which (to borrow Mrs. Gregory’s phrase) “reflected ignominy” upon them all.  When he transgressed, their very value for him turned them bitter against him.  I know that all of us are more or less chained to our community, which is pleased to expect us to walk its way, and mightily displeased when we please ourselves instead by breaking the chain and walking our own way; and I know that we are forgiven very slowly; but I had not dreamed what a prisoner to communal criticism a young American could be until I beheld Kings Port over John Mayrant.

And to what estate was this prince heir?  Alas, his inheritance was all of it the Past and none of it the Future; was the full churchyard and the empty wharves!  He was paying dear for his princedom!  And then, there was yet another sense of this beautiful town that I got here completely, suddenly crystallized, though slowly gathering ever since my arrival:  all these old people were clustered about one young one.  That was it; that was the town’s ultimate tragic note:  the old timber of the forest dying and the too sparse new growth appearing scantily amid the tall, fine, venerable, decaying trunks.  It had been by no razing to the ground and sowing with salt that the city had perished; a process less violent but more sad had done away with it.  Youth, in the wake of commerce, had ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses, and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found.  Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song:  O tempo passato perche non ritorni?

And John Mayrant?  Why, then, had he tarried here himself?  That is a hard saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings hard that are true?  What was this young man doing in Kings Port with his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence?  If the Custom House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all full of future and empty of past?  Was it much to the credit of such a young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female relatives?

With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them.  I could not ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must keep wide away from it.  What, then, could I ask them?  As I pondered, Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory, of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part:—­

“—­if he should share the family bad taste in wives.”