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Newport from the water-front.

of the motor in the adjacent street conveying the excursionists and "strangers," the old name for the summer residents, to their respective destinations, it were easy to imagine a like peace prevailed over the whole town. The houses, built close to the sidewalks, or to the street where there is no room for a sidewalk, with a low flag for a step, have little architectural merit save for their many handsome doorways, but the south wind laden with dampness brings with it a wondrous light peculiar to Newport and they assume a certain dignity and interest.

Following Barney Street until it ends at Spring Street, one stands on the very land around which the first settlers made their home. It was here, as the name of the street recalls, gushed forth a fine, abundant supply of fresh water. It ran down across what is now the Parade, or Mall, then common or open land, and a later generation adding a pump, which served the neighborhood for many years until bottled up underground. Another large stream is recalled by River Street, a little to the north of the Mall, back of the jail. It ran westward toward the Cove, as that part of the harbor was then called.

Newport abounded in ponds and streams, as the flooded cellars after heavy rains still testify, but with the cutting away of the heavy foliage with which the island was covered, many of these dried up or were filled in. The Parade was the centre of Newport's civic life, and around or near it were started the first buildings of importance. The Court House, still in use, built by Richard Munday, has the advantage of standing by itself with nothing to deteriorate from its dignified charm. We can easily imagine that the irregularity of the street that bounds it on one side was an old footpath to the big spring. The old City Hall faces it melancholily at the head of Long Wharf, a thing of beauty still but disfigured and overwhelmed by its surroundings.

Dimming in importance the celebration of Fourth of July, it was on "Lection Day," now only a memory, that the old Parade came into its own. The last Tuesday in May, when the governor, after being inaugurated in Providence, was obliged to recognize in person the fact that Newport was the other capital of Rhode Island, was looked forward to with pleasant anticipation by young and old. He came down from Providence, accompanied by the legislature, the latter of no importance whatsoever in the eyes of the young, and for one little girl all embodied in the person of her great-uncle, who wore a black coat and brought with him an old dog who got a cookie if the governor was a Republican (which was usually the case), and none if he was a Democrat. The Newport artillery since the Dorr war, the governor's body-guard, met him at the landing and escorted him to the Court House, playing first an old Revolutionary air, followed by "Hail to the Chief," in prestissimo time as the distance was short to his destination. From the balcony overlooking the Mall he was proclaimed governor to the people, who doubtless were far less interested than those who had heard the Declaration of Independence read from the same balcony in 1774. The Mall had by this time become a scene of festive excitement. The town's ordinary population added to by the country folk from "out on the island" filled the square and the surrounding streets. Fakers, of course, were in evi

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With the passing away of Newport as a a much-frequented coffee-house by the

capital Election Day ceased to exist.

Of the houses which stood on either side of the Parade but few remain. The Hazard House, wantonly destroyed only a few years ago, has given way to shops, and the Lawton House, long known as

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name of "Pitts Head Inn," has been moved back to Charles Street. curved consoles of the entrance are not often seen in a Newport doorway, but may be of a later date than the house. The graceful dormer-windows, which re

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Pitts Head Inn, which originally faced the Parade, as it now appears in Charles Street.

flected many a historic scene on the Parade, must resent their present mean surroundings. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's house, to the right of his statue at the foot of the Mall, with its peculiar "rustication," rekindles for a second the memory of him. Buying it only a few weeks before his last cruise, he stood one day admiring it with his wife and a friend, who later told the story to his granddaughter, and remarked that when he returned he would have the boards sanded so as to look like stone. This same granddaughter was born and passed much of her earlier childhood in the old house, where Mrs. Perry continued to live after her husband's death. The beautiful garden, with its fruit-trees, bushes, and flow

ers, has all been built over. In fact, none of the old gardens remain, which on Thames Street ran down to the water's edge and up toward Spring Street, shut in by high board fences. The old Breeze garden on Thames Street and Gidley Lane was the last of its kind, and seems like a paradise in the memory of the writer, who played there as a child, at a time when flowers were pretty generally confined to the greenhouses and formal beds of the summer resident. The hedges and hardy borders of present Newport are all of a much later date.

Though descendants of Jeremy Clarke, one of the first nine settlers, still live in Newport, not one inherits any part of the large plot of land that was his. The

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