“There’s a saucy, wild packet, a packet of fame, She belongs to New York and the Dreadnaught’s her name. She’s bound to the eastward where stormy winds blow, Bound away in the Dreadnaught to the eastward we go. Oh, the Dreadnaught’s a-howling down the Long Island shore, Captain Samuels will drive her as he’s oft done before, With every stitch drawing aloft and alow, She’s a Liverpool packet; Lord God, see her go!” Such was the building of Newburyport, and such is the romance of memory that comes in to her on every wind of the sea to-day, though the ships have sailed away never to return and even the foundations of the old ship yards are hard to find. The wealth and dignity of the old sea-faring days remain. The custom house bravely hoists its flag each morning and waits in gray silence for the cargoes that rarely come. Old age comes to it, though, and to climb the worn stairs to its top is to walk with the men of other years, hearing their footfalls in the echo of your own and seeing them vanish, phantoms of gray dust, through dark doorways into the forgotten past. Piled in the corners as they pass you see the outworn flags of other years, as if draping huddled heaps of the achievements of these phantom shipmasters. Perhaps in some dark corner lies another story like that of the Scarlet Letter. Along the street on which the custom house faces passed the sea-faring traffic of the day, and the buildings suggest Wapping Old Stairs or some such quaint corner of old London near the Thames. The smell of the sea lingers round all corners, and in the little shop windows are crowded for sale pictures of ships and fragments of ship chandlery and curios from ports once a half-year’s sail away; wares that one fancies have waited a century for customers. The street itself loves the sea so well that it is always trying to reach it, swerving toward the water line often and making detours when blocked, and always sending down little messenger side streets to bring it news from the very shore, thus winding its way always eastward till it gets an unobstructed view of the harbor entrance across Joppa flats and is no doubt content, strolling there along the very margin with a blear eye turned seaward for the ships that come no more.