strong, persistent, and yet unexhausted individuality, as a town, no less than for a peculiar dignity of character which has become a pronounced trait in many of its children. But, on the other hand, it is fecund of eccentricities. Though many absorb the atmosphere of age to their great advantage, there must be other temperaments among the descendants of so unique and so impressionable a body of men as the early settlers of this region, which would succumb to the awesome and depressing influences that also lurk in the air; and these may easily pass from piquant personality into mere errant grotesqueness. Whether from instinctive recognition of this or not, it has never seemed to me remarkable that people here should see apparitions of themselves, and die within the year; it did not strike me as strange when I was told of persons who had gone mad with no other cause than that of inherited insanity,--as if, having tried every species of sane activity for two or three hundred years, a family should take to madness from sheer disgust with the monotony of being healthy; nor could any case of warped idiosyncrasy, or any account of half-maniacal genius be instanced that seemed at all out of keeping. One day I passed a house where a crazy man, of harmless temper, habitually amused himself with sitting at a window near the ground, and entering into talk, from between the half-closed shutters, with any one on the sidewalk who would listen to him. Such a thing, to be sure, might easily be met with in twenty other places; but here it seemed natural and fitting. It was not a preposterous thought, that any number of other men in the neighborhood might quietly drop into a similar vein of decrepitude, and also attempt to palm off their disjointed fancies upon the orderly foot-passengers. I do not by this mean to insinuate any excessive leaning toward mental derangement on the part of the inhabitants; but it is as if the town, having lived long enough according to ordinary rules to be justified in sinking into superannuation, and yet not availing itself of the privilege, but on the contrary maintaining a life of great activity, had compensated itself in the persons of a few individuals. But when one has reached this mood, one remembers that it is all embodied in "The House of the Seven Gables." Though Hawthorne, in the Preface to that romance, takes precautions against injuring local sentiment, by the assurance that he has not meant "to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard," the book is not the less a genuine outgrowth of Salem. Perhaps the aspect under which Salem presents itself to me is tinged with fancy, though Hawthorne in the same story has called it "a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and home-loving inhabitants, ... but in which, be it said, there are odder