Yet there are changes, marked and memorable, both in Salem and its
neighborhood, since the date of thirty-seven years ago. There was then
an exclusiveness about the place as evident to strangers, and as dear to
natives, as the rivalship between Philadelphia and Baltimore, while far
more interesting and honorable in its character. In Salem society there
was a singular combination of the precision and scrupulousness of
Puritan manners and habits of thought with the pride of a cultivated
and traveled community, boasting acquaintance with people of all known
faiths, and familiarity with all known ways of living and thinking,
while adhering to the customs, and even the prejudices, of their
fathers. While relating theological conversations held with liberal
Buddhists or lax Mohammedans, your host would whip his horse, to get
home at full speed by sunset on a Saturday, that the groom's Sabbath
might not be encroached on for five minutes. The houses were hung with
odd Chinese copies of English engravings, and furnished with a variety
of pretty and useful articles from China, never seen elsewhere, because
none but American traders had then achieved any commerce with that
country but in tea, nankeen, and silk. The Salem Museum was the glory
of the town, and even of the State. Each speculative merchant who went
forth, with or without a cargo (and the trade in ice was then only
beginning), in his own ship, with his wife and her babes, was determined
to bring home some offering to the Museum, if he should accomplish a
membership of that institution by doubling either Cape Horn or the Cape
of Good Hope. He picked up an old cargo somewhere and trafficked with
it for another; and so he went on--if not rounding the world, seeing
no small part of it, and making acquaintance with a dozen eccentric
potentates and barbaric chiefs, and sovereigns with widely celebrated
names; and, whether the adventurer came home rich or poor, he was sure
to have gained much knowledge, and to have become very entertaining
in discourse. The houses of the principal merchants were pleasant
abodes--each standing alone beside the street, which was an avenue
thick-strewn with leaves in autumn and well shaded in summer. Not far
away were the woods, where lumbering went on, for the export of timber
to Charleston and New Orleans, and for the furniture manufacture, which
was the main industry of the less fertile districts of Massachusetts in
those days. Here and there was a little lake--a "pond"--under the shadow
of the woods, yielding water-lilies in summer, and ice for exportation
in winter--as soon as that happy idea had occurred to some fortunate
speculator. On some knoll there was sure to be a school-house. Amid
these and many other pleasant objects, and in the very center of the
stranger's observations, there was one spectacle that had no beauty in
it--just as in the happy course of the life of the Salem community there
is one fearful period. That dreary object is the Witches' Hill at Salem;
and that fearful chapter of history is the tragedy of the Witch
Delusion.