family carved on its locked gate, in which, beneath gray headstones and long, flowering grasses, repose the hushed secrets of a century ago. Or, fresh from the buzz and chatter, the gay interchange of the day, you may chance on an old salt spinning yarns of pirates and privateers, phantom ships or buried treasure, or an antiquary full of well-remembered stories whose actors belong to the far-gone past,--stories of the extinct glories of [Illustration: GENERAL NATHANAEL GREENE. FROM ONE OF MALBONE’S BEST MINIATURES.] the place, of family romance and family tragedy, or tragedy just escaped. What could be finer contrast than tales like these, told on a street-corner where, just before, perhaps, the question had been about Wall Street or Santiago, if the French frigate were still in the bay, or when would be the next meeting of the Town and Country Club! Indeed, it is not so many years since visitors to Newport might have held speech with a dear old lady whose memory carried her back clearly and distinctly to the day when, a child six years old, she sat on Washington’s knee. The little girl had a sweet voice. She sang a song to the great man, in recompense for which he honored her with a salute. “It was here, my dear, and here, that General Washington kissed me,” she would say to her grandchildren, touching first one and then the other wrinkled cheek; and to the end of her life, no other lips were suffered to profane with a touch the spots thus made sacred. In a country whose charm and whose reproach alike is its newness, and to a society whose roots are forever being uprooted and freshly planted to be again uprooted, there is real education and advantage in the tangible neighborhood of the past; and the Newport past is neither an unlovely nor a reproachful shape. There is dignity in her calm mien; she looks on stately and untroubled, and compares and measures. The dazzle and glitter of modern luxury do not daunt her: she has seen splendor before in a different generation and different forms, she has shared it, she has watched it fade and fail. Out of her mute, critical regard, a voice seems to sound in tones like the rustle of falling leaves in an autumn day, and to utter that ancient and melancholy truth, _Vanitas vanitatum_! “The fashion of this world passeth away.” We listen, awed for a moment, and then we smile again,--for brightness near at hand has a more potent spell than melancholy gone by,--and turning to our modern lives with their movement and sunshine, their hope and growth, we are content to accept and enjoy such brief day as is granted us, nor “prate nor hint of change till change shall come.” [Illustration] [Illustration] PROVIDENCE THE COLONY OF HOPE BY WILLIAM B. WEEDEN