These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand 66 Filling the chilly room with perfume light.— Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm The lustrous salvers in the moonlight gleam; Awakening up, he took her hollow lute- Upon his knees he sank, pale as smooth-sculptured stone. Her eyes were open, but she still beheld, At which fair Madeline began to weep, "Ah, Porphyro!" said she, "but even now And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear: How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear! Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear! For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go." Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine. "My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride! Thy beauty's shield, heart-shaped and vermeil dyed ? A famish'd pilgrim, saved by miracle. To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel." "Hark! 'tis an elfin storm from faery-land, For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee." She hurried at his words, beset with fears, And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor. They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall; The wakeful blood-hound rose, and shook his hide, By one, and one, the bolts full easy slide- And they are gone:-ay, ages long ago OLD BALTIMORE AND ITS MERCHANTS. ET us seat ourselves beneath the ven- the advantage of posterity. It was on commis pride of Baltimore, and summon its ghost- sioners, assisted by Philip Jones, the ly guardians to our aid. Emerging from county surveyor, laid off the town," unthe deep shadow, gray and gnarled as the der the advice of those primitive engiforest around him, stands in rude majesty neers the cows, whose instinctive seleca venerable Druid, a priest of Baal. In tion of easy grades might have continued the husky tones of extreme age he tells of to save the tear and wear of the breeches a former home under groves of Irish oak, of a Druidical circle and a worship of the sun and of fire, of the sacred mistletoe and the great god Baal, the Phoenician type of life and power; and how, David being then king in Israel, his ancestry had blessed a grove and built a temple in Erin, and called the place Baál-ti-môr, or "the great place of Baal." Loyal to his sacred office, and like a true Phoenician of old, his spirit braved the ocean, and haunts the grove that bears his name, the guardian of this city of the sun. And so, Lords of Baltimore in Ireland, the well-beloved Calverts gave the oldest name to the youngest city of our seaboard; for New York was already one hundred and sixteen years old, and Boston aged a century, when, "In the 15th year of the Dominion of the Right Honorable Charles, absolute Lord and Proprietary of the province of Maryland and Avalon, Lord Baron of Baltimore, etc., Anno Domini 1729," a law was enacted for erecting a town on the Patapsco, and for laying out in lots sixty acres of land, etc. This location was the fruit of a lucky blunder, for when the owner of previously selected site got wind of the attempt to be made to put a town upon his property, setting prodigious store by certain iron mines which he believed to be upon his territory, he posted off to Annapolis and defeated the plan, much to his own satisfaction and the subsequent regret of his heirs, but greatly to NOTE. The writer is indebted to Scharf's Chronicles of Baltimore for valuable aid. fled with so curtly as to destroy utterly | warmer sun and sharper shadows. They the cheering irregularity of a varied surface, but, thanks to the cows, and in spite of Poppleton, some street scenery of charming diversity survives in crooked ways and steep ascents and commanding heights. The town of the enactment was but one of a conglomerate of settlements which became finally merged in the title of Baltimore, but which, under the names of "The Town," "Old Town," "Fell's Point," "The Hill," etc., held distinctive claims to individuality, and presented defined characteristics as marked as the people of separate provinces, and until finally obliterated through the agency of street railways, these distinctions were a marked peculiarity of the place. It was at Fell's Point, a quarter nearly two miles distant from the spot where Jones and the cows began their survey, that the heavy shipping lay, and where the older merchants, prior to the Revolution, had their spacious residences and their countingrooms, looking out over their wharves and through the towering spars of shipping to the broad water. Their homes were those of old English merchants, blooming with the added graces of a were panelied and tiled, and spacious and secure, honestly built, but not weighed down by extravagant excrescences either in the way of cupola or mortgage. A vague savor of far-away lands suggest ed itself in odd bits of marine mementos, as in the conch-shell borders of the flower beds, the narwhal's tusk and the sharks' teeth on the mantel, East India settees, and "Forty-thieves" jars from the Levant. Old anchors and chains rusted in damp shadows, and the streets and shops had a pungent smell of oakum and tar. Storm-worn figure-heads served as signs of tobacco shops and taverns, and old salts sat around them clinging to their chairs and benches with as tenacious a twist of their legs and arms as though rocked in a gale, spinning the while unconscionable yarns, or lamenting the fate of poor Jack. As in all sea-ports, a sadness and anxiety questioned inscrutable fate, and the awful mystery and uncertainty of the sea penetrated every hearth. Many left these wharves never to return, cast away, wandered off. sweethearts and husbands were anxious facts, and solaced widows not too sure of the death of the late lamented. Far-away |