The town was long and very narrow. From Elm Street you could look down some of the cross streets to the river, and beyond. On the other side of Elm Street, as soon as you had passed the gardens that lay behind the big houses, you were almost in open country. There were a few outlying farms, a few shanties, and then bare, scrubby fields, the Common Pasture, rocky knolls and clumps of woods. On one of these farms dwelt Mr. Diggery,--a fierce little man, of whom we went in terror. So near did the river come to the lower part of the town that a storm often made people who lived in that quarter need high boots to get across the street; while the country (unexplored wilds to us!) closed up so near on the other side of Elm Street, that owls, woodchucks, and an occasional fox penetrated the gardens. It was this nearness of the river and ocean, and of the open country, that made the town such a delightful dwelling-place for us. Even the centre of the town, the neighborhood where Ed Mason and Jimmy Toppan lived, and Rob Currier, the two Carters, Horace Winslow, Peter Bailey, and I,--this was a region thick with the possibilities of adventure. Much of this centred about the frog pond and the Mall. The pond was full of goldfish, and other humbler fish, and toads, frogs, and water-beetles. You were sure to find something interesting whenever you walked around the pond. Many of our neighbors on Elm Street owned large gardens, to which we had entrance--either by permission, or by the informal and far more adventurous method of climbing the back fence. The owners of the gardens, at that period, were mostly elderly persons, dwelling in great contentment and the most profound quiet. Their lives were comfortable, well-ordered, and precise. They lived mainly in the past. They pondered much on some grandfather, or great-grandfather, who had built up a fortune through foreign trade, and they heeded not at all the remarks of envious and ill-natured folk who liked to point out that one of the chief commodities of this trade was rum. The principal hallmark of their respectability was a portrait of their ancestor, with very pink cheeks,--the sign of an outdoor life, and not necessarily an indication of a taste for port and madeira. Beside this venerable portrait would hang a lively representation of the ship _Sally B._, as she appeared on some memorable occasion entering the harbor of Singapore, and viewed by one of those artists who invariably happen to be near by when the ship is under full sail and making not less than twelve knots.