Women's faces are apt to take from old age a finer touch than those of men, and poverty does not interfere with this, where there is no actual exposure to the elements. From the windows of these old houses there often look forth delicate, faded countenances, to which belongs an air of unmistakable refinement. Nowhere in America, I fancy, does one see such counterparts of the reduced gentlewoman of England,—as described, for instance, in "Cranford,"—quiet maiden ladies of seventy, with perhaps a tradition of beauty and bellehood, and still wearing always a bit of blue ribbon on their once golden curls,—this headdress being still carefully arranged, each day, by some handmaiden of sixty, so long a house-mate as to seem a sister, though some faint suggestion of wages and subordination may be still preserved. Among these ladies, as in "Cranford," there is a dignified reticence in respect to money-matters, and a courteous blindness to the small economies practised by each other. It is not held good breeding, when they meet in a shop of a morning, for one to seem to notice what another buys.
These ancient ladies have coats of arms upon their walls, hereditary damasks among their scanty wardrobes, store of domestic traditions in their brains, and a whole Court Guide of high-sounding names at their fingers' ends. They can tell you of the supposed sister of an English queen, who married an American officer and dwelt in Oldport; of the Scotch Lady Janet, who eloped with her tutor, and here lived in poverty, paying her washerwoman with costly lace from her trunks; of the Oldport dame who escaped from France at the opening of the Revolution, was captured by pirates on her voyage to America, then retaken by a privateer and carried into Boston, where she took refuge in John Hancock's house. They can describe to you the Malbone Gardens, and, as the night wanes and the embers fade, can give the tale of the Phantom of Rough Point. Gliding farther and farther into the past, they revert to the brilliant historic period of Oldport, the successive English and French occupations during our Revolution, and show you gallant inscriptions in honor of their grandmothers, written on the window-panes by the diamond rings of the foreign officers.
The newer strata of Oldport society are formed chiefly by importation, and have the one advantage of a variety of origin which puts provincialism out of the question. The mild winter climate and the supposed cheapness of living draw scattered families from the various Atlantic cities; and, coming from such different sources, these visitors leave some exclusiveness behind. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, are doubtless good things to have in one's house, but are cumbrous to travel with. Meeting here on central ground, partial aristocracies tend to neutralize each other. A Boston family comes, bristling with genealogies, and making the most of its little all of two centuries. Another arrives from Philadelphia, equally fortified in local heraldries unknown in Boston.
A third from New York brings a briefer pedigree, but more gilded. Their claims are incompatible; but there is no common standard, and so neither can have precedence. Since no human memory can retain the great-grandmothers of three cities, we are practically as well off as if we had no great-grandmothers at all.
But in Oldport, as elsewhere, the spice of conversation is apt to be in inverse ratio to family tree and income-tax, and one can hear better repartees among the boat-builders' shops on Long Wharf than among those who have made the grand tour. All the world over, one is occasionally reminded of the French officer's verdict on the garrison town where he was quartered, that the good society was no better than the good society anywhere else, but the bad society was capital. I like, for instance, to watch the shoals of fishermen that throng our streets in the early spring, inappropriate as porpoises on land, or as Scott's pirates in peaceful Kirkwall,—unwieldy, bearded creatures in oil-skin suits,—men who have never before seen a basket-wagon or a liveried groom and, whose first comments on the daintinesses of fashion are far more racy than anything which fashion can say for itself.
The life of our own fishermen and pilots remains active, in its way, all winter; and coasting vessels come and go in the open harbor every day. The only schooner that is not so employed is, to my eye, more attractive than any of them; it is our sole winter guest, this year, of all the graceful flotilla of yachts that helped to make our summer moonlights so charming. While Europe seems in such ecstasy over the ocean yacht-race, there lies at anchor, stripped and dismantled, a vessel which was excluded from the match, it is said, simply because neither of the three competitors would have had a chance against her. I like to look across the harbor at the graceful proportions of this uncrowned victor in the race she never ran; and to my eye her laurels are the most attractive. She seems a fit emblem of the genius that waits, while talent merely wins. "Let me know," said that fine, but unappreciated thinker, Brownlee Brown,—"let me know what chances a man has passed in contempt; not what he has made, but what he has refused to make, reserving himself for higher ends."
All out-door work in winter has a cheerful look, from the triumph of caloric it implies; but I know none in which man seems to revert more to the lower modes of being than in searching for seaclams. One may sometimes observe a dozen men employed in this way, on one of our beaches, while the cold wind blows keenly off shore, and the spray drifts back like snow over the green and sluggish surge. The men pace in and out with the wave, going steadily to and fro like a pendulum, ankle-deep in the chilly brine, their steps quickened by hope or slackening with despair. Where the maidens and children sport and shout in summer, there in winter these heavy figures succeed. To them the lovely crest of the emerald billow is but a chariot for clams, and is valueless if it comes in empty. Really, the position of the clam is the more dignified, since he moves only with the wave, and the immortal being in fish-boots wades for him.
The harbor and the beach are thus occupied in winter; but one may walk for many a mile along the cliffs, and see nothing human but a few gardeners, spreading green and white sea-weed as manure upon the lawns. The mercury rarely drops to zero here, and there is little snow; but a new-fallen drift has just the same virgin beauty as farther inland, and when one suddenly comes in view of the sea beyond it, there is a sensation of summer softness. The water is not then deep blue, but pale, with opaline reflections. Vessels in the far horizon have the same delicate tint, as if woven of the same liquid material. A single wave lifts itself languidly above a reef,—a white-breasted loon floats near the shore,—the sea breaks in long, indolent curves,—the distant islands swim in a vague mirage. Along the cliffs hang great organ-pipes of ice, distilling showers of drops that glitter in the noonday sun, while the barer rocks send up a perpetual steam, giving to the eye a sense of warmth, and suggesting the comforts of fire. Beneath, the low tide reveals long stretches of golden-brown sea-weed, caressed by the lapping wave.
High winds bring a different scene. Sometimes I fancy that in winter, with less visible life upon the surface of the water, and less of unseen animal life below it, there is yet more that seems like vital force in the individual particles of waves. Each separate drop appears more charged with desperate and determined life. The lines of surf run into each other more brokenly, and with less steady roll. The low sun, too, lends a weird and jagged shadow to gallop in before the crest of each advancing wave, and sometimes there is a second crest on the shoulders of the first, as if there were more than could be contained in a single curve. Greens and purples are called forth to replace the prevailing blue. Far out at sea, great separate mounds of water rear themselves, as if to overlook the tossing plain. Sometimes these move onward and subside with their green hue still unbroken, and again they curve into detached hillocks of foam, white, multitudinous, side by side, not ridged, but moving on like a mob of white horses, neck overarching neck, breast crowded against breast.
Across those tumultuous waves I like to watch, after sunset, the revolving light; there is something about it so delicate and human. It seems to bud or bubble out of the low, dark horizon; a moment, and it is not, and then another moment, and it is. With one throb the tremulous light is born; with another throb it has reached its full size, and looks at you, coy and defiant; and almost in that instant it is utterly gone. You cannot conceive yourself to be watching something which merely turns on an axis; but it seems suddenly to expand, a flower of light, or to close, as if soft petals of darkness clasped it in. During its moments of absence, the eye cannot quite keep the memory of its precise position, and it often appears a hair-breadth to the right or left of the expected spot. This enhances the elfish and fantastic look, and so the pretty game goes on, with flickering surprises, every night and all night long. But the illusion of the seasons is just as coquettish; and when next summer comes to us, with its blossoms and its joys, it will dawn as softly out of the darkness and as softly give place to winter once more.