In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century
ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but
which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and
exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps,
a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging
hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out
her cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated
wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the
base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many
languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--here, with
a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during
precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or
droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally,
and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of
Uncle Sam's government is here established. Its front is
ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite
steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an
enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a
shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of
intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With
the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye,
and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief
to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all
citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the
premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless,
vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very
moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal
eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness
and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great
tenderness even in her best of moods, and, sooner or
later--oftener soon than late--is apt to fling off her nestlings
with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.
The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we
may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has
grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of
late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In
some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon
when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions
might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last
war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned,
as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit
her wharves to crumble to ruin while their ventures go to swell,
needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at
New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four
vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or
South America--or to be on the verge of their departure
thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly
up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife has
greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in
port, with his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin
box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful, sombre, gracious or
in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished
voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be
turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities
such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here, likewise--the germ
of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant--we
have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a
wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound
sailor, in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one,
pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we
forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring
firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of
tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but
contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying
trade.