things not
mundane. Quite as beautiful and quite as Grecian as the Technology
buildings is the noble marble group of the School of Medicine of Harvard
University, out by the Fenlands--that section of the city which is
rapidly becoming a students' quarter, with its Simmons College, the New
England Conservatory of Music, art schools, gymnasiums, private and
technical schools of all descriptions, and its body of over 12,000
students. Harvard is, of course, across the river in Cambridge, and
preparatory schools and colleges dot the suburbs in every direction,
upholding the cultural traditions of a city which has proved itself
peculiarly fitted to educational interests.

All this time we have, like _bona-fide_ Bostonians, stayed on Beacon
Hill, and merely looked out at the rest of the city. And perhaps this is
as typical a thing as we could have done. Beacon Hill was the center of
original Boston, when the Back Bay was merely a marsh, and long after
the marsh was filled in and streets were laid out and handsome
residences lined them, Beacon Hill looked down scornfully at the new
section and murmured that it was built upon the discarded hoopskirts and
umbrellas of the true Bostonians. Even when almost every one was crowded
off the Hill and the Back Bay became the more aristocratic section of
the two, there were still enough of the original inhabitants left to
scorn these upstart social pretensions. And now Beacon Hill is again
coming back into her own: the fine old houses are being carefully,
almost worshipfully restored, probably never again to lose their
rightful place in the general life of the city.

But if Beacon Hill was conservative in regard to the Back Bay, that
district, in its turn, showed an equal unprogressiveness in regard to
the Esplanade. To the stranger in Boston, delighting in that magnificent
walk along the Charles River Embankment, with the arching spans of the
Cambridge and Harvard bridges on one side, and the homes of wealth and
mellow refinement on the other--a walk which for invigorating beauty
compares with any in the cities of men--it seems incredible that when
this promenade was laid out a few years ago, the householders along the
water's edge absolutely refused to turn their front windows away from
Beacon Street. Furthermore, they ignored the fact that their back yards
and back windows presented an unbecoming face to such an incomparably
lovely promenade, and the inevitable household rearrangement