Women's faces are apt to take from old age a finer touch than those of men, and poverty does not interfere with this, where there is no actual exposure to the elements. From the windows of these old houses there often look forth delicate, faded countenances, to which belongs an air of unmistakable refinement. Nowhere in America, I fancy, does one see such counterparts of the reduced gentlewoman of England,--as described, for instance, in "Cranford,"--quiet maiden ladies of seventy, with perhaps a tradition of beauty and bellehood, and still wearing always a bit of blue ribbon on their once golden curls,--this headdress being still carefully arranged, each day, by some handmaiden of sixty, so long a house-mate as to seem a sister, though some faint suggestion of wages and subordination may be still preserved. Among these ladies, as in "Cranford," there is a dignified reticence in respect to money-matters, and a courteous blindness to the small economies practised by each other. It is not held good breeding, when they meet in a shop of a morning, for one to seem to notice what another buys. These ancient ladies have coats of arms upon their walls, hereditary damasks among their scanty wardrobes, store of domestic traditions in their brains, and a whole Court Guide of high-sounding names at their fingers' ends. They can tell you of the supposed sister of an English queen, who married an American officer and dwelt in Oldport; of the Scotch Lady Janet, who eloped with her tutor, and here lived in poverty, paying her washerwoman with costly lace from her trunks; of the Oldport dame who escaped from France at the opening of the Revolution, was captured by pirates on her voyage to America, then retaken by a privateer and carried into Boston, where she took refuge in John Hancock's house. They can describe to you the Malbone Gardens, and, as the night wanes and the embers fade, can give the tale of the Phantom of Rough Point. Gliding farther and farther into the past, they revert to the brilliant historic period of Oldport, the successive English and French occupations during our Revolution, and show you gallant inscriptions in honor of their grandmothers, written on the window-panes by the diamond rings of the foreign officers.