A Little Girl in Old Salem Part 42

She had changed very little. Chilian said she grew younger with the birth of every baby. She was happy and merry, truly the light of the house, and Cousin Eunice was the happiest grandmother in all of Salem.

Miss Winn shared their joys--so far there had been no sorrows.

Chilian grew a little stouter with advancing years, which really improved him. He took a warm interest in the new projects. There was the Ess.e.x Historical Society, gathering portraits and relics of the older Salem, and the East India Marine Society was enlarging its scope. The new Salem was to be curiously intellectual, historic, and one might say antiquarian. Modernized and transformed in many respects, it still has the old-time fragrance of sandalwood and incense when the chests in the old garrets are turned over for fine things that came from India a century before.

Cousin Giles aged more rapidly, but then he was considerably older than Chilian. He did adopt young Anthony, and insisted upon his taking the name of Leverett, and a share of the business burthens. And he married quite to the approval of the elder man, though not such an heiress as Cynthia.

And no one was dreaming that the little boy born in Union Street in 1804 was to add such interest and l.u.s.tre to his native town that the scenes of his curious wizard-like romances were to be settled upon by those interested in them and handed down as actual occurrences. Do we not all know Hester Prynne and Mr. Dimmesdale, Phebe and Hephzibah and Judge Pyncheon, and weird old Dr. Grimshawe, and many another that have flitted through the pages of Hawthorne's strange romances, leaving Salem the richer by the memories?

There was another little girl who was to grow up and take a great interest in all these things, and finally to see the old Leverett house pa.s.s away, after its more than two hundred years. But it was a new and doubly interesting Salem then, with its several evolutions that have pa.s.sed and gone.

She lived a long and happy life, this little girl who came back to her birthplace consigned to Chilian Leverett's care, and won his love that never changed, or grew any less. Her sons never tired of the old reminiscences. Many of the old houses were still standing. Here President Washington had been entertained; here the artist Copley had lived and painted portraits that are heirlooms; Justice Story and his gifted son, poet and artist; Prescott, the historian, and many another of whom the country is proud to-day, and civilians whose fine thought and n.o.ble work have made the city a Mecca for intellectual tourists, and a beautiful and interesting abiding-place for her citizens, a town of three striking epochs that linger not only in tradition but in history.

THE "LITTLE GIRL" SERIES

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD NEW YORK.

HANNAH ANN; A SEQUEL.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD BOSTON.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD PHILADELPHIA.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD WASHINGTON.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD NEW ORLEANS.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD DETROIT.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD ST. LOUIS.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD CHICAGO.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD SAN FRANCISCO.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD QUEBEC.

A LITTLE GIRL IN OLD BALTIMORE.