Miss Putnam speaks of the gorgeous fans, the carved ivory, the blue Canton china, the generous tea-cups, the tureens, the heavy tankards, the Delft jars, the ancient candle-sticks, the heavy punch bowls, the strange beads, suggestive of the Hindoo rites, Nautch dances, and women with dusky throats. Then the very air was weighty with romantic adventures. We read with awe of cashmere shawls hanging on clothes lines, of jars full of silver coin, of the gilded fishes on the side of each stair, of the grand staircase in the front hall of Mr. Pickman's house on Essex Street, of logs of sandal-wood. The museum of the East India Marine Society contains sceptres from the Fiji Islands; a musical instrument from New South Wales, another from Borneo; a carved statue of a rich Persian merchant of Bombay; an alabaster figure of a Chinese Jos; a copper idol from Java; a mirror from Japan; fans from Maraba, the Marquesas Islands, Calcutta; cloth from Otaheite; an earthen patera from Herculaneum; two dresses of women from the Pelew Islands; sandal-wood from the Sandwich Islands; a parasol from Calcutta; nutmegs from Cayenne; thirty-six specimens of Italian marble; cement from the palace of the Cæsars at Rome; white marble from Carthage; porphyry from Italy; beads worn by the Pundits and Fakirs in India; a glass cup from Owyhee; Verde Antico from Sicily; sandal-wood tapers from China; wood images of mummies from Thebes; a silver box from Soo-Soo; porphyry from Madagascar; a piece of mosaic from ancient Carthage; silk cocoons from India; marble from the temple of Minerva at Athens; piece of pavement from the site of ancient Troy; and polished jasper from Siberia. When I was in Salem, from 1847 to 1855, this splendor had departed. Derby Street was deserted, the great warehouses were tenements for laborers. Hawthorne has described the custom-house in his famous preface to the "Scarlet Letter." The sailors had disappeared; the commerce, owing mainly to the shallowness of the water in the harbor, had gone to Boston and New York. But traces of the old glory still lingered. Here and there a great merchant was seen on the streets. Some of the old houses remained: the Pickering House on Broad Street, built in 1651; the Turner House; Roger Williams' house, at the corner of Essex and North Streets, built before 1634; and Mr. Forrester's house.