--by which
the drawing-rooms were placed in the rear--was literally years in
process of achievement. But such conservatism is one of Boston's
idiosyncrasies, which we must accept like the wind and the flat A.

Present-day Bostonians are proud--and properly so--of their Copley
Square, with its Public Library, rich with the mural paintings of Puvis
de Chavannes, with Abbey's "Quest of the Holy Grail," and Sargent's
"Frieze of the Prophets"; with its well-loved Trinity Church and with
much excellent sculpture by Bela Pratt. Copley Square is the cultural
center of modern Boston. The famous Lowell lectures--established about
seventy-five years ago as free gifts to the people--are enthusiastically
attended by audiences as Bostonese as one could hope to congregate; and
in all sorts of queer nests in this vicinity are Theosophical
reading-rooms, small halls where Buddhism is studied or New Thought
taught, and half a hundred very new or very old philosophies, religions,
fads, fashions, reforms, and isms find shelter. It is easy to linger in
Copley Square: indeed, hundreds and hundreds of men and
women--principally women--come from all over the United States for the
sole purpose of spending a few months or a season in this very place,
enjoying the lectures, concerts, and art exhibitions which are so easily
and freely accessible. But in this bird's-eye flight across the
historical and geographical map of a city that tempts one to many
pleasant delays, we must hover for a brief moment over the South and the
North Ends.

Skipping back, then, almost three centuries, but not traveling far as
distance goes, the stranger in Boston cannot do better than to find his
way from Copley Square to the Old South Church on Washington
Street--that venerable building whose desecration by the British troops
in 1775 the citizens found it so hard ever to forgive. It was here that
Benjamin Franklin was baptized in 1706; here that Joseph Warren made a
dramatic entry to the pulpit by way of the window in order to denounce
the British soldiers; and here that momentous meetings were held in the
heaving days before the Revolution. The Old South Church Burying Ground
is now called the King's Chapel Burying Ground, and King's Chapel
itself--a quaint, dusky building, suggestive of a London chapel--is only
a few blocks away. Across its doorsill have not only stepped the Royal
Governors of pre-Revolutionary days, but Washington, General Gage, the
indestructibl