use they have neither best nor
worst, but what they had on was _it_. And possessing no hats was greatly
in their favour. By the way, did you know that Cambridge is the first
place where a printing press was set up in America? I didn't. It
remained for my English Jack to inform me of the fact.

This Cambridge expedition was in the afternoon I neglected to mention.
Our morning (while Peter doubtless toiled) had been spent in the
wonderful Public Library of Boston itself. We'd meant to do more and
other things, but one could stay a week in that library, which I believe
started with just _ten thousand_ books! Everything is beautiful about
it, from the pale-pink granites and brown Spanish tiles without to the
St. Gauden lions who guard the great marble staircase within. Sargent's
"Religions of the World" is a noble decoration, and Abbey's frieze of
the Holy Grail is beautiful, but the panel paintings of Puvis de
Chavannes--"The Muses Greeting the Genius of Enlightenment"--are worth
while coming from London or Paris to Boston to see.

After we motored back from Cambridge we wandered about here and there,
seeing the "Cradle of American Liberty," the "Sanctuary of Freedom," and
the place "where Independence was born." Unless you have the key, you
won't be able to unlock this saying, so I'll do it for you. Why, they
call Faneuil Hall the "Cradle of Liberty" because they used to hold all
the town meetings there to discuss whether they should revolt against
British rule or no; so Liberty must have rocked to and fro a lot! The
Old South Meeting House is the "Sanctuary of Freedom," for there it was
prayed for and blessed. And of course Independence was born in the Old
State House. I wonder if anything half as epoch-making will ever come to
pass under the great gold dome of the new one? It's very fine, but it
can never be quite so thrilling, I think. And _it_ wasn't built where
the pillory and scaffold used to stand! Jack would see the Bunker Hill
Monument, too, though I think monuments, even the finest, seem to chill
your glorious visions of what really happened on the spot.

Jack, and Pat, and Peter, and I then made a secret pact that we'd devote
part of to-morrow to Hawthorne's Boston; that we'd _pretend_ to find the
house of "The Blythedale Romance" in Tremont Street; that we'd poke
about for the lost site of Hester Prynne's lonely hut on the Back Bay
(huts there are neither cheap nor lonely now), and search for various
other s