.

Of course we went below and spent two of our hard-earned dollars in
order to be taken behind the falls. We were smothered with spray and
forced to cling frenziedly to the hands of our guide, but it was a part
of our duty, and we did it. No one could rob us of the glory of having
adventured so far.

That night we resumed our seats in the smoking car, and pushed on toward
Boston in patiently-endured discomfort. Early the following morning we
crossed the Hudson, and as the Berkshire hills began to loom against the
dawn, I asked the brakeman, with much emotion, "Have we reached the
Massachusetts line?" "We have," he said, and by pressing my nose against
the glass and shading my face with my hands I was able to note the
passing landscape.

Little could be seen other than a tumbled, stormy sky with wooded
heights dimly outlined against it, but I had all the emotions of a
pilgrim entering upon some storied oriental vale. Massachusetts to me
meant Whittier and Hawthorne and Wendell Phillips and Daniel Webster. It
was the cradle of our liberty, the home of literature, the province of
art--and it contained Boston!

As the sun rose, both of us sat with eyes fixed upon the scenery,
observant of every feature. It was all so strange, yet familiar! Barns
with long, sloping roofs stood with their backs against the hillsides,
precisely as in the illustrations to Hawthorne's stories, and Whittier's
poems. The farm-houses, old and weather-beaten and guarded by giant
elms, looked as if they might have sheltered Emerson and Lowell. The
little villages with narrow streets lined with queer brick-walled houses
(their sides to the gutter) reminded us of the pictures in Ben
Franklin's _Autobiography_.

Everything was old, delightfully old. Nothing was new.--Most of the
people we saw were old. The men working in the fields were bent and
gray, scarcely a child appeared, though elderly women abounded. (This
was thirty-five years ago, before the Canadians and Italians had begun
to swarm). Everywhere we detected signs of the historical, the
traditional, the Yankee. The names of the stations rang in our ears like
bells, _Lexington_, _Concord_, _Cambridge_, _Charlestown_, and--at last
_Boston_!

What a strange, new world this ancient city was to us, as we issued from
the old Hoosac Tunnel station! The intersection of every street was a
bit of history. The houses standing sidewise to the gutter, the narrow,
ledge-like pavements, the awkward t