that a lichen can take hold of, is a sage-gray.  There seems to be something in the sea-breezes unusually favorable to the growth of lichens, and they hold high carnival everywhere, growing in riotous exuberance on every tree and rock and fence.  I saw whole board fences so thickly tufted and bearded with a rich, particolored mosaic of lichens that from base-board to cope-board there was scarcely a square foot of the original wood to be seen.  On any hazy Indian-summer afternoon, if you look down the wide, irregular main street, lined with its mighty elms and gambrel-roofed houses, all seems wrapped in a dim gray atmosphere of antiquity, like that surrounding Poe’s House of Usher, only not ghostly as that is.  It is a strange je ne sais quoi that eludes description, as if houses and trees stood at the bottom of a sea of visible heat.

Whatever of picturesqueness an English hamlet has, this American one has.  It has its wealthy hereditary aristocracy, its small farmers or squires and its peasants, its ruins and haunted houses, its traditions of savages and of the great men who have honored it with their presence.  The town, moreover, is set off by a framework of the most enchanting and varied scenery—­river, streamlet, ocean, lighthouse, hills with flower-and-grass-tufted crags, and forests, while on any summer’s day one may see, far away and “sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,” some neighboring village with its graceful spire of purest white gleaming and flaming in the hot sunshine, like marble set in a foil of malachite.

A window of my room looked out upon a crystal stream that wound down through the salt-meadows to the sea, and twice a day, under the influence of the seemingly-mysterious systole and diastole of the tides, spread out into a wide-glittering lake and anon crept back again into its sinuous bed.  This water was as fickle and wanton and many-mooded as a coquettish girl.  Now its translucent glassy surface is unruffled by a single wrinkle, and in its brilliant depths every minutest feature of yonder drifting hay-barge is weirdly mirrored.  I look out again, and the face of the water is working with rage under the lashing of the wind:  at the same time its face seems white with fear, and its ghostly arms are tossing, now in defiance and now in piteous appeal.  But now, as I gaze, the winds in their uncouth gambols tear a huge rent in the cloud-tent they had raised over the earth, and in the sweet blue beyond appears the calm and smiling face of the sun.  Before its glance the wind-phantoms slink away in fear and the now quiet streamlet smiles through its tears.