ne the name of Joan of Arc. We should be slightly
shocked if the town of Johannesburg happened to be called Jesus Christ.
But few have noted a blasphemy, or even a somewhat challenging
benediction, to be found in the very name of San Francisco.

But on the other hand a place like Boston is much more beautiful than
its name. And, as I have suggested, an Englishman's general information,
or lack of information, leaves him in some ignorance of the type of
beauty that turns up in that type of place. He has heard so much about
the purely commercial North as against the agricultural and
aristocratic South, and the traditions of Boston and Philadelphia are
rather too tenuous and delicate to be seen from across the Atlantic. But
here also there are traditions and a great deal of traditionalism. The
circle of old families, which still meets with a certain exclusiveness
in Philadelphia, is the sort of thing that we in England should expect
to find rather in New Orleans. The academic aristocracy of Boston, which
Oliver Wendell Holmes called the Brahmins, is still a reality though it
was always a minority and is now a very small minority. An epigram,
invented by Yale at the expense of Harvard, describes it as very small
indeed:--

Here is to jolly old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod,
Where Cabots speak only to Lowells, and Lowells speak only to God.

But an aristocracy must be a minority, and it is arguable that the
smaller it is the better. I am bound to say, however, that the
distinguished Dr. Cabot, the present representative of the family, broke
through any taboo that may tie his affections to his Creator and to Miss
Amy Lowell, and broadened his sympathies so indiscriminately as to show
kindness and hospitality to so lost a being as an English lecturer. But
if the thing is hardly a limit it is very living as a memory; and Boston
on this side is very much a place of memories. It would be paying it a
very poor compliment merely to say that parts of it reminded me of
England; for indeed they reminded me of English things that have largely
vanished from England. There are old brown houses in the corners of
squares and streets that are like glimpses of a man's forgotten
childhood; and when I saw the long path with posts where the Autocrat
may be supposed to have walked with the schoolmistress, I felt I had
come to the land where old tales come true.

I pause in this place upon this particular aspect of Ame