es the streets. The houses are elegant, but sternly
ordered. If they belong to the colonial style, they are exquisitely
symmetrical. There is no pilaster without its fellow; no window that
is not nicely balanced by another of self-same shape and size. The
architects, who learned their craft from the designs of Inigo Jones and
Christopher Wren, had no ambition to express their own fancy. They were
loyally obedient to the tradition of the masters, and the houses which
they planned, plain in their neatness, are neither pretentious nor
inappropriate. Nowhere in Boston will you find the extravagant ingenuity
which makes New York ridiculous; nowhere will you be disturbed by an
absurd mimicry of exotic styles; nowhere are you asked to wonder at
mountainous blocks of stone. Boston is not a city of giants, but of men
who love their comfort, and who, in spite of Puritan ancestry, do
not disdain to live in beautiful surroundings. In other words, the
millionaire has not laid his iron hand upon New England, and, until he
come, Boston may still boast of its elegance.

The pride of Boston is Beacon Street, surely one among the most majestic
streets in the world. It recalls Piccadilly and the frontage of the
Green Park. Its broad spaces and the shade of its dividing trees are
of the natural beauty which time alone can confer, and its houses are
worthy its setting. I lunched at the Somerset Club, in a white-panelled
room, and it needed clams and soft-shell crabs to convince me that I was
in a new land, and not in an English country-house. All was of another
time and of a familiar place--the service, the furniture, the aspect.
And was it possible to regard our sympathetic hosts as strange in blood
or speech?

The Mall, in Beacon Street, if it is the pride, is also the
distinguishing mark of Boston. For Boston is a city of parks and trees.
The famous Common, as those might remember who believe that America
sprang into being in a night, has been sacred for nearly three hundred
years. Since 1640 it has been the centre of Boston. It has witnessed the
tragedies and comedies of an eventful history. "There," wrote an
English traveller as early as 1675, "the gallants walk with their
marmalet-madams, as we do in Moorfields."

There malefactors were hanged; there the witches suffered in the time of
their persecution; and it is impossible to forget, as you walk its ample
spaces, the many old associations which it brings with it from the past.