, as making more show than their humbler
sisters. This, when finished, she covered with a thick coat of varnish,
thus making a very good substitute for the more modern oil-cloth.

Of course everybody, from far and near, came to look, and wonder, and
admire; and among them a good old deacon, who, after critically
surveying the wonderful work, turned to the proud artist, and, with a
look half of amazement, half of pitying reproach, upon his honest,
weather-beaten face, asked solemnly:--

"Sister ----, do you expect to have _all this_ and _heaven_ too?"

To-day, Boston is sometimes jestingly styled the "Hub of the Universe,"
but at the beginning of the present century it was, soberly speaking,
the Hub of New England, for from it spokes projected into every part,
however distant, of that region.

As in past ages all roads led to Rome, so seventy-five or eighty years
ago all roads led to or from Boston. In an old Farmer's Almanac, printed
in 1817, I find, among other things quaint and curious, four
closely-printed pages devoted to "Roads to the Principal Towns of the
Continent from Boston, with the distances and names of Innkeepers."
Beginning with: "From Boston to Newport, over Seekonk, through Rehoboth,
69 miles," and ending with "Down the Ohio, to the mouth of the
Muskinqum, 524 miles,"--a tolerably long ride in those days of the
old-fashioned stage coach.

Naturally, this Umbilicus of the Western World set the fashions in
theology, literature, dress, and manners for all New England, and any
one who had made a trip to Boston was venerated as a kind of travelled
wonder, and forever after regarded as an authority upon all mooted
points of general interest.

It has been said, on what authority I am unable to state, that "all good
Americans go to Paris when they die." But in those days of Boston's
supremacy an aspiring dame in one of our Maine villages, finding herself
upon her death bed, expressed as her one last wish, that she "might be
permitted to go to heaven by the way o' Boston."

Evidently the poor soul had pined in vain all her life for a sight of
its splendors, and could think of nothing so near akin to heaven as a
peep at this earthly Paradise on her way there.

I might go on indefinitely to call up pictures, heroic, quaint, or
pathetic, of these earnest-hearted men and women, who toiled, suffered,
and planned, for the future, that we, their children, have entered into
the fulness of. But time forbids, and