Chapter 1

Par. "Mars dote on you for his novices."

_All's Well that ends Well._

No one, who is familiar with the bustle and activity of an American
commercial town, would recognize, in the repose which now reigns in the
ancient mart of Rhode Island, a place that, in its day, has been ranked
amongst the most important ports along the whole line of our extended
coast. It would seem, at the first glance, that nature had expressly

fashioned the spot to anticipate the wants and to realize the wishes of
the mariner. Enjoying the four great requisites of a safe and commodious
haven, a placid basin, an outer harbour, and a convenient roadstead, with
a clear offing, Newport appeared, to the eyes of our European ancestors,
designed to shelter fleets and to nurse a race of hardy and expert seamen.
Though the latter anticipation has not been entirely disappointed, how
little has reality answered to expectation in respect to the former. A
successful rival has arisen, even in the immediate vicinity of this
seeming favourite of nature, to defeat all the calculations of mercantile
sagacity, and to add another to the thousand existing evidences "that the
wisdom of man is foolishness."

There are few towns of any magnitude, within our broad territories, in
which so little change has been effected in half a century as in Newport.
Until the vast resources of the interior were developed the beautiful
island on which it stands was a chosen retreat of the affluent planters of
the south, from the heats and diseases of their burning climate. Here they
resorted in crowds, to breathe the invigorating breezes of the sea.
Subjects of the same government, the inhabitants of the Carolinas and of
Jamaica met here, in amity, to compare their respective habits and
policies, and to strengthen each other in a common delusion, which the
descendants of both, in the third generation, are beginning to perceive
and to regret.

The communion left, on the simple and unpractised offspring of the
Puritans, its impression both of good and evil. The inhabitants of the
country, while they derived, from the intercourse, a portion of that bland
and graceful courtesy for which the gentry of the southern British
colonies were so distinguished did not fail to imbibe some of those
peculiar notions, concerning the distinctions in the races of men, for
which they are no less remarkable Rhode Island was the foremost among the
New England provinces to recede from the manners and opinions of their
simple ancestors. The first shock was given, through her, to that rigid
and ungracious deportment which was once believed a necessary concomitant
of true religion, a sort of outward pledge of the healthful condition of
the inward man; and it