BOSTON AND ITS ENVIRONS 29 



placidity over the buried boxes of tea which the hasty 

 hands of the angered patriots hurled to a watery 

 grave ; Boston Common, whose turf grows velvet- 

 green over ground once blackened by the fires of the 

 grim colonial days of witch-burning, and again 

 trampled down by innumerable soldierly feet in 

 Revolutionary times; the Old State House., from 

 whose east window the governor's haughty command, 

 "Disperse, ye rebels ! '^ sounded on the occasion of 

 the "Boston Massacre,'' the first shedding of American 

 blood by the British military ; and the monument of 

 Bunker Hill — these, with a thousand and one other 

 reminders of the city's brilliant historical record, com- 

 pose the Old Boston whicii I was prepared to see. 

 The first vision, however, of that many-sided city 

 was almost bewilderingly different from the mental 

 picture. Where was the quaint Puritan town of the 

 colonial romances? Where were its crooked, winding 

 streets, its plain uncompromising meeting-houses, 

 darkened with time, its curious gabled houses, stoop- 

 ing with age ? Around me everything was shining 

 with newness — the smooth, wide streets, beautifully 

 paved, the splended examples of fin de si^cle architec- 

 ture in churches, public buildings, school houses and 

 dwellings. 



Afterwards I realized that there was a New Boston, 

 risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of its manv conflao:- 

 rations, and an Old Boston, whose " outward and 

 visible signs " are best studied in that picturesque, 

 shabby stronghold of ancient story, now rapidly de- 

 generating Into a "slum" district — the North End. 



Boston, viewed without regard to Its history, is 

 indeed " Hamlet presented without the part of 



