THE running of the first train over the Eastern Road from Boston to Portsmouth—it took place somewhat more than forty years ago—was attended by a serious accident. The accident occurred in the crowded station at the Portsmouth terminus, and was unobserved at the time. The was followed, though not immediately, by death, and that also, enough, was unobserved. Nevertheless, this initial train, freighted with so many hopes and the Directors of the Road, ran over and killed—LOCAL CHARACTER.  
Up to that day Portsmouth had been a very little community, and had had the courage of its . From time to time it had calmly produced an individual built on plans and of its own, without regard to the prejudices and conventionalities of outlying districts. This individual was . He was born in the town, he lived to a good old age in the town, and never went out of the place, until he was finally laid under it. To him, Boston, though only fifty-six miles away, was virtually an unknown quantity—only fifty-six miles by measurement, but thousands of miles distant in effect. In those days, in order to reach Boston you were obliged to take a great yellow, clumsy stage-coach, resembling a three-story mud-turtle—if will, for the sake of the , tolerate so daring an invention; you were obliged to take it very early in the morning, you dined at noon at Ipswich, and into the great city with the golden just as the was falling, provided always the coach had not shed a wheel by the roadside or one of the leaders had not gone . To many and well-to-do persons in Portsmouth, this journey was an event which occurred only twice or thrice during life. To the typical individual with whom I am for the moment , it never occurred at all. The town was his entire world; he was a parochial as a Parisian; Market Street was his Boulevard des Italiens, and the North End his Bois de Boulogne.
 
Of course there were varieties of local characters without his limitations; venerable merchants from the East India trade; elderly gentlewomen, with family jewels and personal ; one or two scholarly in by-gone cut of coat, haunting the Athenaeum reading-room; ex-sea captains, with rings on their fingers, like Simon Danz’s visitors in Longfellow’s poem—men who had played busy parts in the world, and had drifted back to Old Strawberry Bank in the sunset of their careers. I may say, in passing, that these ancient , after battling with terrific hurricanes and typhoons on every known sea, not infrequently drowned themselves in pleasant weather in small sail-boats on the Piscataqua River. Old sea-dogs who had commanded ships of four or five hundred tons had naturally slight respect for the potentialities of sail-boats twelve feet long. But there was to be no further increase of these odd sticks—if I may call them so, in no irreverent mood—after those innocent-looking parallel bars indissolubly linked Portsmouth with the capital of the of Massachusetts. All the conditions were to be changed, the old angles to be pared off, new horizons to be regarded. The individual, as an eccentric individual, was to undergo great . If he were not to become extinct—a thing little likely—he was at least to lose his .
 
However, as I said, local character, in the sense in which the term is here used, was not instantly killed; it died a lingering death, and passed away so peacefully and silently as not to attract general, or perhaps any, notice. This period of gradual dissolution fell during my boyhood. The last of the cocked hats had gone out, and the railway had come in, long before my time; but certain bits of color, certain half customs and of the past, were still left over. I was not too late, for example, to catch the last town crier—one Nicholas Newman, whom I used to with , and now recall with a sort of affection.
 
Nicholas Newman—Nicholas was a , his real name being Edward—was a most estimable person, very short, cross-eyed, somewhat bow-legged, and with a bell out of all proportion to his . I have never since seen a bell of that size disconnected with a church steeple. The only thing about him that matched the instrument of his office was his voice. His “Hear All!” still memory’s ear. I remember that he had a queer way of sidling up to one, as if nature in shaping him had originally intended a , but thought better of it, and made a town-crier. Of the intention only a moist thumb remained, which served Mr. Newman in good stead in the delivery of the Boston evening papers, for he was incidentally newsdealer. His duties were to cry , funerals, mislaid children, traveling , public meetings, and articles lost or found. He was especially strong in announcing the loss of reticules, usually the property of elderly ladies. The unction with which he the several contents, when to him, would have seemed satirical in another person, but on his part was pure . He would not let so much as a thimble, or a piece of wax, or a portable tooth, or any vanity in the way of tonsorial device, escape him. I have heard Mr. Newman spoken of as “that man.” He was a figure.
 
Possibly it is because of his bell that I connect the town crier with those sounds which I used to hear rolling out of the steeple of the Old North every night at nine o’clock—the of the colonial curfew. Nicholas Newman has passed on, perhaps crying his losses elsewhere, but this nightly is still a custom. I can more satisfactorily explain why I associate with it a vastly different personality, that of Sol Holmes, the barber, for every night at nine o’clock his little shop on Congress Street was in full blast. Many a time at that hour I have my nose on his window-glass. It was a gay little shop (he called it “an Emporium”), as barber shops generally are, decorated with circus bills, prints, and fly-catchers of tissue and gold paper. Sol Holmes—whose antecedents to us boys were wrapped in thrilling mystery, we imagined him to have been a prince in his native land—was a colored man, not too dark “for human nature’s daily food,” and enjoyed marked distinction as one of the few exotics in town. At this the foreign element was at its minimum; every official, from selectman down to the Dogberry of the watch, bore a name that had been familiar to the town for a hundred years or so. The situation is greatly changed. I expect to live to see a Chinese policeman, with a sandal-wood club and a rice-paper pocket handkerchief, patrolling Congress Street.
 
Holmes was a handsome man, six feet or more in height, and as straight as a pine. He his race’s sweet temper, , and vanity. His bearing was a positive factor in the effectiveness of the Portsmouth Greys, whenever those bloodless paraded. As he brought up the rear of the last platoon, with his cap stuck on the left side of his head and a bright silver cup on a belt at his , he seemed to youthful eyes one of the most things in the display. To himself he was pretty much “all the company.” He used to say, with a which did not strike me until years afterwards, “Boys, I and Cap’n Towle is goin’ to out ‘the Greys’ to-morroh.” Though honest in all business dealings, his tropical imagination, whenever he strayed into the fenceless fields of , left much to be desired in the way of accuracy. Compared with Sol Holmes on such occasions, Ananias was a person of integrity. Sol Holmes’s end was in singular contrast with his sunny . One night, long ago, he threw himself from the deck of a Sound steamer, somewhere between Stonington and New York. What led or drove him to the act never .
 
There are few men who were boys in Portsmouth at the period of which I write but will remember Wibird Penhallow and his sky-blue wheelbarrow. I find it difficult to describe him other than , possibly because Wilbird had no expression whatever in his . With his vacant white face lifted to the clouds, seemingly of everything, yet going with a sort of heaven-given instinct straight to his destination, he trundled that wheelbarrow for many a year over Portsmouth cobblestones. He was so unconscious of his environment that sometimes a small boy would pop into the empty wheelbarrow and secure a ride without Wibird arriving at any very clear knowledge of the fact. His employment in life was to deliver groceries and other merchandise to purchasers. This he did in a dreamy, kind of way. It was as if a spirit had somehow go hold of an earthly wheelbarrow and was trundling it quite unconsciously, with no sense of responsibility. One day he appeared at a kitchen............