Undoubted among such specimens as will be met with in the neighborhood of the wharves, or between Essex Street and the water-side, is the old gambrel-roofed, portly-chimneyed house in which our "Wizard of the North" first drew breath. It stands in Union Street, at the left as you pass down. Many pilgrims loiter and ponder there over these words:
"Salem, October 4th, Union Street [Family Mansion]."
SHATTUCK HOUSE.
"Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. Here I have written many tales—many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all—at least, till I were in my grave."
ROOM IN WHICH HAWTHORNE WAS BORN.
It is not my purpose to attempt a description of Salem, or of what is to be seen there. Her merchants are princes. No doubt they were in Josselyn's mind when he said some of the New Englanders were "damnable rich." French writers of that day speak of her "bourgeois entièrement riches." Those substantial mansions of red brick, tree-shaded and ivy-trellised, represent what Carlyle named the "noblesse of commerce," with money in its pocket.