tyrannize over the spiritualist minority. With the exception of the Mormons, whose case was, in many respects, a peculiar one, there has been no instance in America of religious persecution. And what is still more remarkable, under the rule of a democracy, deep national religious convictions have been proved to be consistent with complete freedom of opinion on religious matters. There is no such thing in the North as social persecution, or loss of political standing, on account of your religion, or want of religion. How far this is consistent with the theory of the tyranny of majorities, I much question personally.

CAMBRIDGE, U. S.

SOME four miles or so from Boston lies the universitytown of New England-the Cambridge of the New World. There are few places in the States of which I have carried away with me brighter memories. The kindness of new-made friends caused Cambridge to be a sort of home to me during my stay at Boston. But even without personal recollections, my impressions of the university town, and above all of its class-day, as the annual commemoration is called, would be very pleasant ones. Let me speak of it as I found it.

It is by the street-railroads that you go to Cambridge, U.S. The idea may not be academical, but the reality is wonderfully pleasant. If I had no other reason for not liking George Francis Train, I should find cause enough for my dislike in the fact that he has discredited the street-railway system in England. I know, indeed, of no pleasanter mode of travelling for a short distance; and of all American street-railroads, the Cambridge ones

are the best. It is true that the cars are over-crowded at times. Nothing is perfect in this bad world of ours. It is true, too, that gentlemen are expected to leave their seats when ladies have no place to sit down in; but then so many of the Boston ladies are young and pretty, and always smile so pleasantly when you make room for them, that I wonder how Mr. Trollope found it in his heart to grumble at the custom. It is undeniable also, that if, as I trust my readers do, you drive your own mail-phaeton, you find the streetrails hinder the high-road from being as smooth as it would be otherwise. Still, even from the summit of a mail-phaeton you cannot help perceiving that the number of people who do not possess carriages of their own considerably exceeds the number of those who do; and, therefore, on the whole, street-railroads are a gain to the community at large. Putting aside these slight objections, your ride to Cambridge, especially on a summer evening, is all that you can desire. Your fare is only threepence: low as the fare is, a dirtily-dressed passenger is almost unknown; and even if you are sometimes crowded, it is pleasant to see coloured women and children sitting or standing among the other passengers on terms of perfect equality. You travel as smoothly as you would in the softest of spring carriages. You go as quick as you would in an Eastern-Counties express, and you pay as little as you would in a London omnibus.

The road itself is a very pretty one. Up and down the old-fashioned hilly streets of Boston, with their quaint red-brick houses, then over a long wide bridge across the Charles River, or rather, across the sea creek into which the Charles River runs-a creek famed in the annals of Boston for the fact that the tea was thrown into its waters in the days of the Revolution; then through the long straggling suburb of Cambridge Port, then through rows after rows of wooden villas, standing each in its own gardens, and so on into the little quiet town of Cambridge. Of town or streets there is but little; what there is, is grouped round Harvard College. Three low blocks of building, built two hundred years ago, looking for all the world as though the Pilgrim Fathers had transported them ready made from Trinity Hall or Emmanuel College, and called Hollis, Stoughton, and Massachusetts, form two sides of a college quad. On the third stands the college library, a cross in architectural fashion between King's Chapel and the brick church in Barnwell, with the same dumpy pinnacles on the roof, like the legs of a dinner-table turned upside down. The square is completed by a block of lecture-rooms, of the plainest structure. Hard by the college, there are a row or two of shops, university book-stalls, groceries, and the like; and round about, in every direction, there are pleasant shady streets, lined with trees and quickset hedges and old-fashioned country houses. Indeed, the whole place had, to my

eyes, an academic air, for which I was not prepared. One of the professors told me, that after Arthur Clough had resided here a short time, he said that "he felt himself back in Oxford." Indeed, strolling through the grounds of that sleepy, quiet university, it seems hard to realize that you are in the country of New York and Chicago and the West.

The students are quieter, apparently, than our English ones; or, at any rate, you see less of them about the streets. Once or twice in the evenings I heard snatches of noisy songs, as I passed the college buildings, which, coupled with the jingling of glasses, called back recollections of college supper-parties. Otherwise I saw or heard but little of the students, and those, I did meet with, had none of that air of being the owners, possessors, and masters of the university precincts, so peculiar to the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge. The age of the students is about the same as in our own universities. Twenty-one is, as with us, the average age at which students take their degree, or rather, close their college course, for taking one's degree is, at Harvard College, by no means the usual termination of the university career. There is no particular reason why students should take a degree; and, as a rule, when they have studied as many years as their finances or their inclinations will allow them, they leave the university without undergoing the formality of graduating. The fact that there are no fellowships