How perfectly he understood Salem!"
"Salem is certainly very remarkable," I responded.
"Yes, certainly so," he agreed. "Strange folk! Salem had a type of
itself in its very harbor. The ship America, at Downer's wharf, grew
old and went to pieces in that one spot, through years. Bit by bit it
fell to atoms, but never ceded itself to the new era. So with Salem,
precisely. It is the most delightful place to visit for this reason,
because it so carefully retains the spirit of the past; and 'The House
of the Seven Gables'!" Dr. Holmes smiled, well knowing the
intangibility of that house.
Said I: "The people are rich in extraordinary oddities. At every turn
a stranger is astonished by some intense characteristic. One feels
strongly its different atmosphere."
"And their very surroundings bear them out!" Dr. Holmes cried,
vivacious in movement and glance as a boy. "Where else are the little
door-yards that hold their glint of sunlight so tenaciously, like the
still light of wine in a glass? Year after year it is ever there, the
golden square of precious sunbeams, held on the palm of the jealous
garden-patch, as we would hold the vial of radiant wine in our hand!
Do you know?" He so forcibly appealed to my ability to follow his
thought that I seemed to know anything he wished. "I hope I shall not
be doing wrong," he continued,--"I hope not,--in asking if you have
any preference among your father's books; supposing you read them,
which I believe is by no means always the case with the children of
authors.
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