dation to the public. Here, in New England, alone perhaps in all America, is such an inscription possible. Coming, as I did, to Massachusetts from the Far West, my prevailing feeling was, all along, that I had got back to an Old World civilization. Having reversed the ordinary route of European travellers-having made Boston my terminus, and not my starting-point-I was perhaps more struck with the oldness of New England than with the characteristics which belonged to it as a portion of the New World. Montalembert said once, that when he was weary of despotism, he came across the Channel to take a bath of freedom. So, if I were settled in the Western World, I should come to New England from time to time, to take a bath of antiquity. Old and new are relative terms, and the change is as great in coming from Chicago to Boston as it is in passing from England to Massachusetts. Be the cause what it may, I felt, and felt pleasantly, that I was getting home. One must have wandered, as I did for months, through new cities and new States and new locations, to know the pleasure of coming back to a country where there is something older than oneself. The olive-leaf which the dove brought back to the ark was welcome as a token of the older world rising above the dull level of the flood; and so this one inscription of a building that dates from two centuries ago was welcome as a memory of the past to one who was well-nigh weary of the promises of the future.

But, indeed, it needed no Western training to find Boston pleasant in the month of June. After six weeks' residence there, I was unable to discover on what plan the city was built, if, which I doubt, it was ever built on any plan at all. The very names of the streets are good English names, which tell you something about their several histories—nothing about their relative location. There is no such address in Boston as "No. 1000A Street, between 100 and 101z Street." The street cars do not take you, as elsewhere in America, to Pekin, Peru, Paris, Constantinople, and Jerusalem; but to old-fashioned English suburbsCambridge and Charlestown, and Roxbury, and Watertown. So State Street-it used to be King StreetFremont, Beacon, Leveret, Mount Vernon, and a hundred other streets, run in and out of each other at all kinds of angles, up and down all kinds of slopes, in a perfect chaos of disorder. Somehow or other you always keep coming upon the sea in all sorts of unexpected places; and, whichever way you strike out, you always get back to Washington Street. This is all that I could learn as to the topography of Boston. But even though you do lose your way, it is pleasanter to an ill-regulated European mind to go wrong in Boston than to go right in St. Louis or Chicago. There is even a pleasure (I make the confession with a sense of humiliation) in being received at an hotel where the waiters wear white neckties and are pompous

as well as civil. There are no mammoth hotels, no rows of commercial palaces, no stores of gigantic height, resplendent with marble facings; but, on the other hand, there are streets upon streets of solemn, cosy Dutchbrick houses, looking as though a dozen generations had been born within their walls and carried out from behind their doors. Before each house there are little patches of grass-plot gardens hemmed in by iron railings of substantial respectability. At the corners of the streets, perched in the most inconvenient localities, there are old stone-built churches which must have heard our King Georges prayed for on many a Sunday. There is a State-house with a yellow gilt dome of the Brighton Pavilion order of architecture, which it could have entered into the head of none but an English architect to conceive. In quaint nooks, right in the city's heart, stand old-fashioned English graveyards, looking as if they had been brought over from the city in the days while city trees still were green; and, in the very centre of Boston, there is a fine old park full of ups and downs, and turf and knots of trees, which must have been the especial charge of the King's forester, whose house you can still have pointed out to you not far from the city.

Putting aside the dreary six months' winter of ice and snow, I would choose Boston for my dwellingplace in the States. The town itself is so bright and clean, so full of life without bustle; and then the

suburbs are such pleasant places. Bunker's Hill, I own candidly, I did not go to. Talking of Bunker's Hill monument, there is a story told in Boston which is worth repeating. An English nobleman, who visited America not long ago, was taken to see the stock sight of Boston. "It was here, my lord," said his American guide, "that Warren fell." "Dear me!" replied the peer, staring at the monument in blissful ignorance of who Warren was, "I hope he did not hurt himself." Let me add, that during my stay at Boston, I learnt two facts about the battle of Bunker's Hill, of which, to judge from myself, I think the English public are completely ignorant. The first is, that the battle was fought on the same day as the battle of Quatre-Bras. The second is, that it ended in a British victory, though a victory of the Cannæ kind. On learning this, I felt absolved from the necessity of visiting the monument.

The truth is, there are so many pretty places about Boston, that it is hard to choose among them. On every line by which you enter the city, you pass for miles by hundreds and thousands of pleasant countryhouses, sometimes grouped together in villages, sometimes in knots of two or three, sometimes standing alone in their own gardens. There is no superstition in New England about the neighbourhood of trees being unwholesome, and in the early summer the houses are almost buried beneath the green shade of the over

hanging foliage. Out of the city itself the houses, with few exceptions, are built of wood. Stone is more plentiful there than timber; in fact, the whole State of Massachusetts is little more than a great granite boulder covered over with a thin layer of scanty soil. Wood, however, is preferred for house-building, partly because a wooden house requires less labour in construction, and labour is expensive and far from plentiful, partly because wooden dwellings dry more quickly, and are more habitable than stone ones. To show how scanty skilled labour is still in New England, I may mention that some friends of mine, who live a few miles from Boston, wanting in last May to have a store-closet fitted up with shelves, sent for the only carpenter within reach. The man was quite willing to undertake the job, but could not find time to fix it up till the following August; and so it being Hobson's choice, my friends had to wait till he was disengaged.

It can only be the high price of labour which hinders Massachusetts from being a very poor country. I have never seen fields elsewhere at once so picturesque and so barren. They are very small for the most part, sometimes surrounded with stone fences built up laboriously, at others divided off by hedge-rows reminding me of Leicestershire, rich in stones beyond description, and bearing the meagrest of crops. Great masses of rock rise up in their midst, and the ploughs seem to have turned up three handfuls of stones to