OLD • SRLe/A GL6KNOR PUTNAM 3 1924 025 963 707 Cornell Imuersity library Strata, K»m tfork BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE I89l The date shows when this volume was taken. K 3 1 194? ST1957 J HOME USE RULE: All books subject to reca All borrowers must regii ter in the library to borro books for home use. All books must be n turned at end of .colleg year for inspection an repairs. Limited books must V returned within the foi week limit and not f enewet Students must return a books before leaving towi Officers should arrange ft the return of books wante during their absence froi town. Volumes of periodica and of pamphlets are he! in the library as much i possible . For special pu i poses they are given out fc a limited time. Borrowers should not us their library privileges fc the benefit of other person Books of special valu and gift books, when tfc giver wishes it, are nc allowed to circulate. Readers are asked to n port all oases of bool marked or mutilated. Do not deface books by marks and writing. Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924025963707 OLD SALEM By ELEANOR PUTNAM EDITED BY ARLO BATES BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (Sfc tfitarsibe tyctm CamfiriOoe 1886 Copyright, 1886, By ARLO BATES. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge! Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. For the son too young to remember her, have been gathered these fragments of his mother's work, broken by death. CONTENTS. Page Introduction 7 Old Salem Shops 27 A Salem Dame-School 43 Two Salem Institutions 6} Salem Cupboards 68 My Cousin the Captain 10$ INTRODUCTION. —4 i]T is with unspeakable tenderness and pain that I attempt to gather up the broken threads of this un- finished web, but I appreciate that per- sonal feeling would be out of place here, and that what I say must be confined to the subject of this volume. The first paper in the brief collection, " Old Salem Shops," was written for the Contributors' Club of the "Atlantic Month- ly," a fact which accounts for its brevity. The editor gave it a place in the body of the magazine, and its reception was suffi- ciently kind to encourage the writing of other papers in the same vein. It was the writer's intention to publish a series of 8 Introduction. sketches which should afterward be put together under the title which this volume bears, and she had noted down the sub- jects of several which were destined never to be written. " A Salem Dame-School " and " Salem Cupboards " followed in the " Atlantic ; " "Two Salem Institutions" was written for "The Spinnet," a paper published at a Salem fair; while "My Cousin the Cap- tain " was left a fragment at her death. There were in her portfolio few notes, it being her custom to depend upon her remarkable memory almost entirely, but she had in conversation spoken of many of the things which it was her wish to include in these sketches of the quaint old town which she loved and where now her grave is made. The subjects she had set down were : "The Marine Museum," where "it was as if each sea-captain had lounged in and hustled down his contributions in any con- venient vacant space," " Derby and Char- Introduction. 9 ter Streets," "Old Burying Grounds," " ' New Guinea ' and Witch Hill," and "The Witch Records (?) ; " while besides these she spoke with the most genuine tenderness of a paper she wished to write on " Salem Gentlewomen." There was also some talk of a sketch of " Salem Oddities," to include some notice of " Billy Cook " and other erratic individuals ; and she wrote thus much upon " The Bundle Handkerchief : " " The bundle handkerchief is as essential a figure in Salem history as the witches themselves." " My Cousin the Captain," upon which she was engaged when she laid down for- ever her pen, was in a vein in which, from her extreme fondness for all things nau- tical, she delighted especially. The fascina- tion of the sea was strong upon her, and in some of her magazine stories'she has shown how lively was her interest in all that pertains to the life of a mariner. There is in the history of Salem enough of nautical romance to excite the most to Introduction. sluggish imagination, and far more one so responsive as was hers. There is an irre- sistible suggestiveness in the record of the voyages of Salem vessels to cannibal Fe- jee, to Zanzibar, to Mauritius, to Surinam, to Madagascar, to Russia, and to Calcutta. The fancy is aroused by the simple enu- meration of the cargoes the ships brought from far over-seas : " Wine and prunes ; " " nutmegs, mace and cinnamon ; " " raisins, almonds and sweet wines ; " " palm - oil, gum copal and ivory ; " "sugar, indigo and spices ; " or the drolly incongruous mix- ture, " gin, cheese and steel," brought by the brig Minerva from Amsterdam. There is, too, an opulence in the amounts paid for tariff — the Sumatra, a ship of but 287 tons burden, on three cargoes from Canton handed over duties of $128,363.13, $138,- 480.34 and $140,761.96 — which throws a sort of halo of magnificent and fabulous wealth over even this prosaic side of the marine history of the old town. The se- cret voyages of Captain Jonathan Carnes Introduction. i / to Sumatra, moreover, with an allusion to which " My Cousin the Captain " so abrupt- ly closes ; the messages from Captain Ea- gleston, who in Southern seas caught sev- eral albatrosses, fastened to the neck of each a quill in which was a slip of paper, bearing the words, " Ship Leonidas, of Sa- lem, bound for New Zealand," and by means of a French vessel which recaptured one of the birds off the Cape of Good Hope, hundreds of miles away, sent tidings to his friends at home, who during the six months that had elapsed since his sailing had received no news of him ; the robbery of the Mexican by the Spanish pirate Pinda, with the unsuccessful attempt to burn alive the imprisoned crew ; the adven- tures of the Charles Daggett among the treacherous cannibals in Fejee, and in trans- porting the Pitcairn islanders from "sen- sual Tahiti " to their former home, — all these and many another wild tale of adven- ture, peril, and shipwreck might be com- bined to form a most thrilling chapter. It 12 Introduction. is no wonder that one who loved both Sa- lem and the sea should be moved by such a history. The sketch of Derby Street was one of the first projected, but there are scarcely any notes for it. In it was to figure the house of Mr. Forrester, where upon the parlor walls were painted scenes from the life of the owner, showing his rise from poverty to grandeur ; the place of his birth, a humble cottage in Ireland ; with his vari- ous places of business, the Salem wharves and the vessels which had brought his merchandise to them. The Old Ladies' Home, too, was to be spoken of, with rem- iniscences of certain of its inmates whose memories took hold upon the romantic and palmy days of the town. And there was to be a sketch of the strange old shop of a Sol Gibbs like instrument maker, which stood upon a corner of Derby Street, wherein were the relics of many a good ship and many a voyage ; where among quaint rubbish from all over the world an- Introduction. 13 cient mariners sat and gossiped garru- lously, in endless review of their past and tireless bewailings of the degeneracy of the present ; where antique chronometers ticked patiently, awaiting the return of owners whose bones were bleaching on the sands of islands in seas of the under world or " suffering a sea change " in caves be- neath some ocean near the poles ; where the wizened proprietor and the storm-beaten antiques who consorted with him were ir- resistibly suggestive of the mummies some adventurous Salem captain, perhaps one of these, had brought from Peru ; where time had no value save as its measure served to test the accuracy of venerable time- pieces ; and where the quadrants, the sex- tants, and the compasses reposing in shabby cases upon the dusty shelves would not have been out of place on the deck of the Flying Dutchman or the Dead Ship of Harpswell. " If fine old Leisure is dead," runs one of the scanty notes, " surely he spent his last days in Salem ;" and in this 14 Introduction. quaint nook good old Leisure may well have dreamed through his placid dotage. In the sketch of Derby Street, too, it is to be supposed there would have been mention of the famous Custom House in which Hawthorne wrote, and where he feigned to have found the manuscript of that greatest of all American books, " The Scarlet Letter ; " while it was no less in- tended to picture the dusky sail-lofts, fra- grant with the smell of new canvas and of tar, where were stitched on the smooth floor the great white sheets that were to be the wings of many a craft more stout than even the strong-penned albatross, and were to be mirrored in the waves of har- bors as far asunder as the world is wide. The writer of these sketches spoke more than once of the suggestive charm of these sail-lofts, where men sat upon the floor like Turks, sewing, with their thimbles curi- ously fastened in the middle of their palms, and where the children went for bunches of " thrums," to be used at home for tying up Introduction. 15 bundles. Lifted above the stir of Derby Street, the silence of the loft must have been doubly impressive, and have accorded well with the softened light which fell through small dusty panes, to be reflected from the polished floor and great snowy sails. But most of all would this paper have been likely to deal with the indefinable charm of the days when Derby Street was alive with bustle and excitement; when swarthy sailors were grouped at the cor- ners, or sat smoking before the doors of their boarding-houses, their ears adorned with gold rings, and their hands and wrists profusely illustrated with uncouth designs in India ink ; when every shop window was a museum of odd trifles from the Ori- ent, and the very air was thick with a sense of excitement and of mystery. Of what would have been included in the other papers one may conjecture, but beyond the fact that "The Bundle Hand- kerchief " was to show the staid people of 1 6 Introduction. Salem carrying home in that useful article their weekly baked beans and brown bread, and equally their mental food in the shape of books from the Athenaeum, or, indeed, for that matter, anything that they ever had to carry home at all ; and that it was to give a half-humorous and half-pathetic history of an old gentleman not unlike him who figures in " The Last Leaf," thjfe is nothing that can be said authoritatively*-, II. She who wrote under the name of Elea- nor Putnam — a name which was in truth borne by her great-grandmother in maid- enhood — went to live in Salem in 1865, being then nine years old. Her ances- tors had dwelt there almost from the foundation of the town, and like all genu- ine Salem families cherished that feeling of local pride and attachment which left so strong a mark upon her character. Half a dozen years she lived here before the family moved temporarily to the West, in Introduction. ij search of health for the mother. In that time she attended the dame-school she has described, spent her pennies at the quaint shops she has pictured, and stored in a memory which was wonderful for its fidel- ity and its exactness a thousand details of which we now shall have no record. She was naturally not a little amused when a Boston journal commented upon her second " Atlantic " paper : " Eleanor Putnam describes a Salem dame-school of fifty or sixty years ago in a charming es- say." The truth is, however, that Salem forms a sort of eddy, deliciously shady and qu,iet, beside the rushing stream of modern progress, and the state of things existing there a score of years ago was similar to that which passed away half a century since in more progressive communities. III. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of quoting here from two letters, both writ- ten by persons unaware of the identity of 18 Introduction. Eleanor Putnam, and both total strangers to her. The first is of interest as showing the kindly and generous appreciation of a man of letters, who has himself, unhappily for literature, passed beyond all earthly work ; the second as proving how truthful are the pictures these essays present. 335 East 17TH Street, Stuyvesant Square. Dear Miss Putnam : Pray allow me the pleasure of expressing to you my great admiration and enjoyment of your " Old Salem Shops " in the " Atlantic " for September, which I spoke of often to friends at the time of its appearance. I am led to re- vert to it now by having recently read Miss Mitford's " Our Village " and " Belford Regis." These I heard spoken of in my boyhood, when they were in great favor ; but I never saw them until lately among a heap of books with which I beguiled hours of illness. I was reminded at once of your sketch, — say, rather, highly fin- ished genre-picture, — and could not but think of its superiority, — superiority in everything, in style, in vivid portraiture, in gentle humor. Introduction. jg And then I thought that I would venture to suggest to you that you should write and pub- lish a group of such pictures of the now — alas! — fading New England life. They could not but be welcome ; and they would have at least one admiring and grateful reader. Sincerely yours, Rich. Grant White. Sunday, 2d Oct. '84. Of the second letter I have let the per- sonalities remain, because they concern only the dead and can do no harm. Boston, Feb. 20, 1886. To the Lady who signs herself Eleanor Putnam. I have often thought of asking your proper address that I might thank you for the charm- ing tales about dear old Salem ; but the Feb- ruary number of the " Atlantic " " Salem Cup- boards " is too much for me, and I cannot delay thanking you, and saying what delight I have taken in it. I trust you will pardon the liberty I take in addressing you, though I am a stranger, for it renews my youth, makes 20 Introduction. my blood thrill, and my heart beat when I recall my early home and see it so faithfully described. The Hersey Derbys were my first cousins. The old house contained stores of cut glass, such as you describe, which was preferred to silver in those days. Aunt Hersey had much humor and was a mimic. I remember her coming into our house on Court Street one day and describing a call at old Mrs. B.'s shop. Mary and Nancy were in the store. How per- fectly I remember them ! Severe, staid and formal ; talking slowly and whining over their private affairs even before customers. Mary would say : " Mother, Miss So-and-so is com- ing to dinner ; what shall we have for her ? " After due deliberation, the old lady would squeak out : " Coffee and nimble-cake is a very pretty dinner, Mary." And so it was settled. The old cupboard is all so natural. At my father's we had stores of the ginger in blue and wickerwork, and on the upper shelf a sticky fork might often be seen. I remember mamma, to shame me, once put the jar and fork on my pillow, but I, in triumph, transferred it to my closet and feasted on it at will. Introduction. 21 I remember well the rock candy in such great quantities ; and mamma had a huge box of maccaroni and vermicelli from Leghorn in every variety of form, and as they said : — " A box of such enormous size Great Holyoke's years would not suffice To eat it all before she dies." I have now some dainty relics, a needle-book with drawings in India ink, — bee-hive, etc., most delicately done, — and tender mottoes. In Mr. Hoppin's " Auton House " I see again our nursery : the back of the fire-place in iron with a pot of tulips cast on it and the sides always kept so nice with redding ; and the smell of the herbs in the closet and the row of bottles that we would uncork and sniff till we came to paregoric, that would ease our pain. I have rambled on, but I have enjoyed it all so much; the " Gibraltars and Black-Jacks," all that you have given us, and long for more. Excuse my venturing to address you. I have been unable to walk for sixteen years, am seventy-nine years old, and old age may be pardoned for being garrulous. ... I am the last of my line, not even a cousin left. I am your friend, 22 Introduction. IV. There is perhaps no excuse for adding here the following fragments, since they have no connection with the subject of this little volume. They seem to me worth preserving, however, and while I have de- nied myself the pleasure of writing a sketch of my wife's life, lest it might seem an effort forcibly to claim attention which she unhappily had not lived long enough to win, it does not appear so wholly out of place to insert these few extracts, which may help such readers as care to do so the better to form a correct estimate of her powers. The habit, already alluded to, of depending upon memory, has reduced her note-books to the most melancholy brevity. From what there is I have made a few se- lections which seem to me to show her delicate humor, close observation, and fe- licitous diction. Introduction. 2} " Most of us would read our own caricatures with bland unconsciousness and be immensely amused thereat." " Apples all gnarled and twisted, as if their faces were drawn awry and puckered and pursed up by their own sourness." " One may say hard words of her, but not to her." " I have often noticed in deserted ship-yards the flights of stairs which once led up to the vessel's deck, but which now, the vessel having slipped the ways and sailed to foreign shores, lead to nowhere and stop abruptly in mid-air, as if — like the ladder in the vision of Jacob of old — some one had started to build steps to heaven, but had failed and stopped, discouraged long ere he attained his end." " He had the face of a young Greek god ; as for his soul, — well, perhaps we can say no worse of him than that he had also the soul of a young Greek god." " She said she did it for the best, but things which are ' done for the best ' are seldom pleas- ant." " On Kneeland Street about noon of a burn- 24 Introduction. ing July day, an Italian wine-seller sat at the door of his little shop. The old swing door behind him was of a cotton whiah had been originally of a vivid orange, but which from standing half-open, and thus meeting irregularly the rays of the sun, was now exquisitely shaded from a dull cream tint on the hinge side to the original brilliant hue on the edge where was placed the latch. This door, made more gor- geous than common by the blaze of the sun's rays which fell upon it, served as a screen which set off to perfection the dark face of the Italian, his shock of black hair, his sleepy dark eyes, his crisp bushy beard, the gold rings in his ears, and his handsome, full throat, from which the shirt was carelessly rolled away. He was doing nothing, and doing it with a thoroughness only possible to an Italian or an African." " That man is not wise who tries to induce one woman to be kind to another on the ground that she is young." " It was, I believe, what physicians call ' sus- spended animation,' only that in his case the suspension was chronic." Introduction. 25 " It stopped raining very suddenly, diminish- ing from a shower of heavy drops to a thin mist of silver ; then the pearl gray tint of the sky all at once broke, and began to sweep away toward the northeast in long trailing lines of opal and amber vapor, leaving behind a heaven blue and cool with a pale radiance as of early spring-time." " He kept a secret as closely as a new cone holds its seeds, which are never delivered an instant before the appointed time." " She had bent to kiss the baby, who was babbling upon the floor, and as she recovered her standing position a strange thing happened. She extended her hand in recovering her bal- ance, and somehow gave it a twist which at once transformed it from its white plumpness into the hand of an old woman, smooth like parchment and crackled finely like old china. It passed like a flash of lightning. Had it not been that both hands wore the same ring, — a ruby set about with diamonds, — I should have thought that the two hands belonged to different persons. It was the hand of an old woman, but a woman in the prime of life stood 26 Introduction. before me, golden-haired, pink-cheeked, bright- eyed, and vigorous, smoothing the folds of her satin gown and laughing like a girl of twenty." " When rats desert a sinking ship where do they go ? " " Story of the Old Ladies' Home in Derby Street. A crazy old woman, once a beauty living in the same house, finds love-letters hid- den behind a panel in the wall." V. Nothing that any one else can write will replace the Salem papers which now we have lost forever, and, however reluc- tantly, it is necessary to bring to a close this brief review of what it was planned to make this volume. It must remain a promise of which death prevented the fulfillment ; a proof, merely, of what might have been. A. B. OLD SALEM SHOPS. WONDER how many people have memories as vivid as mine of the quaint shops which a score of years ago stood placidly along the quiet streets of Salem. In the Salem of to-day there are few innovations. Not many modern buildings have replaced the time- honored landmarks ; yet twenty years ago Salem, in certain aspects, was far more like an old colonial town than it is now. When the proprietor of an old shop died it was seldom that a new master entered. Nobody new ever came to Salem, and everybody then living there had already his legitimate occupation. The old shops, lacking tenants, went to sleep. Their green shutters were closed, and they were laid up in ordinary without comment from any one. 28 Old Salem Shops. I remember one shop of the variety known in Salem as "button stores." It was kept by two quaint old sisters, whose family name I never knew. We always called them Miss Martha and Miss Sibyl. Miss Martha was the older, and sported a magnificent turban, of wonderful con- struction. Miss Sibyl wore caps and lit- tle wintry curls. Both had short-waisted gowns, much shirred toward the belts, and odd little housewives of green leather, which hung from their apron-bindings by green ribbons. Their wares were few and faded. They had a sparse collection of crewels, old- fashioned laces, little crimped cakes of white wax, and emery balls in futile im- itation of strawberries. They sold hand- kerchiefs, antiquated gauze, and brocaded ribbons, and did embroidery stamping for ladies with much care and deliberation. I remember being once sent to take to these ladies an article which was to be stamped with a single letter. Miss Martha con- Old Salem Shops. 29 suited at some length with her sister, and then, with an air of gentle importance, said to me, " Tell your mother, dear, that sister Sibyl will have it ready in one week, cer- tainly." On another occasion Miss Sibyl had chanced to give me a penny too much in change ; discovering which before I was well away, I returned to the shop and told her of the mistake. Miss Sibyl dropped the penny into the little till, — so slender were the means of these old gentlewomen that I believe even a penny was of im- portance to them, — and in her gentle voice, she asked, " What is your name, dear ? " and when I told her she replied, approvingly, "Well, you are an honest child, and you may go home and tell your mother that Miss Sibyl said so." To this commendation she added the gift of a bit of pink gauze ribbon, brocaded with little yellow and lavender leaves, and I returned to my family in a condition of such con- scious virtue that I am convinced that I jo Old Salem Shops. must have been quite insufferable for some days following. The only article in which these ladies dealt which specially concerned us chil- dren was a sort of gay-colored beads, such as were used in making bags and reticules — that fine old bead embroidery which some people show nowadays as the work of their great-grandmothers. These beads were highly valued by Salem children, and were sold for a penny a thimbleful. They were measured out in a small mustard- spoon of yellow wood, and it took three ladlefuls to fill the thimble. I cannot for- get the air of placid and judicial gravity with which dear Miss Martha measured out a cent's worth of beads. One winter day Miss Sibyl died. The green shutters of the shop were bowed with black ribbons, and a bit of rusty black crape fluttered from the knob of the half- glass door, inside of which the curtains were drawn as for a Sunday. For a whole week the shop was decorously closed. Old Salem Shops. 31 When it was reopened, only Miss Martha, a little older and grayer and more gently serious, stood behind the scantily filled show-case. My mother went in with me that day and bought some laces. Miss Martha folded each piece about a card and secured the ends with pins, after her usual careful fashion, and made out the quaint little receipted bill with which she always insisted on furnishing customers. As she handed the parcel across the counter she answered a look in my mother's eyes. " I did not think she would go first," she said, simply. "Sibyl was very young to die." In the following autumn came Miss Martha's turn to go. Then the shutters were closed forever. Nobody took the store. The winter snows drifted un- checked into the narrow doorway, and the bit of black crape, affixed to the latch by friendly hands, waved forlornly in the chilly winds and shivered in the air, — a thing to affect a child weirdly, and to be $2 Old Salem Shops. hastened past with a "creepy" sensation in the uncertain grayness of a winter twi- light. Another well-remembered Salem shop was the little establishment of a certain Mrs. Birmingham. This store was really a more joyous and favorite resort for chil- dren than the aristocratic precincts of Miss Martha and Miss Sibyl. One reason for this was that, while two gentler souls never lived, these ladies belonged to a generation when children were kept in their places, and were to be seen and not heard. This fact flavored their kindly treatment of young people, and we felt it. Then, too, save for the beads, their wares were not attractive to little folk ; and, lastly, there was a constraint in the prim neatness, the mystic, half-perceived odor of some old Indian perfume, and the general air of de- cayed gentility that hung about the shop of the two old gentlewomen, which per- tained not at all to the thoroughly vulgar but alluring domain of Mrs. Birmingham. Old Salem Shops. 33 This shop was not on Essex Street, the street of shops, but upon a quiet by-way, devoted to respectable dwelling-houses, and for this reason we were free to visit Mrs. Birmingham's whenever we chose. It was a tiny house, and I believe it had beside it a very shabby and seedy garden. There were two windows with green wooden shutters, and a green door with the upper half of glass. This was once the fashionable manner of stores in Salem. Inside the door was a step, down which one always fell incontinently ; for even if one remembered its existence, it was so narrow and the door closed on its spring so suddenly behind one that there was no choice but to fall. The very name of Bir- mingham brings up the curious odor of that shop. There was, above all, a close and musty and attic-like perfume. Min- gling with this were a perception of cellar mould, a hint of cheese, a dash of tobacco and cabbage, a scent of camphor, a sus- picion of snuff, and a strong undercurrent 34 Old Salem Shops. of warm black gown scorched by being too near an air-tight stove. Mrs. Birmingham's stock equaled But- tercup's in variety. Along the floor in front of the left-hand counter was always a row of lusty green cabbages and a basket of apples. A small glass show-case held bread and buns and brick-shaped sheets of livid gingerbread. If one came to buy milk, Mrs. Birmingham dipped it from a never empty pan on the right-hand coun- ter, wherein sundry hapless flies went, like Ophelia, to a moist death. Then there were ribbons, and cotton laces ; needles, pins, perfumed soaps, and pomatums. There were a few jars of red-and-white peppermint and cinnamon sticks, a box of pink corncake, — which Mrs. Birmingham conscientiously refused to sell to children, for fear the coloring matter might be poi- sonous, — and, in season and out, on a line above the right-hand counter hung a row of those dismal creations, the valentines known as "comic." All these articles, Old Salem Shops. 35 though shabby and shop-worn enough, probably, possessed for us children a species of fascination. There was a gla- mour in the very smell before referred to, and the height of our worldly ambition was to have a shop "just like Mrs. Bir- mingham's." The things for which we sought Mrs. Birmingham's were, however, chiefly of two sorts. The first was a kind of small jointed wooden doll, about three inches high. In the face these generally looked like Mrs. Birmingham, and they had little red boots painted on their stubby feet. These ugly little puppets cost a cent apiece, and were much prized as servant dolls, nurses particularly, because their arms would crook, and they could be made to hold baby dolls in a rigid but highly sat- isfactory manner. This flexibility of limb had also, by the by, its unpleasant side; for my brother Tom had a vicious habit, if ever the baby-house were left unguarded, of bending the doll's joints, and leaving _?6 Old Salem Shops. the poor little manikins in all manner of ungainly and indecorous attitudes. An- other thing which could be bought for one cent — the limit of our purses when we went shopping, and it required six or seven of us to spend this sum — was a string of curious little beads made of red sealing- wax. They were somehow moulded on the string while warm, and could not be slipped off. We really did not like them very well, yet we were always buying them, and despite our experience trying to slip them from the string. There was a bell fastened to the top of Mrs. Birmingham's shop door, which jangled as one precipitately entered, and summoned Mrs. Birmingham from an inner room. Mrs. Birmingham was a stout Irishwoman, with black eyes, fat hands, and a remarkably fiery nose. She wore a rusty black gown — the same, probably, which was always scorching before the stove in the back room — and a false front dark as the raven's wing. I believe she Old Salem Shops. 37 must have worn some sort of cap, because, without recalling just where she had them, I never think of her without a distinct im- pression of dark purple ribbons. She was by no means an amiable woman, and in serving us she had a way of casting our pennies contemptuously into the till which was humiliating in the extreme. She had likewise a habit of never believing that we had a commission right, and persisted in sending us home to make sure that we were sent for a ten and not a five cent loaf, or for one and not two dozen of eggs. This was painful and crushing to our pride, but the bravest never rebelled against Mrs. Birmingham. My brother used, indeed, to lurk around the corner a few minutes, and then return to the shop without having gone home ; but I always feared Mrs. Birmingham's sharp black eyes, and felt that a dies ira would cer- tainly come for Tom, when all would be discovered. In addition to the shop Mrs. Birming- j8 Old Salem Shops. ham conducted an intelligence office in the back room. I never saw one of the girls, nor knew of any person's going to Mrs. Birmingham to seek intelligence ; but sometimes we heard laughter, and very often Mrs. Birmingham's deep bass voice exclaimed, "Mike, be off wid yer jokin' now ! Let alone tellin' stories til the gur- rels ! " " Mike " was Mr. Birmingham, a one- legged man, whom I never saw. We knew that he was one-legged because Tom had seen him, and we secretly believed this to be the reason of Mrs. Birmingham's dressing in mourning. We children had asked and been told the nature and pur- pose of an intelligence office, and yet there was ever a sort of uncanny -mystery about that back room, where unseen girls laughed, and Mr. Birmingham was always being told to "be off wid his jokin'." But tempora mutantur. Alas for Mike ! He is off with all joking now for good. Alas, too, for Mrs. Birmingham ! I cannot Old Salem Shops. $g believe that she died, she was so invinci- ble ; but she is gone. The rusty black gown, the purple ribbons, and the ruddy nose have passed somewhere into the shad- ows of oblivion. One more shop there was in which, at a certain season, the souls of the children rejoiced. It was not much of a shop at ordinary times ; indeed, it was but a small and unnoticeable building just around a corner of Essex Street. It was only at holiday time that it blossomed out of insig- nificance. This was before the days of any extent of holiday decoration, and very lit- tle in the way of Christmas trimming was done by Salem tradesmen. The season was celebrated with decorous merriment in our homes, but almost no church adorn- ment was seen, and most of the shops re- laxed not from their customary Salem air of eminent and grave respectability. No butcher sent home a spray of holly with the goose, and no Christmas cards dropped, as now, from the packages of baker or can- 40 Old Salem Shops. dlestick maker. It was therefore the more delightful to witness the annual transfor- mation of the little shop around the Essex Street corner. The very heart and soul of Christmastide must have dwelt in the plump body of the man who kept that shop. His wooden awning was converted into a perfect arbor, under which the front of his little store showed as an enchanted cavern of untold beauty ; a bower of lusty greenery, aglow at night with the starry brilliance of many candles, gay with the scarlet berries of holly, set off by the mystic mistletoe, and rich with Aladdin treasures of sugary birds and beasts, ropes of snowy popped corn, bewildering braids, twists and baskets of pink-and-white sugar, golden oranges, — a rarer fruit then than now, — white grapes in luscious clusters, and bunches of those lovely cherries of clear red barley candy with yellow broom corn for stems. After all, though, it was not so much that the wares were more delightful than Old Salem Shops. 41 those kept by other folk. Probably the very same things could have been bought at any fruit store. It was simply that this tiny shop and its plump, red-cheeked owner were overflowing with the subtle and joy- ous spirit of keeping holiday. We children used always to call his place " the Christ- mas shop ; " and I well remember the thrill of joy which ran over me when, re- turning from school one afternoon, I saw my own parents entering the jovial pre- cincts. I sped home on winged feet to tell the other children that " mother and father were in the Christmas shop ; " and we all sat about the fire in the twilight and "guessed" what they were buying, and reveled in the dear delights which were to result from a visit to that treasure house. Where is he now, that child-like man who loved the holidays ? The merry wight was twenty years before his time, but it warms one's heart to think of him to-day. Alas, a visit to Salem last year showed his wooden awning torn away, and in his dis- 42 Old, Salem Shops. mantled bower a dry and wizened stationer among law books and school-room furnish- ings. What a direful change from the halcyon days of old ! I wonder that the chubby ghost of the former owner does not walk o' nights to bemoan the times that are no more. The shop of Miss Martha and Miss Sibyl, too, seemed to be entirely done away with, and Mrs. Birmingham's, al- though still standing, was but a wreck. I would gladly have bought there, for old times' sake, a jointed doll or a string of sealing-wax beads ; but the green wooden shutters were closed, the green door sunken sadly on its hinges, its glass half grossly boarded. The grass grew high before the doorstone. The mossy roof was concave. The chimney was almost tottering. The little shop was drawing itself together and dying ; asking no sympathy of the be- holder, but meeting its appointed fate with that gray and silent resignation which alone is considered the proper thing in Salem society. 43 A SALEM DAME-SCHOOL. N English journal recently devoted some space to a discussion of the so-called " dame-school " of the rus- tic district, and concluded that its virtue, if indeed it possessed any, was of the smallest. It appears from this article that, while the authorities urge the superior ben- efit and training to be found in the parish schools, the villagers, with the doggedness of true lower-class ignorance, persist in sending their children to the old dame, — the same, perchance, who taught them their own letters thirty or forty years be- fore, and who depends upon the pittance earned by her labors to keep herself alive and out of the parish workhouse. Certainly all this is most ungrateful and vicious of the peasantry, and if they were a little more intelligent they would see that 44 A Salem Dame-School. they have really no right to cut off the educational advantages of their children, just for the sake of a snuffy old woman, who makes her pupils sing the multiplica- tion table through their noses, and who calls z " izzard." It is, however, a singular fact that this conservative clinging to old methods is not confined to English plough- men, for it was not long ago that a well- known American divine spoke very warm- ly, at a meeting of the Round Table Club, in favor of the old methods of teaching. A lady of high breeding and of rather unusual culture added her opinion, say- ing,— " I want my boy to learn his letters ex- actly as I did, from a primer laid upon his teacher's knee ; and I want the letters to be pointed out with a great brass pin, as mine were, and no other way." Such of us as have ever been to one of these dame-schools must, I think, always hold them in kindly and loving remem- brance, and particularly is this true in re- A Salem Dame-School. 45 gard to the dame-schools of Salem. In this ancient city these schools differed from their English counterparts in being kept by gentlewomen for the benefit of well-born children. The lower classes at- tended the public schools. In those days it would have been unutterably vulgar to allow one's children to go to any but a pri- vate school until they were old enough to enter the higher grades. Perhaps the most exclusive of all these private schools was one kept by a pair of gentlewomen living in the upper and eminently respectable portion of Essex Street. Their name was not Witherspoon, but for purposes of disguise it may be well to call it thus. The Misses Witherspoon's school was not opened to whomsoever might chance to knock. Only an intro- duction by some person with untarnished 'scutcheon, who could vouch for one's pos- session of an undoubted great-grandfather, could gain admission to this small but ar- istocratic symposium. I have reason to 46 A Salem Dame-Scbool. believe that I was not accepted without a thorough examination of family docu- ments, and that the scale was finally turned in my favor by the production of an an- cestress who was down in the witch rec- ords as having testified against some poor old goody or other, and signed "Phoebe Chandler, her -j- mark." Once a pupil at the Misses Witherspoon's school, however, one's social superiority was firmly estab- lished forever. In after years one might elope with a grocer, become a spiritualis- tic medium, or start a woman's bank, but one could never be regarded as quite be- yond the pale who could claim ever to have been admitted to the select circle at the Misses Witherspoon's. Our way to school lay along the quieter part of Essex Street. We always stopped to sharpen our slate-pencils by rubbing them upon the granite bases of the great columns before Mechanic's Hall, and there was one little drug shop before which we always loitered to admire the crimson and A Salem Dame-School. 47 purple jars which adorned the windows. The quaint little house where the witches were tried was attached by one corner to this shop. It was a quiet and common- place building, occupied at that time by a maker and mender of sun-umbrellas. It stood back in a green yard, and from an upper window projected, for a sign, a tri- colored parasol. There was nothing at all uncanny about the silent, weather-beaten old house, yet we eyed it askance, and once felt a thrill of genuine horror at the gaunt apparition of a black cat stealing with soft feet over the gray roof. The Misses Witherspoon's house faced Essex Street, but not to ruin the front stair carpet we always went in by a door which opened into the little side-yard. This brought us into the kitchen, from which the back stairs ascended. In order that we might not look profanely upon the domestic priestess of the household, a long curtain of gay-colored patch was hung be- side the stairway, and we were further- 48 A Salem Dame-Scbool. more charged not to look over the top of it when we reached a height upon the stairs which made this possible. As a natural result, the space behind the cur- tain became a sort of Bluebeard's Cham- ber, and one inevitably did peep now and then, though one never saw anything more wonderful than Miss Abby Witherspoon wiping tea-cups. The stairs led directly into a little back chamber, in which we hung our outside garments, and from this chamber we en- tered the school-room. This was a low, square apartment in the left-hand front corner of the house, having two windows on Essex Street, and I think only one which looked upon the side-yard. The walls had a wooden dado painted white, while the paper, in brown and blue, re- peated a meaningless pattern. There were two rows of single desks, with hard, slip- pery little yellow chairs. These were for the girls. There was one row of seats for boys, — the female sex was the dom- A Salem Dame-School. 49 inant one at the Misses Witherspoon's, — and that was decorously removed to the furthest possible limit. The Misses With- erspoon had no great liking for boys. They regarded them always with sus- picion, as one might a Norwich torpedo, and I do not believe that they ever came wholly to consider it proper to allow them to attend the school at all. There were three Misses Witherspoon. The oldest, Miss Emily, was rather severe in outward appearance, with an upright figure and remarkably keen dark eyes. One fancied that she might have been handsome as a young woman, but some- thing too sharp and clever with her tongue. She taught arithmetic, and put down on a little slate marks for our misdemeanors. I can hear now the brisk tap of her pencil, and the measured and awful " Little girls, my sharp eye is on you ! " Sometimes this remark was personal instead of gen- eral, and dire indeed was the shame which overwhelmed that one of us whom she 50 A Salem Dame-School. named. Miss Lucy, the second sister, was not made of such stuff as Miss Emily. She was milder of face and gentler of voice, and had a kindly, caressing way with those pupils whose youth forced them to spell out their lessons from a book upon her knee. The third sister, Miss Abby, was the housekeeper, and never appeared in the school-room. All the sisters wore scant-skirted gowns, and their hair was scalloped low over their ears and turned up oddly behind to a tight fastening of shell combs. At recess we did not go to romp rudely out-of-doors, but amused ourselves in the house with A Ship from Canton and The Genteel Lady, as became well-bred chil- dren. An exception was made in favor of the boys, who were told to go out into the yard to shout. Miss Emily seemed to think that boys must go somewhere oc- casionally to shout, as a whale must come up to blow. The boys never did shout. . I fancy they were too much depressed by A Salem Dame-School. 51 the great gentility of everything. There were but two of them, and they generally sat on a deserted hen-coop and banged their heels and looked very dismal till the little bell tinkled for them to come in. When there had been a fall of moist snow, the boys would sometimes snowball each other in a perfunctory way, being bidden to the sport by Miss Lucy ; and on such occasions we of the gentler sex were al- lowed to go and look upon the stirring sight from the back-chamber window. The elder of these two boys was a tall, very pale, light-haired lad, who was called by Miss Emily " Danyell." He had a highly satisfactory disease of the eyes, which often prevented him from studying for an entire day, but which was fortu- nately not aggravated by drawing pictures on the slate and making Jacob's ladders. On a Wednesday, when the girls all sewed, Danyell did a deed without a name by means of four pins stuck into a spool and some bits of colored worsted. We heard 52 A Salem Dame-School. that he was making a lamp-mat for his aunt, but I fear it was never finished, for the other boy, one direful day, called Dan- yell " a sissy knitting a night-cap for his granny," and, although he was obliged to stand for some time in a corner as a pun- ishment, I think the iron of his sneering words entered the soul of Danyell ; at all events, the spool disappeared. This same " other boy," whose name has entirely faded from my memory, was de- cidedly more masculine in character than Danyell. He was a short, fat lad, and he wore a bottle-green jacket, which was cov- ered with brass buttons, and fitted as tightly as Tommy Traddles' own. His hair was remarkably thick, and he was a very sullen boy, with a revengeful disposi- tion. It was his standing grievance that he went to a private school. He one day confided to me that his cousin, who went to the Broad Street school, had been thrown down in a foot-ball rush, and had had three teeth knocked in. He added A Salem Dame-Scbool. 53 that a fellow could have some fun at a pub- lic school, but that Miss Witherspoon's was a baby-class. I did not like this slur on our dear little school, and I totally disa- greed with the sullen boy as to what was fun. A short time after this Danyell was withdrawn from the Misses Witherspoon's to go to an academy somewhere, and the green-jacketed boy was left to sit in a row by himself, to go out to shout alone at recess, and to sit gloomily by himself on the hen-coop and swing his heels. A certain air of gentle good-breeding prevailed at the Misses Witherspoon's school, which affected the children so far that quarrels and sharp words seem to have been practically unknown. This may have been owing partly to the fact that we were always under the eyes of our teach- ers, even at recess ; but it is quite true that we were little gentlewomen in school, whatever we may have been out of it. There are, for example, few schools to-day where a child made conspicuous by her 34 A Salem Dame-School. dress could escape unkindly jests and un- timely displays of wit from her mates. It chanced to be my lot at this time to be arrayed in the cast-off raiment of a pair of venerable great-aunts, whose taste in fab- rics was, to say sooth, a little antiquated. Accordingly, while other children wore warm-colored plaids and soft cashmeres of lovely hues, I was clad in gowns of dull browns and smutty purples, or, still worse, in flowered chintzes, which even in those days looked hopelessly old-fashioned, and resembled upholstery stuffs. My rubbers, too, instead of being of the shiny, blue- lined sort so dear to childish souls, were literally what Miss Lucy called "gum- shoes," being made of pure rubber spread while hot over a last. They had an im- pression of a clover leaf stamped on each toe. After a little wear ugly pits began to appear in the rubber, as if the shoes had had small-pox. One side was thicker than the other, and when taken off they closed in a hateful way, and persisted in lying A Salem Dame-School. 55 upon the side. I used to think I could have borne the other peculiarities with res- ignation, but there was something partic- ularly aggravating in having one's rubbers shut up when taken from the feet. Other children had neat little twine school-satch- els, but I used the old green baize bag in which my grandfather had carried his law papers. It was so long and I so short that it nearly touched the ground as I walked, and my book and my apple rolled about unpleasantly in the bottom. In these days, what rude sport would not be directed by school-girls against a child with such odd belongings ! But so perfect was the kindly good-breeding of the little dame-school that I never remember a smile or significant glance, though I must have been indeed an odd and antiquated figure. Beside these invaluable teachings of kindness and courtesy the lessons were few and simple. We read and spelled and wrote copies on our slates. We chanted the multiplication table to an "adapted" 56 A Salem Dame-School. Yankee Doodle. We learned addition and subtraction by an abacus, which was an article like a wire broiler strung with col- ored wooden beads, and which had the ef- fect of at once destroying any possibility of original effort on the part of the pupil. When we were marked for any misde- meanor we had to go to Miss Emily and ask what we should do to " make up our marks." Before doing this it was the fash- ion to cry — or pretend to cry — for a few moments, with one's head resting upon the desk. I do not think any of us ever really shed a tear, but it was a perfunctory way we had of showing our sense of the disgrace of having a mark. The " making up a mark " was by no means a heavy penance. It usually consisted of writing one's name ten times, or making some fig- ures, or " doing sums " on a slate. We recited in arithmetic to Miss Emily, but as we had all sorts of odd books each child was in a class by herself. Most of the pupils had arithmetics of the compara- A Salem Dame-School. 57 tively modern sort, wherein were rows of pinks and apples, and little sparrows oblig- ingly sitting on fences in the twos and threes necessary for teaching the first two of the four simple rules. My own book, however, was of a far earlier time, rum- maged out of the attic for my special use. It was a thin, brown volume, with an hon- est enough outside, but the contents were of a peculiarly misleading and beguiling character. It opened with an apparently artless tale of an old woman whose name was Jane, who lived " all alone by herself in a small hut upon the lea." She was further described as being very poor, — so poor that she depended for her living upon selling the few little things raised in her tiny garden patch and the eggs laid by her three speckled hens. The wind blew about her humble cot, and in winter time often drove the snow through the cracks in the old walls. Jane was, however, a good and thrifty old woman, and did her best to make an honest living. Each of her spec- 5