CHAPTER II. 



Boston. Horticultural Show in Faneuil Hall. Review of Militia. Peace 

 Association. Excursion to the White Mountains. Railway Traveling. 

 Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Geology, Fossils in Drift. Submarine 

 Forest. Wild Plants ; Asters, Solidagos, Poison Ivy. Swallows. 

 Glacial Grooves. Rocfcs transported by Antarctic Ice. Body of a Whale 

 discovered by an American Trader in an Iceberg. 



GREAT progress has been made in beautifying the city of 

 Boston by new public buildings in the three years since we were 

 last here. Several of these are constructed of granite, in a hand 

 some style of architecture. The site of the town is almost an 

 island, which has been united to the main land by long mounds, 

 which are beginning to radiate in all directions, except the east, 

 like the spokes of a wheel. Railway trains are seen continually 

 flying to and fro along these narrow causeways at all hours of 

 the day. 



On the evening of our arrival we went to a horticultural show 

 of fruit and flowers in Faneuil Hall, where we found a large 

 assembly of both sexes enjoying a &quot; temperance feast,&quot; a band of 

 music in the gallery, and the table spread with cakes, fruit, ices, 

 tea, milk, and whey. I was glad to observe, what I am told, 

 how r ever, is an innovation here, that the ladies, instead of merely 

 looking on from a gallery to see the gentlemen eat, were sitting 

 at table in the body of the hall, and listening to some of the first 

 orators of the land, Daniel Webster, R. C. Winthrop, and our 

 friend and late fellow-voyager in the Britannia, Edward Everett, 

 whose reception, on his return from his embassy to England, was 

 most enthusiastic. He said, &quot; he had been so lately rocking on 

 the Atlantic, whose lullaby was not always of the gentlest, that 

 he was hardly fit for a rocking in &amp;lt; the old cradle of Liberty ; 

 and felt almost unconsciously inclined to catch at the table to 

 steady himself, expecting to see the flowers and the fruit fetch 

 away in some lee-lurch. Even the pillars of old Faneuil Hal!, 



