The delicacy and accuracy of touch exhibited in _The Scarlet Letter_ and in _Oldport Days_ can hardly be appreciated to the full by those who are unacquainted with certain mellow and crumbling towns and hamlets of the New England coast, especially of the warm south coast. Soft mists rise in summer like "rich distilled perfumes" from the warm Gulf Stream off Long Island Sound and drift landward in invisible airy volumes. Suddenly, as at a given signal, the sky becomes troubled, grows dun: trembling dew-specks glister upon the leaves, and in a few moments the gray fog starts out of the air on every side and clings to tree, crag and house like shroud to corpse. It is this warm moisture that gives to the south-coast hamlets their mellow tint. I have especially in mind at this moment one romantic village whose stout old yeoman elms hold their protecting foliage-shields over many a gray mansion as rich in tradition as the House of the Seven Gables, and only awaiting the touch of some wizard hand to become immortalized. The prevailing tint of these old houses, and of everything that a lichen can take hold of, is a sage-gray. There seems to be something in the sea-breezes unusually favorable to the growth of lichens, and they hold high carnival everywhere, growing in riotous exuberance on every tree and rock and fence. I saw whole board fences so thickly tufted and bearded with a rich, particolored mosaic of lichens that from base-board to cope-board there was scarcely a square foot of the original wood to be seen. On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe's House of Usher, only not ghostly as that is. It is a strange _je ne sais quoi_ that eludes description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of visible heat. Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one has. It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions of savages and of the great men who have honored it with their presence. The town, moreover, is set off by a framework of the most enchanting and varied scenery--river, streamlet, ocean, lighthouse, hills with flower-and-grass-tufted crags, and forests, while on any summer's day one may see, far away and "sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill," some neighboring village with its graceful spire of purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set in a foil of malachite.