And then, behind the orchards, there were hills, playgrounds for baby cedars. Everything contrived to look at least two hundred years old (except the blossoms and the motor cars), and even the pigeons had such an air of colonial serenity that they simply refused to stir for a new-fangled thing like an automobile. They sat still, pretending not to see us, and never changed their expressions!
At last we did get into old Marblehead, and I'm so happy to tell you it was exactly like finding our way round the corner in a picture. You know that thrilling corner in pictures, leading somewhere you are dying to see and never can? Well, now I have seen it. It's Marblehead. Round the corner of the front of the picture where the new, smart things are, we cleverly slipped in. And there was the background running up the canvas, all over funny labyrinths of streets generally leading nowhere, or, if anywhere, back to the same garden we'd just passed, a darling garden boiling over with grass pinks, cabbage roses, sweet williams, and bleeding hearts. Each house was just a little quainter than the other, and Jack and I thought we were going to like Marblehead better than any that ever lived, until--we came to Salem, after Manchester and Magnolia. Then--we weren't precisely being _untrue_ to Marblehead. No, never that! _But_ Salem--perhaps it's fair after all to keep a larger place in memory-land for the Witch City.
It would have been almost a _world_ tragedy if, when the great fire swept over the town, it hadn't stopped short of the old part, which is American history incarnate. That "old part" consists of "old, older, oldest." The oldest houses of all, built about 1635, are very, very simple, as if the Puritans had prayed over them to be delivered from temptation and craving for beauty. Then, next are the ones not quite so old, when people began to be rich and see that Beauty wasn't after all the unpardonable sin. These houses of the eighteenth century look as if architects might have been commissioned to come from the Old World to build them, bringing traditions of gracious decoration for outside and in. Next, there are the far grander and more stately mansions which grew up after the Revolution, when the good folk of New England knew that their land and their fortunes would be theirs forever, undisputed. Salem had grown into an important place then. Merchants and shipowners had plenty of money to spend. They spent it well, too, for they made their dwellings very beautiful, so beautiful that the witch hunters and Quaker persecutors of the past would have been shocked to the bottom of those hollow places they called their hearts.