She wondered at times if any old fancy kept him single. If so, she was sincerely sorry. For she had been very, very happy with the husband of her love. And in the household there were two merry, frolicking boys, and a sweet little girl, with her mother's eyes.
Captain Marsh did come and he was delighted with his visit. The little boys climbed over him as if they had known him always. He told the story of the terrific battle at the Canaries, and many another battle that had left him unscathed.
"And I used to think if I came back to old Salem and found you unmarried, it would go hard with me if I could not win you," he said to Cynthia in his cordial, manly fashion. "And I confess to you now if Dame Wilby had struck you that day at school, I should have rushed at her like a tiger. I like that remembrance of you standing there so brave and defying."
They both laughed over it.
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 Essex 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 lustre 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 pass away, after its more than two hundred years. But it was a new and doubly interesting Salem then, with its several evolutions that have passed 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 noble 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.