Along Charter Street and down Derby the once stately mansions of the great merchants of another century droop in senile decay, knee deep in the dust and debris that immigrant, alien races scatter, and note it and them no more than they do the rats in the wainscoting. The thoughts of the old houses are busy still with ships in the China Sea, battling round the Cape of Good Hope with the Flying Dutchman, or running down the trades from Senegambia, Surinam or Ceylon, and their upper window eyes stare unwinkingly across rotten wharves and out to the island gaps in the horizon of the bay, watching for the sails that come no more. So the world thinks of Salem to-day as the city of romantic memories. It may weave cotton cloth and tan hides and make shoes and carry on a thousand other inventions of modern business, yet we who dwell away from it, far or near, will always know it best for its romance of elder days, the dread delusion of its witch finding, the astounding deeds of its merchant sailors, and in the end most of all perhaps, for its man of dreams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who dreamed there the grim story of “The Scarlet Letter” and made it live for all men for all time. More and more, as the years slip by, Hawthorne comes to be the presiding genius of Salem, and reverent pilgrims in increasing numbers come to seek the few abiding traces of his life there; and though they go to Gallows Hill and also view the relics of the old merchants and their portraits and the pictures of their ships, they go first to the house where Hawthorne was born, to the other houses where he lived and worked, and to the sleepy, dignified old Custom House from whose drab duties grew the strange flower of weird romance. It may be that out of the Ghettos and Warsaws which now surround the old Custom House will come again as great merchants as once dwelt there, or as great a writer of romance as he who worked on its scarred old wooden desk now preserved with such care in the Essex Institute, but one may be pardoned for having his doubts. The world matures rapidly, and the heritage of primitive environment and primitive opportunity is smoothed out by the steel roller of modern invention. New ports no longer wait the seaman adventurer. Steam makes all ports common, and the knowledge of them common, to all the world. We shall look long for the successors to Derby and Peabody and their ilk, and we may well doubt if ships like The Grand Turk, Rajah and Astræa will sail again from any future Salem. [Illustration: One angle of “The House of the Seven Gables.”] [Illustration: A Salem dock of the old sea-faring days]