giving New Hampshire her present scant eighteen miles of coast-line. Rye Beach is the most popular of these seashore resorts, and not far beyond is Piscataqua River, the New Hampshire eastern boundary. Here is the quaint and quiet old town of Portsmouth, three miles from the sea, and having about ten thousand people. Opposite, on Continental Island, adjoining the Maine shore, is the Kittery Navy Yard, where the warship "Kearsarge" was built. Commerce has about surrendered to the superior attractions of a summer resort at Portsmouth, and the comfortable old dwellings in their extensive gardens show the wealth accumulated by bygone generations. To this place originally came the "founder of New Hampshire," Captain Mason, who had been the Governor of the Southsea Castle in Portsmouth harbor, England, and at his suggestion, the settlement, originally called Strawberry Bank, from the abundance of wild strawberries, was named Portsmouth. The Piscataqua is formed above by the union of the Salmon Falls and Cocheco Rivers, both admirable water-powers, serving large factories, and the whole region adjacent to Portsmouth harbor is bordered by islands and interlaced with waterways, some of them yet displaying the remains of the colonial defensive forts. At Kittery Point, near the Navy Yard, was born and is buried the greatest man of colonial fame in that region, Sir William Pepperell, the famous leader of the Puritan expedition that captured Louisbourg from the French in 1745. The noted "Mrs. Partington," B. P. Shillaber, was born in Portsmouth in 1814. Adjoining the harbor, and with a broad beach facing the sea, is Newcastle Island, incorporated for the annual fee of three peppercorns, by King William III. and Queen Mary in the seventeenth century. Here lived in semi-regal state the Wentworths, who were the colonial governors, their memory now preserved by the vast modern Wentworth Hotel, whose colossal proportions are visible far over land and sea. The old Wentworth House at Little Harbor, wherein was held the provincial court, still remains--an irregular, quaint but picturesque building--its most noted occupant having been the courtly and gouty old Governor Benning Wentworth, who named Bennington in Vermont, and whose wedding on his sixtieth birthday has given Longfellow one of his most striking themes, the "Poet's Tale" at _The Wayside Inn_. The poet tells of the appearance one day in Queen Street, Portsmouth, of Martha Hilton, "A little girl, Barefooted, ragged, with neglected hair, Eyes full of laughter, neck and shoulders bare, A thin slip of a girl, like a new moon, Sure to be rounded into beauty soon, A creature men would worship and adore, Though now, in mean habiliments, she bore A pail of water, dripping, through the street, And bathing, as she went, her naked feet."