No longer seeking nor caring that my name should be blasoned
abroad on title-pages, I smiled to think that it had now another
kind of vogue. The Custom-House marker imprinted it, with a
stencil and black paint, on pepper-bags, and baskets of anatto,
and cigar-boxes, and bales of all kinds of dutiable merchandise,
in testimony that these commodities had paid the impost, and
gone regularly through the office. Borne on such queer vehicle
of fame, a knowledge of my existence, so far as a name conveys
it, was carried where it had never been before, and, I hope,
will never go again.
But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts
that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest
so quietly, revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions,
when the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that which brings
it within the law of literary propriety to offer the public the
sketch which I am now writing.
In the second storey of the Custom-House there is a large room,
in which the brick-work and naked rafters have never been
covered with panelling and plaster. The edifice--originally
projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial enterprise of
the port, and with an idea of subsequent prosperity destined
never to be realized--contains far more space than its occupants
know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore, over the
Collector's apartments, remains unfinished to this day, and, in
spite of the aged cobwebs that festoon its dusky beams, appears
still to await the labour of the carpenter and mason. At one end
of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels piled one
upon another, containing bundles of official documents. Large
quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was
sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and
years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were
now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this
forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at by human eyes. But
then, what reams of other manuscripts--filled, not with the
dulness of official formalities, but with the thought of
inventive brains and the rich effusion of deep hearts--had gone
equally to oblivion; and that, moreover, without serving a
purpose in their day, as these heaped-up papers had,
and--saddest of all--without purchasing for their writers the
comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the Custom-House had
gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen. Yet not
altogether worthless, perhaps, as materials of local history.
Here, no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might
be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants--old King
Derby--old Billy Gray--old Simon Forrester--and many another
magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely
in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle.
The founders of the greater part of the families which now
compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the
petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods
generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their
children look upon as long-established rank, Prior to the Revolution there is a dearth of records; the
earlier documents and archives of the Custom-House having,
probably, been carried off to Halifax, when all the king's
officials accompanied the British army in its flight from
Boston. It has often been a matter of regret with me; for, going
back, perhaps, to the days of the Protectorate, those papers
must have contained many references to forgotten or remembered
men, and to antique customs, which would have affected me with
the same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian arrow-heads
in the field near the Old Manse.