 
 is otherwise unchanged. In the days of 
 my childhood its mistress was a lonely wo- 
 man, about whom hung the mystery of one 
 whose solitude is peopled by the weird 
 visions that opium brings. We regarded 
 her with something of awe, and I have 
 wondered, in later days, what strange and 
 eldritch beings walked with her about those 
 shadowy rooms, or flitted noiselessly up 
 and down the fine old staircase. 
 
 The House of the Seven Gables was no 
 open and joyous dwelling, where children 
 loved to flock and run about at will. There 
 was always an air of ceremony and dignity 
 here, and a certain oppressive chill haunted 
 the great low parlor, where the beams di- 
 vided the ceiling into squares. We never 
 paid a visit there except with some grown
 
 8o Salem Cupboards. 
 
 person, and then sat throughout our stay, 
 dangling our legs from our high chairs, 
 and studying the quaintly stiff array of or- 
 naments upon the lofty mantel. There 
 were three covered Delft jars, two vases of 
 flowers, and at either end a flask-shaped 
 china vase. Between these taller articles 
 were set shallow cups of painted china. 
 Except in the flowers which filled the two 
 middle vases, I never knew the arrange- 
 ment of the mantel to differ. 
 
 A large jar stood on the floor directly 
 beneath the mantel, and ranged firmly 
 about the room were several Dutch apple- 
 tree chairs, with others of old-fashioned 
 severity. On the right of the mantel was 
 a delightful cupboard, whose tall, arched 
 door often stood open, displaying a beauti- 
 ful collection of old cut glass. We chil- 
 dren used to describe this cupboard as 
 " hollow," it being, in fact, shaped like an 
 apse. It had six semi-circular shelves, all 
 of rich dark wood, against which the rows 
 of splendid old glass glittered most bravely
 
 Salem Cupboards. 81 
 
 There were graceful pitchers, shallow 
 dishes, odd bowls, and flagons almost with- 
 out number. On the floor of the cupboard 
 a vast china punch-bowl was flanked by 
 jars and vases each more enchanting than 
 the other. I believe there was no truly 
 housewifely dame in Salem who did not 
 adore and envy this wealth of crystal, but 
 although we children admired it, it did not 
 inspire us with any deeper feelings. It 
 did not appeal to the youthful imagination. 
 It was an array of frail and icy splendor, 
 toward which our hearts could not warm ; 
 not even the subtle suggestions of good 
 cheer conveyed by delicate wine-glasses 
 and portly old decanters could charm 
 minds so unformed and simple as ours. 
 
 Equally far removed from childish emo- 
 tions, and even more splendid, was the 
 chest of family silver, which we were some- 
 times allowed to behold. How little did 
 we think, as we viewed in admiring silence 
 the fine heavy tankards, candlesticks, old 
 two-tined silver forks, and antique porrin-
 
 82 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 gers, that the fate of this haughty collec- 
 tion was to be sold for mere old silver, and 
 hustled without respect or reverence to a 
 fiery death in the silversmith's crucible ! 
 Sadly changed since that day is the House 
 of the Seven Gables. The family silver is 
 melted ; the antique-furnishings are scat- 
 tered ; and gone, one knows not whither, 
 the beautiful old glass, the glory of that 
 tall, dark, " hollow " cupboard, and the pride 
 of that strange mistress, who dreamed such 
 dreams and saw such eerie visions in her 
 great lonely chamber above-stairs. 
 
 Another Salem cupboard, which is al- 
 ways of pleasant memory, was in the house 
 of one of my schoolmates, with whom I was 
 spasmodically intimate. I am sorry to say 
 that our visits to this closet were attended 
 by a certain awful joy, from the fact that 
 they always partook of a character surrep- 
 titious, not to say sneaking. I was assured 
 by my companion that her mother ap- 
 proved of her investigations, but, at the 
 same time, she casually mentioned that it
 
 Salem Cupboards. 83 
 
 was as well not to speak in the front entry, 
 and that the fourth stair from the top 
 creaked " so awful " that she usually made 
 a point of stepping over it. 
 
 The chamber containing the closet was 
 a back room, seldom visited, and used only 
 for the storage of trunks and boxes. The 
 windows were fitted with shutters, in one 
 of which a heart-shaped hole had been cut 
 to admit a little light At the chimney 
 end the room was wainscoted to the ceil- 
 ing with wood which had never been 
 painted, but which had taken a fine brown 
 color from age and the fires which had 
 once roared on the red-tiled hearth. The 
 closet in this brown paneling was one of 
 the tall and narrow sort, and the shelves 
 ran back very deep. It was of the same 
 age-darkened wood within as without, and 
 the door sagged on its hinges, so that we 
 had. to lift it together when we opened it ; 
 otherwise we might have disturbed some 
 of those people below who were so very 
 willing we should be there. In this cup-
 
 84 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 board were stored the possessions of a 
 great-aunt of my friend. We had seen an 
 ivory picture of her in the parlor many 
 times, and we thought of her always as a 
 thin young creature, with unnaturally large 
 gray eyes, and a neck that looked too 
 slender to bear the weight of the small 
 Head with its wealth of piled-up auburn 
 hair. Her name was Isabel, and she had 
 died in her early girlhood. Nobody seemed 
 to remember much about her. Perhaps 
 there was nothing to remember. Her 
 miniature and her framed sampler were 
 preserved with honor, but I think my 
 friend and myself were the only ones who 
 cared for the relics which were put away 
 in this upper cupboard. 
 
 There were a number of books of the 
 floral-token order, containing sentimental 
 verses and bits of elegant prose in praise 
 of the Rose, the Lily, the Rainbow, and 
 kindred subjects. They were embellished 
 with the portraits of large-eyed and small- 
 mouthed beauties with wonderful ringlets,
 
 Salem Cupboards. 85 
 
 and the covers, though now faded, had 
 once been gorgeous with gilding and floral 
 designs. An unpleasant feature of these 
 books was the fact that when one opened 
 them tiny brown spiders went " tacking " 
 crookedly across the pages. They were a 
 highly objectionable sort of spiders, that 
 did not at all mind being suddenly jammed 
 between the pages, for they were already 
 too flat to be any flatter, and that would 
 just as lief run backward as forward with 
 their ugly crab-like legs. 
 
 On the same shelf with the books was 
 the mahogany box of water-colors with 
 which poor Isabel, who had accomplish- 
 ments, forsooth, had made the prim little 
 sketches which filled a portfolio. They 
 were chiefly of the stencil-plate variety, 
 done from boarding-school "patterns," in 
 clear colors, upon white, gilt-edged draw- 
 ing-paper. There was one full-blown white 
 rose, painted with exquisite neatness and 
 delicacy, which was an especial favorite of 
 ours ; but most of the designs were wreaths
 
 86 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 and garlands of flowers surrounding verses 
 of poetry copied in a fine hand. There 
 was also on this shelf an album, wherein 
 friends had written verses from the poets, 
 and admirers had even ventured upon 
 original tributes " To Isabel." 
 
 In a bag of faded brocade was a tangle 
 of pale sampler silks and crewels, not in 
 that deliciously prim state of order which 
 one would have expected of Isabel. Per- 
 haps before our day some other child had 
 tossed them over, even as we did, longing 
 but not daring to appropriate them. Some- 
 how, these silks and wools seemed so much 
 prettier than those of any ordinary, down- 
 stairs work-bag ; and certainly nothing 
 could in any way compare with the basket 
 of pieces of French prints with which Isa- 
 bel had been " setting a Job's Patience." 
 No modern cottons possess the faint deli- 
 cacy of color and fabric of these old-time 
 French calicoes. We used to delight in 
 spreading the pieces out upon the floor, 
 and choosing, in discreet whispers, what 
 patterns we would like for gowns.
 
 Salem Cupboards. 87 
 
 Piles of yellow old newspapers filled the 
 closet's upper shelves, and a box of thin 
 gauze ribbons and a few pairs of silk 
 gloves, long and limp, completed the list of 
 Isabel's relics. It would be hard to de- 
 scribe the singular charm which clung 
 about these simple keepsakes, though 
 probably, in great part, it was that the joy 
 was a forbidden one. Be that as it may, 
 there was a remarkable attraction exer- 
 cised upon us by the silent chamber, the 
 ray of sunlight which fell through the 
 heart-shaped hole in the shutter, the nar- 
 row brown cupboard, and the precious pos- 
 sessions of poor gray-eyed Isabel, who to 
 us could never be old. 
 
 When, as children, we had been espe- 
 cially good, we were sometimes rewarded 
 by being sent upon a visit to a certain de- 
 lightful maiden lady whom we called " Miss 
 Mary-Ellen." It was really Miss Mary- 
 EJlen whom we went to see, but we always 
 hoped that her sister, Miss Eliza-Ann, 
 would be at home, for Miss Eliza-Ann was
 
 88 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 very strange and did surprising things. 
 She was the elder of the two sisters, and 
 might in these days have been called 
 strong-minded, though the word then was 
 "eccentric." She was a tall, long-armed 
 woman, with a Roman nose, piercing black 
 eyes, and a wild-looking brown wig which 
 was always awry. This wig, by the way, 
 possessed an awful fascination for us chil- 
 dren, partly because it was a wig, and 
 partly because Miss Eliza-Ann had a star- 
 tling habit of suddenly plucking it from her 
 head with a vindictive clutch, and casting 
 it upon the floor, when she was absorbed 
 in study, annoyed by the heat, or excited 
 by discussion. One never knew at what 
 moment she might do this, and therefore 
 we always watched her with hopeful inter- 
 est. She held great possibilities of amuse- 
 ment. She became in time, for us, a sort 
 of majestic Punch and Judy. Her head 
 was as smooth and ivory-tinted as the os- 
 trich egg which adorned the mantel, and 
 when she doffed her wig her whole ap-
 
 Salem Cupboards. 89 
 
 pearance underwent the most extraordi- 
 nary change. This habit was terribly an- 
 noying to Miss Mary-Ellen, herself the 
 most dainty and decorous of maiden la- 
 dies. I can see yet the horrified way in 
 which she would lift her hands, crying, 
 
 " Oh, Eliza-Ann, Eliza-Ann, how can 
 you do so ? " 
 
 " Because, Mary-Ellen," Miss Eliza-Ann 
 would respond, in her slightly bass voice, 
 " I am uncomfortable. My brain is too 
 warm to think." 
 
 " Then at least put on a handkerchief," 
 her sister would plead. "It really doesn't 
 seem decent ; before the children, too ! " 
 
 To which Miss Eliza-Ann was apt to 
 reply by her favorite exclamation, " Fid- 
 dlesticks ! " 
 
 However, she would eventually hang 
 loosely over her head a red bandanna 
 handkerchief, which certainly gave her a 
 very witch-like and unpleasant look. She 
 was a woman of superior and, for those 
 days, unusual scholarly attainments. Her
 
 go Salem Cupboards. 
 
 friends sighed and shook their heads a 
 little over " poor Eliza-Ann." It would 
 have been more truly feminine, they felt, 
 had she not been quite so fine a linguist 
 and mathematician. They could not thor- 
 oughly approve of her being able to fit 
 youths for Harvard. Her masculine fail- 
 ings were, however, rather softened by the 
 fact that Miss Eliza-Ann was a model of 
 feminine modesty. In spite of the episodes 
 of the wig, she was severely proper in her 
 way, and a highly irreverent nephew has 
 even been known to declare that his aunt 
 always drew circles by a saucer, consider- 
 ing dividers indelicate on account of their 
 limbs. She had what was, in our eyes, a 
 highly objectionable habit of unexpectedly 
 pouncing upon us with mathematical co- 
 nundrums. She delighted to spring upon 
 us at unguarded moments, and ask trium- 
 phantly, 
 
 " How much are twelve and nine ? and 
 thirteen ? and twenty-one ? and seven ? " 
 
 And this abominable practice she would
 
 Salem Cupboards. 91 
 
 sometimes pursue for an entire afternoon, 
 waiting until we were happily forgetful and 
 absorbed, and then suddenly attacking us 
 once more with an explosive "And fifteen ? 
 and nine ? " She called this pastime the 
 " game of mental addition," but it was a 
 sorry game for us. We used to dodge 
 around corners to avoid meeting her on 
 the street, for fear of being confronted 
 with one of these baleful questions ; and I 
 recollect encountering Miss Eliza-Ann at a 
 party, when I was quite a grown girl, and 
 having to struggle to persuade myself that 
 she would no longer raise her thin fore- 
 finger and say, "And seven? and eight- 
 een ? " 
 
 As for Miss Mary-Ellen, she was in 
 every way a contrast to her more brilliant 
 sister. She was tall, but, being in delicate 
 health, she was of fragile figure, and was 
 never seen without a demure little shawl 
 about her shoulders. She usually wore a 
 a gown of very dark satin changing from 
 green to black, and a long black silk apron.
 
 92 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 Her ordinary shawl was of fine white cash- 
 mere, with a border in black and slaty-blue, 
 and a single large palm-leaf ornamented 
 the corner which hung exactly in the mid- 
 dle of the back. She had other shawls of 
 much gorgeousness, which appeared only 
 upon festive occasions. Miss Mary-Ellen's 
 face was almost as pale as her lovely silver 
 hair, which she wore in little curls each 
 side of her temples. Her cap was white, 
 with tiny bows of lavender ribbon, and her 
 wide worked collar was fastened by a pin 
 containing hair from the heads of her 
 father and mother. I think that she had 
 the very sweetest and most lovable with- 
 ered old face in the world. I dare say she 
 was no beauty, but we firmly believed her 
 one. She was so delicately and exqui- 
 sitely fragrant and immaculate that it was 
 like caressing a bunch of garden pinks to 
 put your cheek against hers. Above all, 
 her countenance so beamed with a gentle 
 and innocent kindliness, a sort of beneficent 
 love and charity for all mankind, that we
 
 Salem Clipboards. 9} 
 
 children could not choose but adore her. 
 She was not a scholar, like her sister, but 
 she possessed various pretty accomplish- 
 ments. She directed the house, and, when 
 her health permitted, she always made the 
 "diet bread." It used to be a belief in 
 Salem that it took a lady's hand to make 
 really elegant sponge-cake. Heavier sorts 
 of dainties might be trusted to servants, 
 but only a gentlewoman could fitly be ex- 
 pected to take the responsibility of this 
 most delicate of sweets. So true was this 
 that if a once famous school in Salem did 
 not actually include sponge-cake in its cur- 
 riculum, at least it is true that no young 
 lady's education was considered finished 
 until she had made a loaf of irreproachable 
 "diet bread." Miss Mary-Ellen's was fa- 
 mous even in Salem. She could also fash- 
 ion very pretty needle-books, and could 
 paint bright- colored butterflies on Chinese 
 rice-paper. Her delicate health confined 
 her much to the house, and she dearly 
 loved to have children visit her, if they
 
 94 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 were good. She could not bear bolster* 
 ous conduct, and quarrels and bickerings 
 caused her deep distress. It should be 
 said, however, that we seldom displayed 
 any but our best behavior to gentle Miss 
 Mary-Ellen, and she, on her part, used to 
 exert herself for our enjoyment. We were 
 allowed to play with the curious ivory 
 chessmen which her great-uncle Joseph 
 had brought from Calcutta ; she let us look 
 over her piece-bags, and choose one bit of 
 silk or satin for ourselves ; and last, and 
 best of all, she showed us her sitting-room 
 cupboard. 
 
 The sitting-room was above-stairs, as 
 Miss Mary-Ellen was often too feeble to 
 go down for many weeks together. Here 
 was Miss Eliza-Ann's severe study-table, 
 with its globe and books ; and here was 
 her sister's little work-stand, whose deep 
 green-baize drawer held her crewel work 
 and fine sewing ; and here, in a cupboard 
 in the white wainscoting, were stored away 
 many curious and delightful objects.
 
 Salem Cupboards. 95 
 
 Miss Mary-Ellen disliked to have her be- 
 longings handled, and during the inspec- 
 tion we were seated opposite our hostess, 
 and cautioned to keep our hands clasped. 
 This air of mild ceremony only added to 
 the delight of " seeing Miss Mary-Ellen's 
 things." It was in this cupboard, to begin 
 with, that she kept her shawls. There 
 was one of creamy China crepe, heavy with 
 silken embroidery ; another was of scarlet 
 camel's hair, of such fabulous fineness that 
 it might well have been one of those fairy- 
 tale fabrics which were so easily tucked 
 away in a nutshell. In our eyes, however, 
 the most beautiful were a pair of lovely 
 shoulder shawls from Canton, which dwelt 
 in scented seclusion in a sandal- wood box. 
 They were always called " the pina shawls," 
 but their softness was unlike the wiry tex- 
 ture of any pina cloth. One was white, 
 with the clear and dazzling whiteness of 
 spun glass, the groundwork as sheer as a 
 frost web, and the pattern of silvery lilies 
 gleaming with a silky sheen. The com-
 
 g6 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 panion shawl was of a charming shade of 
 rose-pink, and this was also shot through 
 with a design of silken flowers. These 
 shawls, our friend told us, she wore with 
 her black satin gown when she gave a 
 " tea-company ; " and she added cannily, 
 while putting them to bed in their folds of 
 soft Chinese paper, that she always wore 
 them by turns, so that one should last just 
 as long as the other. 
 
 On the second shelf of the cupboard 
 was a small tea-chest, which was appar- 
 ently full of certain strange beads. Our 
 hostess could not remember whether her 
 great-uncle had said that they had been 
 brought from Canton or Calcutta, but she 
 knew that they came from somewhere in 
 the magical East. Each bead was of the 
 size of a large pea, and was grooved lon- 
 gitudinally. They were made of a fine clay, 
 and were dull blue in color, with an odd 
 glistening effect, as if silver dust might 
 have been mixed with the clay. They 
 were perfumed, and when they became
 
 Salem Clipboards. 97 
 
 warm in the hand or on the neck gave forth 
 a musky sweetness, faint and enchanting. 
 Miss Mary-Ellen gave us each a string of 
 these beads, and I never happen upon 
 them to this day without being touched by 
 a sense of mystery. They suggest strange 
 Hindoo rites, Nautch dances, and women 
 with dusky throats ; they never have lost 
 the suggestive charm of that Orient from 
 whence they came. 
 
 Among the most pleasing of Miss Mary- 
 Ellen's relics were her fans, of which she 
 possessed a variety. There was one of 
 carved sandal-wood inlaid with pearl and 
 silver, and one of ivory, as fragile as yellow 
 lace ; but our delight was an old French 
 fan of light blue silk, whereon a little mar- 
 quis in silver and pink offered a rose to 
 a dainty marquise in puffs and patches, 
 while, just beyond, three maids, with arms 
 entwined, forever danced a minuet measure, 
 and about all were pale garlands of faded 
 roses and little naked Loves. We loved 
 the pretty marquise and the dancing trio,
 
 98 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 and much preferred this fan even to the 
 Chinese one of white feathers, oddly dec- 
 orated with little leaves and blossoms in 
 tinsel and gay-colored embossed paper. 
 
 And, speaking of feathers, I am re- 
 minded of one other drawback, beside the 
 game of mental addition, to the complete 
 enjoyment of our visits to this pleasant 
 house. This drawback was Miss Mary- 
 Ellen's parrot, than which a more thor- 
 oughly vicious and disreputable old bird 
 was never seen. As far as I know, he had 
 absolutely no claim to respect or even tol- 
 eration, except the fact that his mistress 
 loved him. He was ragged and battered 
 in appearance, and his colors, like his mor- 
 als, were low in tone. He had always 
 about him an air of having been out all 
 night, and, so far from repenting, of rev- 
 eling in a sense of his own evil ways. He 
 had a wicked eye, and an unpleasant habit 
 of roosting upon the chair-rails and unex- 
 pectedly pecking at the legs of us children. 
 His disposition was morose and vengeful
 
 Salem Cupboards. 99 
 
 He loved nobody. He only endured his 
 mistress for the sake of the loaf-sugar she 
 gave him. Between him and Miss Eliza- 
 Ann a deadly dislike existed. As a gen- 
 eral thing, he sulked and glowered on the 
 back of a small sofa in the corner. Here 
 I suppose him to have spent his time in 
 reviewing dark episodes in his past life, 
 possibly with some degree of sullen satis- 
 faction. Occasionally he varied this occu- 
 pation by making a sortie to attack Miss 
 Eliza-Ann's ankles, for which he enter- 
 tained the greatest aversion. I never 
 knew anything to afford the least amuse- 
 ment to Polly except Miss Eliza-Ann's 
 clutching off her wig ; and even in this 
 case I think it was not so much mirth at 
 a ludicrous action as it was diabolic glee 
 at the dreadful guy the poor lady looked, 
 and fiendish enjoyment of her sister's dis- 
 tress. It is certain, however, that it did 
 cause him pleasure, for he would burst into 
 peals of rasping, metallic laughter, sway- 
 ing insanely on his perch, drawing long
 
 too Salem Cupboards. 
 
 breaths, and apparently becoming quite 
 exhausted with his mirth. If Miss Eliza- 
 Ann made an attempt to touch him, he 
 would hastily sidle away out of reach, 
 and resume his hoarse, derisive laughter in 
 safety. Our gentle friend was made very 
 unhappy by these exhibitions, which usu- 
 ally ended by Miss Eliza-Ann's assuming 
 the red bandanna, and seating herself at 
 her writing with an injured air, while Polly 
 clucked and glowered from his corner, and 
 Miss Mary-Ellen hastily brought forth some 
 new curiosity to attract our wandering at- 
 tention. 
 
 One thing of which we never tired was 
 a pair of Chinese picture-books, with paint- 
 ings on rice paper in clear and brilliant 
 colors. There was, of course, no attempt 
 at perspective, and we were much enter- 
 tained by the little mandarins walking 
 calmly about in the sky, quite over the 
 heads of the jugglers with their yellow 
 balls and the women under flat-topped 
 umbrellas. A pair of carved ivory chop-
 
 Salem Cupboards. lot 
 
 sticks also appeared during the display of 
 Chinese curiosities, and Miss Eliza-Ann, 
 from her corner, threw in a few darkly 
 learned remarks concerning Confucius, to 
 which we listened with respect and va- 
 cuity. Miss Eliza-Ann was always ready 
 enough to give us useful information, and 
 she was generally called upon to tell us 
 about a curious Japanese bonze in painted 
 clay, with naked chest and stomach. It 
 had an ugly, wrinkled face, and was squat- 
 ted on its feet. Miss Eliza-Ann explained 
 all about it in very long words, but we only 
 gathered that the bonze was a holy man or 
 priest, and we secretly thought it a pity 
 that while his robes were otherwise so vo- 
 luminous, so much of his person should be 
 exposed to the inclemency of the weather. 
 A department more modern, but not less 
 attractive, of Miss Mary-Ellen's cupboard 
 was the shelf of knick-knacks which kind 
 friends had given her, and which she 
 hoarded in little boxes and baskets with 
 almost childish pleasure. Many of these
 
 W2 Salem Clipboards. 
 
 things were oddly trivial as gifts to a 
 grown woman, but the truth was that 
 many of Miss Mary-Ellen's friends had 
 evidently never realized her growing up ; 
 at least, they still took a simple delight in 
 bringing to her tiny fancy boxes, miniature 
 fans, baskets of pink sugar, and micro- 
 scopic books, all of which were received 
 as they were given, and preserved with 
 great care. 
 
 On rare, memorable days our hostess 
 would gladden us by bestowing upon us 
 some of these desirable objects. 
 
 " Let me see," she would muse, regard- 
 ing fondly a tiny bird-cage of gilded wire, 
 or a barley baby tucked snugly into a 
 sugary cradle. " I have had this five years, 
 and it has given me much pleasure. I 
 think I can spare it now to give pleasure 
 to somebody else. You may have it, my 
 dear, and I hope you will keep it care- 
 fully." 
 
 The only two of these presents which 
 lasted us for any length of time were a
 
 Salem Cupboards. 103 
 
 little bonnet of yellow sugar, decorated 
 with a wreath of miniature roses, and a 
 small book. The bonnet was my sister's, 
 and was kept for some years in a box of 
 cotton, until one hapless day we found it 
 broken, by the cold we always supposed. 
 Its owner shed bitter tears over the loss, 
 while her more practical sister suggested 
 that, since it was broken, we might as well 
 see how it tasted. This we proceeded to 
 do, and the result was pasty and disap- 
 pointing in the extreme. My book was a 
 small black volume, entitled Frank and 
 Flora, being the history of a pair of chil- 
 dren of such an aggressive' and rampant 
 state of morality that but for the fact that 
 it told what they had to eat and drink 
 upon every occasion it would have been 
 utterly unendurable. 
 
 We always loved Miss Mary- Ellen's gifts, 
 however, for they took a grace from the 
 gentle giver, and a charm beyond belief 
 from the delightful cupboard which once 
 had been their home.
 
 104 Salem Cupboards. 
 
 Dear Miss Mary-Ellen and her sister 
 have long since gone a loving but in- 
 congruous pair to a better world. I am 
 quite certain that the same sort of after-life 
 could never satisfy them both. The quaint 
 old house yet stands, but it is occupied by 
 strangers. They may be, and doubtless 
 are, the most delightful of people, and yet 
 it seems to me all wrong that they should 
 live in that house. The world is out of 
 joint with all these changes. I would not 
 peep into the old mansion, had I the 
 chance, for I like to fancy everything still 
 as it used to be : yet I cannot help some- 
 times wondering who owns the parrot's 
 corner now ; what furniture has deposed 
 Miss Eliza-Ann's table, with its books and 
 globe ; above all, what these new folk keep 
 in Miss Mary-Ellen's cupboard.
 
 MY COUSIN THE CAPTAIN. 
 
 HERE lived in Salem twenty years 
 ago and in fact the remnant lin- 
 gers still a race of men who be- 
 lieved in nothing else in all the world so 
 much as they believed in the supremacy of 
 their town as the great maritime centre of 
 America ; I do not know that they would 
 not have said of the world. 
 
 These were the old sea-captains and 
 sailing-masters, men who had known 
 Salem in her highest and proudest days of 
 mercantile prosperity : when her wharves 
 were bustling scenes of unlading and of 
 shipping cargoes ; when the harbor was the 
 gathering place of quaintly rigged ketches 
 and great East Indiamen laboring in under 
 clouds of canvas ; when Derby Street was 
 all alive with captains with their sea-legs 
 still on, and the tall warehouses were
 
 106 My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 crammed to the eaves with spicy wares 
 from China and the Philippines ; when the 
 merchants were bustling up and down 
 Water Street, hugging themselves with 
 gratulation over happy voyages and pros- 
 perous ventures ; when Kit's dance-house 
 was filled to overflowing with thirsty sail- 
 ors, intent upon spending their pay quickly 
 that it might not burn their pockets ; 
 when, in point of fact, old Salem was old 
 Salem, in the halcyon days before the 
 great tide of the East India trade had 
 ebbed away, leaving Derby Street stranded, 
 its brown wharves given over to rats and 
 the slow lap of water among the dull green 
 piles, the toppling warehouses transformed 
 into Irish tenements, and the harbor sadly 
 empty, save for occasional slow barges, 
 black and foul, laden with coal for Beverly 
 or hides for Lynn. 
 
 The change time has wrought is melan- 
 choly, even to the unconcerned outsider, 
 but to the old captains it is like the de- 
 struction of Babylon or the fall of Paradise
 
 My Cousin the Captain. loj 
 
 That the writer possesses, although of 
 course in a humble degree, some of the 
 genuine sea-lover's regret for the loss of 
 the old mercantile glory of Salem is due 
 to the acquaintance in childhood of one of 
 the most delightful specimens of the an- 
 cient sailing-masters who ever trod deck 
 under foot, or brought rich cargoes into 
 Salem harbor. 
 
 This was Captain William Rockwell, 
 who by virtue of a distant, connection with 
 my family always went by the name of 
 Cousin William. He was a man over sev- 
 enty years of age, but the salt of the sea 
 he had so long traversed had preserved in 
 him a sort of immortal youth, and he was 
 still hale and comely. His face was ruddy, 
 and his hair, which was of silvery white- 
 ness and thick and vigorous in growth, 
 was brushed back without parting, and, 
 when its length permitted, bound with a 
 black ribbon, to keep it out of the way. 
 The question of length of hair was always 
 a disputed one between Cousin William
 
 io8 My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 and his sister Susan. The Captain con- 
 tended that long hair was bettyish and in 
 the way, while Cousin Susan maintained 
 that cropped hair was foppish and unbe- 
 coming to the dignity of a man of the 
 Captain's years. As Cousin Susan per- 
 formed the office of hair-cutter, she had 
 rather an unfair advantage of her brother, 
 and it is worthy of remark that his hair 
 was generally long enough to be bound by 
 its ribbon. His eyebrows, in striking con- 
 trast to his rubicund face and snowy hair, 
 were as black as if newiy penciled in cray- 
 on, while his eyes, also black, would have 
 stricken awe to our childish souls but for 
 the humorous spark which dwelt within 
 and, in conj unction with a benevolent fore- 
 head and those lines of by-gone laughter 
 which inclose the mouth in a merry paren- 
 thesis, lent to his face an expression of 
 good will toward all and of resolute con- 
 tent with everything about him. 
 
 In his active days, Captain Rockwell had 
 made many voyages in the interest of Sa-
 
 My Cousin the Captain. 109 
 
 lem merchants, beginning as a boy of fif- 
 teen, and leaving the seas only when his 
 hereditary enemy, the rheumatic gout, 
 overcame him and unfitted him for further 
 active labor. His own cruises had been 
 chiefly to India and China, and his time 
 was that following the death of the famous 
 Elias Haskett Derby, the time when 
 William Gray and Joseph Peabody were 
 sending their great ships to Cathay and 
 the India Ocean, and later when Captain 
 John Bertram was making those splendid 
 voyages whose record reads like a fairy 
 tale. Cousin William had, however, not 
 only a thorough understanding of the en- 
 terprises and the state of commerce in his 
 own time, but he had made a study of Sa- 
 lem's mercantile and marine history back 
 to its opening chapter. He could, I be- 
 lieve, have given a clear and correct ac- 
 count of the voyages of Philip English 
 and Richard Derby. He knew the ton- 
 nage of the prominent vessels, the name 
 of the owners and sailing-masters, the car-
 
 no My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 goes and the profits. To all this statisti- 
 cal knowledge he added a fund of lore of a 
 more romantic if less reliable sort, which 
 made him the most entertaining of com- 
 panions to us children. It was always 
 something of a problem to us just how 
 much of the marvelous adventure on high 
 seas which Cousin William related he 
 really believed himself ; and this we never 
 could discover to the day of his death. 
 The old gentleman was so decidedly testy 
 if questioned as to the veracity of any of 
 his extraordinary tales, that we very early 
 learned not to ask, " Is it really true ? " 
 
 When free from his rheumatism he was 
 of a social and friendly disposition, and 
 fond of receiving visits from us children. 
 He instructed us in the art of making 
 sailor knots, and it was one of his pet vex- 
 ations that packages from the shops were 
 tied up in such meaningless and slovenly 
 ways. I can still tie as he taught me " a 
 bowline on a bight," but I never do it with- 
 out being transported to Cousin Susan's
 
 My Cousin the Captain. in 
 
 tidy back parlor, and seeing once more the 
 bit of cord on Cousin William's knee and 
 the blue anchor on the inside of his hir- 
 sute \vrist,-an adornment which was made 
 in his cabin-boy days, and of which he was 
 ever afterward somewhat ashamed. 
 
 If, as I have said, Cousin William was 
 in good health, he always welcomed our 
 arrival most kindly ; but if we opened the 
 door to see him seated with his bandaged 
 legs supported upon a chair, his ruddy 
 face contracted to an awful scowl, and 
 to hear him say, " Look out for the Old 
 Man from Zanzibar ; he eats youngsters ! " 
 then indeed we softly but precipitately 
 closed the door and withdrew in haste, for 
 we knew that the Captain's tormentor had 
 him in his grasp, and that he wished to be 
 left in peace to battle with his pain. Who 
 this Old Man from Zanzibar was we never 
 satisfactorily knew, but the very vagueness 
 of gur information concerning him clothed 
 him with added terrors, and he was one of 
 the most successful of the bogies of my 
 childhood.
 
 H2 My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 Aside from his attacks of gout, the Cap- 
 tain lived a life of easy and methodical 
 monotony. He rose early, breakfasted at 
 seven, walked down to the Athenaeum and 
 back, read his Boston paper, ate his dinner 
 at twelve, then took a short nap upon the 
 back parlor sofa, first carefully protecting 
 its foot by spreading across it a thin brown 
 shawl kept for that purpose. After his 
 nap he repaired to Cousin Susan's sitting- 
 room up-stairs, where he read aloud to her 
 for one hour, and then he went down to 
 Broad Street to make a call upon a mar- 
 ried niece and her children. Tea was 
 drank decorously at half-past five o'clock, 
 and after tea Cousin William's pet crony, 
 Captain Eliphalet Nicholson, came in to 
 spend the evening. 
 
 Captain Nicholson offered in every re- 
 spect a striking contrast to his host. He 
 was a thin, dry, weazened man, as lively in 
 his movements as a cricket. He wore a 
 rusty brown wig, and always told us chil- 
 dren that his own hair was blown out by
 
 My Cousin the Captain. 113 
 
 the roots in a terrible gale at the Cape 
 of Good Hope. Although, as this would 
 prove, occasionally jocose, his disposition 
 was irascible and his temper quite uncer- 
 tain ; wherefore we children, little syco- 
 phants that we were, tried to conceal the 
 fact that we were really shy of him by 
 laughing with obsequious eagerness when- 
 ever he made a jest. He had a tart tongue 
 and a hot and spicy manner in conversa- 
 tion ; and I think it not altogether un- 
 likely that the many vast cargoes of pep- 
 per which he had brought from Sumatra 
 had had their effect upon his disposition. 
 
 It was rather difficult to account for the 
 firm friendship which these two old cap- 
 tains had for each other, since they held 
 the same opinion upon scarcely any points. 
 They were forever arguing upon this or 
 that, and never agreeing ; and as both 
 were somewhat stubborn old gentlemen, 
 it was no uncommon occurrence for the 
 choleric Captain Nicholson to arise in his 
 wrath and betake himself out of the house,
 
 ii 4 My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 vowing never to enter it again ; a proceed- 
 ing which never in the least disturbed the 
 equanimity of Cousin William. He knew 
 what to expect, and he was never disap- 
 pointed, for the next evening would see 
 Captain Nicholson in his usual seat beside 
 the round table of polished mahogany, as 
 lively, as argumentative, and as peppery 
 as ever. 
 
 At eight o'clock exactly, a maid-servant 
 brought in a tray set with tumblers, a 
 lemon, a silver nutmeg-grater, a silver knife 
 and a decanter of rum. Captain Nichol- 
 son then solemnly spread his blue and 
 white handkerchief over his knees and 
 carefully divided the lemon into halves. 
 Cousin William with equal care measured 
 a portion of sugar into the tumbler, and 
 on the sugar grated a shower of nutmeg. 
 Each then measured out his own allowance 
 of rum, and here the paths divided ; for 
 Cousin William contended that the lemon 
 could not be properly blended unless it 
 were mixed in before the addition of the
 
 My Cousin the Captain. 115 
 
 hot water, while his friend stoutly held 
 that the lemon was ruined in flavor by 
 having hot water poured on top of it. 
 Time had, however, somewhat softened 
 this disagreement, so that each captain 
 went his own way ; and there was a sus- 
 pension of hostilities while the two old 
 gentlemen sat seriously sipping their hot 
 rum and water on either side of the round 
 table. 
 
 There was to us children an inexhausti- 
 ble fascination in the conversation of these 
 two mariners, who had come after years of 
 peril and gallant adventure on the seas to 
 the snug harborage of Cousin Susan's back 
 parlor. Even when they were not actually 
 telling stories to us, it was still one of the 
 treats of our childhood to be allowed to 
 sit in some obscure corner, unheeded and 
 unseen, and listen silently. There was 
 about their conversation all the " mystery 
 and magic of the sea," the flavor of adven- 
 ture and danger ; there was excitement in 
 the mention, not then so commonplace as
 
 n6 My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 now, of strange lands and far-away ports ; 
 there was poetry in the names of the ves- 
 sels, the ship Lotus, the Black Warrior, 
 the brig Persia, the Light Horse, the 
 Three Friends, and the great Grand Turk. 
 There was, too, a charm about those car- 
 goes. They were no commonplace bales of 
 merchandise, but were suggestive in their 
 very names of the sweet, strange odors of 
 that East from which they came. There 
 was food for the imagination in the men- 
 tion of those ship-loads of gum copal from 
 Madagascar and Zanzibar ; of hemp, iron 
 and duck from Russia ; of Bombay cotton, 
 of ginger, pepper, coffee and sugar-candy 
 from India; of teas, silks and nankeens 
 from China ; salt from Cadiz, and fruits 
 from the ports of the Mediterranean. 
 
 We children used to listen as to a fairy 
 tale to stories of the unlading of those 
 great Indiamen whose cargoes actually 
 scented the air with spicy fragrance ; but 
 I think that pepper was the favorite cargo 
 of Captain Nicholson, and he used to tell
 
 My Cousin the Captain. uj 
 
 with much delight of the secret voyages to 
 Sumatra. 
 
 " Pepper," he would say, " grew wild at 
 Sumatra, and nobody knew it till Captain 
 Jonathan Carnes was man enough to find 
 it out. Why, sir, I dare say if it had n't 
 been for" 
 
 [Here the MS. ends abruptly. The notes 
 made for its continuance are scanty. There is 
 jotted down a reference to the rescue by Cap- 
 tain Ingersoll, on a return voyage from the 
 West Indies with a cargo of rum, of the mas- 
 ter and mate of the English schooner Amity, 
 whose crew had mutinied and set these officers 
 adrift in a boat. After his arrival in Salem the 
 English captain was sitting one day with Mr. 
 Elias Haskett Derby in the counting-room of 
 the latter, and while using the spy-glass saw 
 his own vessel in the offing. Mr. Derby at 
 once manned one of his brigs, armed it with 
 a couple of cannon, and, taking with him the 
 Englishman, quickly and neatly recaptured the 
 Amity.
 
 n8 My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 There is also noted the pathetic story of an 
 old sea-captain whose only daughter died in 
 early womanhood, and who on every anniver- 
 sary of her birth-night set in the window of 
 her deserted chamber a lighted lamp to burn 
 through all the dark hours as a token of his 
 undying love and remembrance. 
 
 These scattered memoranda follow : 
 
 " Dangers of coral reefs and murderous Ma- 
 lays. 
 
 " The old fellow who recommended his house 
 because the chips would not rattle in the parti- 
 tions. 
 
 " The dinner of the E. I. Marine Co. Car- 
 rying the President through the streets in a 
 palanquin." 
 
 There is also a note of an intention of coia- 
 menting upon the fact that the first slaves 
 which came to New England were brought in 
 the Salem ship Desire ; of speaking of the 
 enormous importation of New England rum 
 and Virginian tobacco into the west coast re- 
 gions of Africa by Salem merchants ; and 
 there is a reference to the quaint conceit of 
 Benjamin Pickman, who, in recognition of the
 
 My Cousin the Captain. 119 
 
 fact that his fortune had been made by the ex- 
 portation of codfish to the West Indies, and 
 with a noble disregard of the obvious jests 
 likely to be made at the expense of any aristo- 
 cratic pretensions on the part of his family, set 
 a carved and gilded effigy of that fish on the 
 side of each stair in the front hall of his man- 
 sion on Essex Street. 
 
 It is hardly to be doubted that had we been 
 given more of the conversation of Cousin 
 William and his friend Captain Nicholson we 
 should have heard discourse of the doings of 
 the Salem privateers both in the Revolution 
 and in the War of 1812. One so familiar with 
 Salem's glorious record as Captain Rockwell 
 could not fail of the ability to tell with zest 
 and completeness the tale of the Gen. Picker- 
 ing, Captain Haraden, master, which had that 
 gallant fashion of sailing up to craft beside 
 which she " looked like a long-boat by the 
 side of a ship," and commanding them to sur- 
 render to an American frigate with so absolute 
 an air that they generally did it on the spot. 
 He would have made much of that famous 
 battle between the Gen. Pickering and the
 
 12O My Cousin the Captain. 
 
 British cutter Achilles, so near the Spanish 
 coast that a hundred thousand spectators 
 viewed the conflict from the shore with as 
 much relish as if it had been a bull-fight. He 
 would have reveled, too, in the deeds of the 
 great Grand Turk in 1815, and would have 
 had his joke over that brig's ungallant wrest- 
 ing from the Active Jane of her " seven bags 
 of specie, containing 14,000 mill rees," and 
 still more cruel scuttling her afterward. He 
 would have repeated tales of suffering told 
 him by sailors held in slavery by the fierce Al- 
 gerines, while of pirates and strange escapes 
 and monsters of the deep or of wild lands his 
 knowledge must have been inexhaustible. He 
 must have known the tonnage and the rig of 
 all the proud craft set afloat by Retire Becket 
 and Enos Briggs, and he was probably not 
 without a decided personal opinion of all the 
 masters who had sailed therein. 
 
 How much or how little of this it was Eleanor 
 Putnam's intention to set down it is impossi- 
 ble now to determine. What was written is 
 little more than an introduction to what was 
 intended ; but to this and to all death made 
 an end.]
 
 A 000024151 3