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.
But, one idle and rainy day, it was my fortune to make a
discovery of some little interest. Poking and burrowing into the
heaped-up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one and another
document, and reading the names of vessels that had long ago
foundered at sea or rotted at the wharves, and those of
merchants never heard of now on 'Change, nor very readily
decipherable on their mossy tombstones; glancing at such matters
with the saddened, weary, half-reluctant interest which we
bestow on the corpse of dead activity--and exerting my fancy,
sluggish with little use, to raise up from these dry bones an
image of the old town's brighter aspect, when India was a new
region, and only Salem knew the way thither--I chanced to lay my
hand on a small package, carefully done up in a piece of ancient
yellow parchment.
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