ities,
like old people, become tenacious of their idiosyncrasies, admitting
their inconsistencies and prejudices with complacency, wisely aware that
age has bestowed on them a special value, which is automatically
increased with the passage of time.

To tell the story of an old city is like cutting down through the
various layers of a fruity layer cake. When you turn the slice over, you
see that every piece is a cross-section. So almost every locality and
phase of this venerable metropolis could be studied, and really should
be studied, according to its historical strata: Colonial, Provincial,
Revolutionary, economic, and literary. All of these periods have piled
up their associations one upon the other, and all of them must be
somewhat understood if one would sincerely comprehend what has aptly
been called not a city, but a "state of mind."

It is as impossible for the casual sojourner to grasp the significance
of the multifarious historical and literary events which have transpired
here as for a few pages to outline them. Wherever one stands in Boston
suggests the church of San Clemente in Rome, where, you remember, there
are three churches built one upon the other. However, those who would
take the lovely journey from Boston to Plymouth needs must make some
survey, no matter how superficial, of their starting-place. And perhaps
the best spot from which to begin is the Common.

This pleasantly rolling expanse, which was set aside as long ago as
1640, with the decree that "there shall be no land granted either for
houseplott or garden out of y^e open land or common field," has been
unbrokenly maintained ever since, and as far as acreage goes (it
approximates fifty acres) could still fulfill its original use of
pasturing cows, a practice which was continued until 1830. It was here
that John Hancock's cattle grazed--he who lived in such magnificence on
the hill, and in whose side yard the State House was built--and once,
when preparations for an official banquet were halted by shortage of
milk, tradition has it that he ordered his servants to hasten out on the
Common and milk every cow there, regardless of ownership. Tradition also
tells us that the little boy Ralph Waldo Emerson tended his mother's cow
here; and finally both traditions and existing law declare that yonder
one-story building opening upon Mount Vernon Street, and possessing an
oddly wide door, must forever keep that door of sufficient width to let
the