Читать книгу Historic Towns of New England - Various - Страница 5

SALEM is what historical students would call a palimpsest, an ancient manuscript that has been scraped and then rewritten with another and later text. By careful study of the almost illegible characters and sometimes by chemical treatment, great treasures of the ancient learning, such as Orations of Cicero, the Institutes of Gaius and versions of the New Testament, have been discovered under monkish rules and medieval chronicles. Such a charm of research and discovery awaits the historical student in this modern, progressive city. The stranger within our gates is at first impressed by the many good business blocks, the elegant residences amid beautiful lawns on the broad, well-shaded streets, the handsome public buildings, many of them once stately mansions of the old sea-captains, and a very convenient electric-car service that makes the city a famous shopping-place for the eastern half of the county. But here and there the visitor comes upon some memorial tablet or commemorative stone, some ancient cemetery or venerable building – faded characters of an earlier text – that brings to mind the great age of Puritanism or the only less interesting era of our town’s commercial supremacy; while if he enters the Essex Institute to see its large and valuable historical collection, it is modern Salem that is obliterated and the stern poverty and austere piety of the Fathers that stand out distinctly. With what interest he will look at the sun-dial and sword of Governor Endicott, at the baptismal shirt of Governor Bradford, and at the stout walking-stick of George Jacobs, one of the victims of the Witchcraft Delusion! The ancient pottery, the old pewter and iron vessels, the antique fowling-pieces and firebacks, the valuable autographs of charters and military commissions and title-deeds – all these survivals of the seventeenth century help to reconstruct that Puritan settlement under the direction of Endicott and Bradstreet, of Higginson and Roger Williams. Or if the visitor has entered the Peabody Academy of Science, rich in natural history and ethnological collections, it is the proud record of commercial supremacy at the beginning of this century which the old palimpsest reveals. As he studies the models of famous privateers and trading-vessels, the oil portraits of the old sea-captains and merchant princes, the implements and idols, the vestments and pottery, they brought