Two Shakers in the cars,--both, if I
mistake not, with thread gloves on. The foundation of the old
meeting-house of Princeton, standing on a height above the village, as
bleak and windy as the top of Mount Ararat; also the old deserted
town-house. The edifices were probably thus located in order to be more
exactly in the centre of the township.
* * * * *
From July 25 to August 9, 1845, at Portsmouth Navy Yard. Remarkables:
the free and social mode of life among the officers and their families,
meeting at evening on the door-steps or in front of their houses, or
stepping in familiarly; the rough-hewn first lieutenant, with no ideas
beyond the service; the doctor, priding himself on his cultivation and
refinement, pretending to elegance, sensitive, touchy; the
sailing-master, an old salt, of the somewhat modernized Tom Bowline
pattern, tossed about by fifty years of stormy surges, and at last swept
into this quiet nook, where he tells yarns of his cruises and duels,
repeats his own epitaph, drinks a reasonable quantity of grog, and
complains of dyspepsia; the old fat major of marines, with a brown wig
not pretending to imitate natural hair, but only to cover his baldness
and grayness with something that he imagines will be less unsightly: he
has a potent odor of snuff, but has left off wine and strong drink for
the last twenty-seven years.
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