A New England Boyhood

VI.

THE WORLD NEAR BOSTON.

THE Broad Street Riot, so called, on the afternoon of June 11, 1837, was an event which of course had great interest for the boys of the period. It was the fortune of very few of them, however, who were decently brought up, to have any hand in that conflict; for, as I have said in another chapter of these recollections, people in those days went to “ meeting” as regularly in the afternoon as they did in the morning.

If there should be need to-day for the sudden appearance of the military forces of Boston on a Sunday afternoon, I think that the officers of those forces would be looked for quite as readily at the Browning Club or a chess club, or possibly even exercising their horses somewhere within ten miles of Boston, as at any place of public worship. But my whole personal recollection of the Broad Street Riot is that, of a sudden, the bell of Brattle Street Church struck “backward,” and the gentlemen who were of the first regiment rose and left their seats, and went down to the armory at Faneuil Hall to join their companies, not to say lead them. It was said, and I believe truly, that a sergeant formed the first men who arrived, in skeletons of companies, and in a skeleton of a regiment. George Tyler Bigelow, afterwards chief justice of the Supreme Court, was the first commissioned officer who arrived. He was a lieutenant in the New England Guards or the Light Infantry. He ordered the regiment out of the armory, and commanded it till he met a superior officer. The story was that the command changed half a dozen times before the regiment reached Broad Street, where firemen and Irishmen were fighting. Of which I saw and remember nothing. But the departure of those gentlemen from church, whom we would have joined so gladly, fixed the whole affair in our memories. In a boy journal of the time, I find the comment, after I had read the newspaper account, “ The Irish got well beaten, but the firemen appear to have been as much in the wrong as they.”

In all these reminiscences, I am well aware that our lives were much less affected by the daily news from abroad than are the lives of people now. Certainly Boston regarded itself more as a metropolis than it does now. And for this there was good reason ; for Boston had much less connection with the rest of the world than it has now. It had a foreign commerce, and the average boy expected to go to sea some time or other. But I recollect times when a vessel from England brought thirty-live days’ news ; all through the time of which I am writing, it took three days for a letter to go to Washington ; and although people no longer offered prayers for their friends when they were going to New York, still a journey to New York was comparatively a rare business. In my third year in college, I wanted to send a parcel of dried plants to a botanist in New York. There was no proper “ express, " and I asked it as a personal favor of a young man named Harnden, whom I knew as a conductor on the Boston and Worcester railroad, that he would give the parcel to some one who would give it to some one else who would give it to my correspondent. It was because Mr. Harnden had so many such personal favors in hand that he established Hamden’s Express, which was, I think, the first of the organized expresses which existed in this country.

I find it difficult to make the Boston boy or girl of to-day understand how different was Boston life, thus shut in from the rest of the world, from our life, when, as I suppose, at least one hundred thousand people enter Boston every day, and as many leave it for some place outside.

As late as May, 1845, when I was twenty-three years old, I had an engagement to go from Boston to Worcester Saturday afternoon. I was to preach there the next day. When, at three o’clock, I came to the station of the Worcester road, there was an announcement that, from some accident on the line above, no train would leave until Monday. The three o’clock train, observe, was the latest train of Saturday. I crossed Boston to the Fitchburg station, and took the train for Groton or Littleton. There I took a stage for Lancaster, where I slept.¹ In the morning, with a Worcester man who had been caught in Boston as I was, I took a wagon early, and we two drove across to Worcester. That is to say, as late as 1845 there were but two men in Boston to whom it was necessary that they should go to Worcester that afternoon. And this was ten years after railroad communication had been established.

Before railroad communication was open, intercourse with other States, or with what now seem neighboring cities, was very infrequent. In 1832, my father went to Schenectady to see the Albany and Schenectady railroad, and, I believe, to order some cars for the Boston and Worcester road. He also went to New York city on the business of that road. I think he had been to that city but once since 1805, when he went there on his way from Northampton to Troy. It is a tradition in the family that he was then a fortnight on the sloop which carried him up the Hudson River from New York, and that he read the whole of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on that voyage. Yet, if anybody was to travel, he would have been apt to. He was a journalist, intensely interested in internal improvement. He had a large business correspondence in New York, and was well known there. I was myself nineteen years old when I first visited New York.

In 1841, I had a chance to overhaul the old register at the hotel at Stafford Springs, in Connecticut. Stafford Springs was, and is, a watering-place of a modest sort, where is a good strong iron spring, — good for boys with warts, and indeed for any one who needs iron in his blood. It was quite the fashion to go to Stafford Springs from different parts of New England, in the earlier part of the century. In this old register, it was interesting to see how universal was the custom by which people came there in their own carriages. What followed was, that people who had no carriages of their own hardly traveled for pleasure at all.

So was it that, in the years of my boyhood, Boston people, with very few exceptions, lived in Boston the year round. People did not care to go to the theatre in midsummer, and I think the theatres were generally closed for six or eight weeks when the days were longest. Perhaps Boston used the matchless advantages of her bay more when she had little communication with points beyond it. Perhaps the entertainments of the bay seemed more important because there were few, if any, excursions for pleasure excepting those which the water offered.

Nahant was seized upon as a seashore resort as early as 1819. The sea serpent had appeared in 1817. The hotel on the southeastern point, long since burned down, was a pretty piazza-guarded building; and, as the steamboat Housatonic went down to Nahant every morning, and came back every night, a day at Nahant made a charming summer expedition, which we young folks relied upon at least once a year. At Nahant, at Chelsea Beach, at Nantasket, at Sandwich, and at Gloucester I made my acquaintance with the real ocean. At Nahant I made my first acquaintance with the joy of the bowling alley, and first saw the game of billiards. By the way, I remember that, in lecturing to my class in college, as late as 1837, Professor Lovering had to tell the class, as a fact which half of them did not know, that when one billiard-ball strikes another it may stop itself, while it communicates its motion to the other. I doubt if half the young men who heard him had ever seen a billiard-table at that time.

There were but one or two steamboats in the harbor, so that the " excursion ” of to-day was very infrequent. But all the more would people go down the bay for fishing-parties, on sailingvessels, — more, I should think, than they do now. Perhaps there was something in foreign commerce which gave to those engaged in it a sort of absolute freedom sometimes, sandwiched in with hard work at others, in an alternate remission of work and play, which the modern merchant seldom enjoys. Your ship came in from Liverpool or from Calcutta, and you and all your staff, down to the boy who swept out the office and trimmed the lamps, were busy, morning, noon, and night, till her cargo was disposed of, and perhaps till she was fitted for another voyage. But then, if no other of your ships arrived, there would be a lull; and if Tom, Dick, or Harry came in to propose a fishing-party, you were ready.

However this may be, the history and experiences of such parties made a considerable element of summer life. The anecdote of General Moreau belongs to them, and I will print it, though it is told of a generation before my time. When General Moreau was in exile from France, he came on his travels to Boston. Among other entertainments he was taken down the bay on a fishing-party. As they dined, or after dinner, excellent Colonel Messenger, whose singing is still remembered with pleasure, was asked to favor the company with a song, and he sang the fine old English song of ToMorrow. The refrain is in the words,—

The French exile did not understand English as well as he did the art of war, and when Colonel Messenger came to these words, at the end of each verse, he supposed, naturally enough, that he was hearing a song made in his own honor.

And so he rose, as each verse closed, put his hand to his heart, blushed, and bowed gratefully, as to a personal compliment. And his hosts were too courteous to undeceive him.

The Harvard Navy Club, an institution long since dead, used to “ go down, " as the abbreviated phrase was, every year. “ Go down ” was short for “ go down the bay and fish.” The Navy Club was a club of those men who received no college honors. The laziest man in a class was the ” Lord High Admiral ; ” the next to the laziest was the “ Admiral of the Blue,” and so on.

Perhaps there are not so many fish in the bay as there were then. Perhaps I am not so much interested in the boys who take them. But I do not see, when I cross the bridge to East Cambridge, any hoy patiently sitting on the rail waiting to catch flounders, as I have done many a happy afternoon. Perhaps, as civilization has come in, the flounders have stayed lower down the bay.

Traveling, in short, was done by retail in those days, and such combinations as those of to-day, by which a hundred thousand people are thrown upon Boston daily, and as many taken away, were wholly unknown, not to say not dreamed of. Retail traveling, if we are to use that expression, had some points of interest which do not enliven the career of a traveler who is boxed up in a train with three hundred and ninetynine others, all of them to be delivered, " right side up with care, " at the place they wish to go to, while none of them have what Mr. Locke would call an “ adequate idea” of the places on the way, if indeed any of them have any idea.

The first of such expeditions which I remember, excepting one on the Middlesex Canal, which has been referred to, was in August and September of 1826, when my father took all of us — that is, my mother and four children — to Sandwich, where he was going to enjoy a week’s shooting. The other gentlemen of the party were Daniel Webster, Judge Story, and Judge Fay. Mr. Webster took his family with him ; I think the other gentlemen did not take theirs. All of us stayed at Fessenden’s tavern ; charmingly comfortable then, I fancy, as I know it was afterwards. My early memories of the expedition are quite distinct. It was here and then that I first fired the gun which is the oldest sporting gun here at Matunuck ; and a good gun it is, if people are not above an old-fashioned percussion cap. But in those days it had a flintlock. The general use of what are now unknown to young sportsmen, percussion caps, belongs some years later. The bigger boys, Fletcher Webster and my brother Nathan, would be taken out with the gentlemen to hold the horses (in chaises, observe) on the beach, while their fathers walked about and shot what they might. But we little fellows stayed at home, to be lifted to the seventh heaven if a loaded gun were brought home at night which we might aim and fire at a shingle. For us and the girls, the principal occupation I remember was playing dinner and tea with the pretty glassware which the Sandwich works were just beginning to make. I believe I have somewhere at this day some specimens of their work for children.

On this expedition, we went and returned, some in the “ stage " and some in my father’s chaise, — making the journey, I think, in a day. But generally, with so large a host as ours,— which included Fullum, — we went on the summer journey, whatever it was, in what was then, as it is indeed now, called a “ barouche.” The names “ landau,” “ victoria, and the like were, I think, unknown. As this business was by no means peculiar to our family, and as it belongs to a civilization quite unlike ours, I will describe it in detail.

We were to go to Cape Ann, and for perhaps a week to take such comfort as the great “ tavern ” at Gloucester would give. Observe that the word " tavern ” was still used, as I think it now is where a tavern exists in the heart of New England, for what the Englishman calls an “inn.” We talk now of the Wayside Inn, the Wayland Inn, and so on, but this is all in a labored, artificial, and indeed foreign speech introduced from England within a generation past. To prepare for such an expedition, Fullum would be sent from stable to stable to hire the best barouche he could find, and a span of horses. Happy the boy who selected himself, or was selected by destiny, to accompany him on this tour of inspection ! When the happy morning arrived, Fullum brought round his carriage and horses early, fastened on the trunk behind, — for I think there never was but one, — and the two elders, and in this case of Cape Ann the five children, with books and hand baggage, always with maps of the country, were packed away in and on the carriage. Both of us boys, of course, sat on the box with Fullum, who drove. If, on any such occasion, there were a very little boy, Fullum would arrange a duplicate set of reins for the special use of the youngster, which were attached, not to the horses’ bits, but to the rings on the saddles. In this particular expedition to Cape Ann, we stopped at the Lynn Mineral Spring Hotel, long since abandoned, I think, and reached Gloucester only perhaps on the second day.

What happened to the old people there, I am sure I do not know. To us children, there were those ineffable delights of playing with the ocean, the kindest, safest, and best playmate which any child can have. Sandwich had given us only the first taste of it. Here we had our first real knowledge of what seaurchins are, and what people call “sand dollars,”horseshoe crabs, cockles, ray’s eggs, and the various seaweeds, from devil’s aprons up or down. The cape had not assumed the grandeur of a summer watering-place. The modern names were unknown. There was no Rockport or Pigeon Cove to go to. It was Sandy Bay or Squam to which one drove. I remember the ejaculation of some fishermen’s children, as they saw the barouche for the first time : “ What is it ? It ain’t the mail, and it ain’t a shay.”

At that time, and certainly as late as 1842, a group of children in the country, if they saw a carriage approaching, would arrange themselves hastily in a line on one side of the road and “ make their manners.” That is, they would all how as the carriage passed. The last time that I remember seeing this was in 1842, in Hampshire County, as the stage passed by. It was done good-naturedly, with no sign of deference, but rather, I should say, as a pleasant recognition of human brotherhood in a lonely region ; as two men, if they were not Englishmen, might bow to each other, wherever they were far from other men.

In our particular family, the annual journey was made to my grandfather’s house in Westhampton, a pleasant town among the hills in Hampshire County, where my father was born. He took his wife there in his chaise when they were married, in 1816, and hardly a summer passed, until 1837, when he did not make the same journey with his whole family. This then numbered seven children, beside himself and my mother, and of course Fullum. To my father, it was a matter of pride that on the last of these journeys we went on his own railroad to Worcester. In 1835, the carriage was taken on a truck on the passenger train, in which we rode ; but I need not say that Fullum preferred to sit in the carriage all the way, and did so.

There was a charm in such half-vagrant journeying, about which the Raymond tourist knows nothing. There was no sending in advance for rooms, and you took your chances at the tavern, where you arrived, perhaps, at nine o’clock at night. It may be imagined that the sudden appearance at the country tavern of a party of ten, of all ages, from three months upward, was an event of interest. In those times, the selectmen knew what they meant when they said that no person should dispense liquor who did not provide for travelers. Practically, it was a convenience to any village to have a place where travelers could stay; and practically, the people of that village said to the man whom they licensed to sell liquor, " If you have this privilege, you must provide a decent place of entertainment for strangers.” One man kept the tavern, perhaps, for his life long. It had its reputation as good or poor ; and you avoided certain towns because So-andSo did not keep a good house. The practical difficulty of such traveling in New England now is, that you are by no means sure of finding a comfortable place to sleep, when your day’s journey is over. The New England tavern of the old fashion held its own to the most advantage, in later times, in the State of Maine, on the roads hack into the lumber region ; and I dare say such comfortable houses for travelers may be found there now.

These country taverns always had signs, generally swinging from a post with a cross-bar, in front of the house. The sign might be merely the name of the keeper ; this was a sad disappointment to young travelers. More probably it was the picture of the American eagle or of a rising sun. Neptune rising from the sea was a favorite device. I remember at Worcester the Elephant, and I have seen the portrait of General Wolfe on the Newburyport tavern, and more than one General Washington.

After I was a man, I had occasion to travel a good deal, one summer, in northern Vermont, where the tavern signs still existed. Almost without exception, their devices were of the American eagle with his wings spread, or of the American eagle holding the English lion in chains, or of the lion chained without any American eagle. These were in memory of Macomb’s and Chauncey’s victories at Plattsburg and on the lake. They also, perhaps, referred to the fact that most of these taverns were supported by the wagons of smugglers, who, in their good large peddlers’ carts, provided themselves with English goods in Canada, which they sold on our side of the line. In our generation, one is more apt to see a tavern sign in a museum than hanging on a gallows-tree.

Meandering along through Leicester, Spencer, Belchertown, Ware, Amherst, Northampton, or some of these places, we arrived at my grandfather’s pretty home in Westhampton on the morning of the third day. Then, for three or four days came absolute and infinite joy. We had cousins there, just our own ages, of whom we were very fond. For the time of our visit they gave themselves, without stint or hindrance, to the entertainment of their friends from Boston. First of all, horses were to be provided, and saddles, that we boys might ride. Little did the country boys understand what joy it was to us to find ourselves scampering over the hills. Then there was the making of traps for woodchucks. If it chose to rain, we were in the great workshop of the farm, using such tools as we had never seen at home. In the evening there were " hunt the slipper " and “ blindman’s buff,” the latter an entertainment which we could follow even on Sunday evening, as I believe I have said, and follow then with more enthusiasm than on other evenings, because other cousins and the children of neighbors came in to join with us. In that New England parsonage,—never so called, by the way, — the old Connecticut customs prevailed, and “ the Sabbath ” began promptly as the sun went down on Saturday night, and was well ended when the sun set on Sunday. The hills of Westhampton are high, and sunset on Sunday evening came early.

So it was that the great joy of life was the visit at grandfather’s every summer. My grandfather was the minister of this town for fifty-seven years. I think I saw the dear old gentleman last in 1834; it must have been in 1837, after his death, that we made the last visit there, when my grandmother was still living. I did not myself return to Westhampton for fifty years, when it was to preach in his pulpit. It was pleasant to find that, after two generations, the people of the town remembered him fondly. I found the pulpit of the meeting-house and the chancel behind it decorated with flowers, and the word “Welcome,” wrought in flowers, hung above me. So I went back to the happiest days of my New England boyhood.

I have already alluded to the infrequency of communication between this country home — for it was such to all of us children — and the home in Boston. The cousins in the country, when autumn came, would not forget us in Boston, and would crack butternuts and walnuts for us, of kinds they thought we should not have, pick out the great meats, and pack them carefully to be sent down. Such a box would be sent to Northampton, and put on board a boat which went to Hartford. There it would be put on board a sloop, in which it was to sail out of the Connecticut River and around Cape Cod to Boston. In the same sloop was perhaps a keg of my grandmother’s apple-sauce, or some other treasure from the farm. Great joy for us, if all these pleasant memorials arrived in time ; great sorrow, if a letter came, stating that the sloop was frozen up opposite Lyme, or somewhere else in the Connecticut River, and would not appear with its precious cargo until the next spring. Such were the difficulties of sending a box a hundred and ten miles across Massachusetts in the year 1830.

To putting an end to such difficulties by the railroad system my father gave much of the active part of his life, as I have before said. When it was thought crazy to talk about such things, he talked about the possibilities of a railroad westward. VY hen it was necessary to induce men of capital to subscribe, with infinite difficulty he obtained a subscription of a million dollars capital for the Boston and Worcester railroad. He was the first president and first superintendent of that railroad, and had the great joy of importing its first engine from Liverpool. This, as I have said, was the Meteor; she was ordered from George Stephenson himself, immediately after the success of the Rocket in the famous railway trial between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. The arrival of the Meteor in Boston, with the engine-driver who was to set her up and to run her first trips, was a matter of great joy to us boys. At the same time, the Yankee was built by a company in Boston, at their works at the cross-dam of the Milldam ; and an engine always called the “Colonel Long” was built for the Boston and Worcester railroad at Philadelphia, under the auspices of the same Colonel Long who gave the name to Long’s Peak at the West. He was in the engineer service of the United States, and this engine was built to burn anthracite coal.

The Meteor was at once set up in Boston, and started on her experimental trips. It is easy to see how much this would interest the men who had looked forward to her success, and, equally, how much it would interest their sons. The engine-driver was good to my brother and me, and we had the great pleasure of making some of the earliest of her trips with him. I have spoken of the opening of the road to West Newton. I think they must still have there the sign which was put upon Davis’s hotel, representing the engine and car of the period. It ought to be preserved in some historical collection there. Boston roused itself to the new interest, and every afternoon eight cars went out to Newton and back, that people might say they had ridden on the new railroad. Many a straw hat was burned through by the cinders which lighted upon it, and many notions were gained for the future.

What is now called the American system was first tried in the cars built for the Worcester railroad at Worcester, by the founder of the present firm of Bradley. The suggestion was made, I believe, by my father ; he saw very early the difficulty of the old system, in which the conductor ran around on a platform on the outside. I remember, as among the close approaches to death which in any man’s life stand out distinctly, that, when I was in college, I ran after a train on which I was to go to Natick, sprang upon it when in motion, and felt myself falling. I supposed that the last instant of my life had come, while I fell for the first few inches. Then I found myself astride of the long, narrow platform on which I had intended to stand. Risks like this were what all the conductors of the early railroads ran ; and I suppose, indeed, the English guards may have to run them, to a certain extent, to the present day.

The Boston and Worcester station in 1833, and for some time after, was on the ground now occupied by Indiana Street and by Brigham’s milk depot, between Washington Street and Tremont Street. Tremont Street had just been laid out on the level of the salt marshes. It was at the instance of the Worcester railroad that its grade was raised, many years after, and that company was obliged to take the cost of lifting the houses which had been built on the lower level. It is to that change of level that we owe it that the whole South End of Boston is now built on the level above the marsh, instead of being built, as the few houses originally on it were, scarcely above the level of high tide.

VII.

THE WORLD BEYOND BOSTON.

All boys, from the nature of their make-up, are great politicians. The boys of sixty years ago were not unlike boys of to-day in this matter, and, when an election day came around, we were glad to spend as much time as we could at the places where people were voting. Happy the boy to whom some vote-distributer would give a handful of votes, and happier he who could persuade some one to take a ballot from those which he had given to him. This, by the way, was not very long after the time when a certain superstition held in Massachusetts by which every ballot was written. Early in the century, gentlemen interested in an election would call on the women of the family, if they could write well, to write out ballots which could be used at the polls. But I never saw such written ballots.

The separation between Boston and the rest of the world affected a good deal the political combinations. I do not suppose that our present compact system of national political parties could possibly exist without the convenience of the telegraph and the railroad. I should say, historically, that it began in the great convention of young men which was held in the city of Baltimore, in the year 1840, by way of advancing the election of President Harrison. Independent and sovereign as Massachusetts was, in the election of 1836, her National Republicans, as they called themselves, nominated Mr. Webster as candidate for President, though nobody else nominated him, and the electoral votes of Massachusetts were given for him and for Mr. Granger. The leaders of any American party would hesitate before they should make such a separate demonstration now. And this habit of separation shows itself more distinctly in the newspapers of the time.

I have already said that I was a great deal in the printing-office of the Daily Advertiser, which my father edited, as well as in his book-office. He maintained-with care and interest the old system of apprenticeship, and always had one or more bright boys, whom he had taken into his office that they might learn the whole art and mystery of printing and what concerned the publication of a newspaper. One of these young men, to whose counsels and help we boys were largely indebted, still lives, honored in the community where he has been known for many years, as the director of the Barnstable Patriot, — Mr. Sylvanus Phinney. To have a boy a little older than yourself as your comrade in the office, to have him show you what you could handle and what you could not handle, was in itself a piece of education.

Mr. Phinney could perhaps tell better than I can a newspaper story, not of my boyhood, but of girlhood in Boston. In the year 1820, the convention met which revised the constitution of Massachusetts. The Advertiser published the full report of the proceedings, and this report was made up in my father’s workroom, in the lower story of the house in Tremont Street. He was suffering at that time from an accident by which he nearly lost the sight of one of his eyes, and all his writing was done at home by my mother. So it would happen of an evening that the gentlemen most interested in the convention would look in at the house to revise the reports of their own speeches, and perhaps to consult about the work of the next day. Mr. Webster and Judge Story were two of the prominent leaders of that convention. They were on terms of the closest intimacy at our house, and would come in almost every evening for this purpose. Mother would be sitting in the room to do any writing which might be required, and, lest she should be called away to the baby of the time, the baby lay asleep in the cradle while the work of dictation went on. Speeches were made, proofs corrected, baby rocked, and undoubtedly a great deal of the fun of such bright young people passed to and fro with every evening.

Afterwards, in friendly recognition of the hard night-work of the winter, when the convention was well over, and its proceedings were published in a volume which is now one of the cherished nuggets of the collectors, mother had a great cake made for the workmen at the office. She frosted it herself, and dressed it with what in those days they used to call “cockles” of sugar. These cockles generally had little scraps of poor verses, which were supposed to be entertaining. But in this case she had cut out from the proofs the epigrams of the convention debates, and as the apprentices and journeymen ate their cake they found, to their amusement, that the work of their own hands had furnished what were called the mottoes.

The journalist of to-day thinks he is much ahead of the journalist of that time, and in many regards he is; but there were certain excitements which belonged to newspaper life then which do not belong to it now. The day when the Sirius arrived in Boston, the first in the line of Canard vessels which have arrived regularly from that day to this, was one of these exciting days. My father went over in person upon the Sirius, talked with the officers, and came back with English newspapers almost as late as he had ever seen. I say “ almost as late,” because the passage of the Sirius was, I think, twenty days, and we had traditions in the office of rapid runs of Baltimore clippers or other fast vessels which had come over in less time. It was after this that in a winter passage, the Great Western at New York brought news which was thirty-five days later than the latest news which we had from Europe. In earlier times there would be many instances of longer periods when neither continent knew anything of the other.

Under such circumstances, the newspaper editor depended much more upon his foreign correspondent than he does now. The foreign correspondent of today digests news of which he knows the details have already gone by telegraph. He is in some sort a foreign editor, but he does not expect to send the detail of news. And there was an element of chance about the arrival of sailing-vessels which added to the curiosity of your morning paper. In our office, Mr. Ballard, who had the charge of the ship news, might board a vessel below in the harbor, whose captain had no idea that he had brought the latest news. Then this poor captain would be beset to hunt up every newspaper that he had on board. Perhaps he had been so foolish that he had not bought the last paper of the day on which he started. Whether he had or had not, it was the business of the boat which boarded him first to get every paper he had, so that no other paper in town might have a word of his intelligence. Perhaps all these papers arrived at the office but a little while before you went to press ; then it was your business to make the best show you could of the news, and possibly it was your good fortune to be able to say that no other paper had it.

I remember that we had the news of the French Revolution of 1830, which threw Charles X. from the throne, on a Sunday morning. When such things happened, the foreman in the office made up what was really an “Extra” by throwing together, as quickly as he had them in type, a few galleys of the news ; in that case, probably rapidly translated from the French papers. Then these galleys would be struck off on a separate handbill, and such handbills were circulated as “ Extras.” And it is to this habit that the present absurd nomenclature is due by which one buys every day an “ Extra” which is published at a certain definite time. All this is fixed upon my mind, because, when I came home from “meeting” on that particular Sunday, I was told the news that there was another revolution in France, and had the “ Extra ” given me to carry down to Summer Street, where one of my uncles lived. There is a certain picturesqueness about the receipt and delivery of news, when it comes in such out-of-theway fashions, which the boy or girl of to-day finds it hard to understand.

Of course, with type as much as we wanted, and all the other facilities for home printing, we printed our own newspapers. I do not think that at our house we did it so much as boys would to whom the making-up of a newspaper was not a matter of daily observation, involving a good deal of errand-running and other work which was anything hut play. But we older boys had the Fly, which was our newspaper, and my brother Charles, not long after, started the Coon in the midst of the Harrison campaign, which survived for a good many years.

I believe that the last issue of the Fly is that which records the death of Lafayette, in 1836. We had not type enough then to print more than one page at a time. Three pages of the Fly had been printed, and the fourth was still to be set up, when the news of Lafayette’s death arrived. This was too good a paragraph to be lost, and we knew we could anticipate every other paper in Boston by inserting it. But, unfortunately, the n’s had given out. We had turned upside down all the u’s we had, and they also had given out. Also, still more unfortunately for printers in this difficulty, Lafayette had chosen to die of an “ influenza,” which disease was at that moment asserting itself under that name in France. It had not yet been called “ la grippe,” which would have saved us. We succeeded in announcing the death of “ the good, generous, noble Lafayette,” although “generous” needed one n and one u, and “ noble ” took one of the last n’s. The paragraph went on to say that the death was “caused by,” and the last u was devoured by “ caused.” Then came the word “ influenza.” “ The boldest held his breath for a time.” But we were obliged ignominiously to go to press with the statement that his death was “caused by a cold.” This was safe, and required no n and no u. Alas! in the making-up of the form the precious n of the word “ noble ” fell out; and any library which contains a file of the Fly will show that its last statement to the world is that “ the good, generous, oble Lafayette has died ; his death being caused by a cold.” Such are the exigencies of boy printers in all times.

I have gone into detail as to the communications between the people in the country and the people who lived in Boston, in the hope of making the reader feel distinctly the isolation which separated Boston from the vest of the world. That isolation has left its marks on the character of Boston till this day. It explains the amusing cockneyisms of Boston which make other people laugh at us, and a certain arrogance of provincialism which crops out very oddly among people who have sons and daughters in every part of the world, and whose communication is now so free in every direction. “ In the beginning it was not so.” The people of Boston had a very large foreign trade from its origin till comparatively recent times. Now they have a little, and half their population is of a stock which came very recently from Europe. But in the beginning of this century there was very little immigration from Europe. Indeed, what there was was looked upon with a certain distrust. About the time I went to college, or a little later, a society of the most intelligent people in Boston was organized for the express purpose of keeping out foreign “ immigration.” We purists made a battle against that word. Professor Edward Channing would have resented the use of it in a college theme with the same bitterness with which Mr. Webster resented “ in our midst,” — a phrase which, I believe, you may now find in the Atlantic Monthly.² One of the most intelligent gentlemen in Boston was appointed to the business of keeping out immigrants, — a business which can only be compared to Mrs. Partington’s determination to sweep out the tide when it was rising in the English Channel! He had his office on Long Wharf, and wrote and forwarded circulars to Ireland to explain to the people of Ireland that they had better not come to this country. At the same moment, the very people who paid his salary were building up a system of manufacturing and internal improvements which was actually impossible without the immigration which they had appointed him to check.

There was at that time, however, a distinct determination on the part of the Best people in Boston that it should be absolutely a model city. They had Dr. Channing preaching the perfectibility of human nature; they had Dr. Joseph Tuckerman determined that the gospel of Jesus Christ should work its miracles among all sorts and conditions of men; they had a system of public education which they meant to press to its very best; and they had all the money which was needed for anything good. These men subscribed their money with the greatest promptness for any enterprise which promised the elevation of human society.

In speaking of the lecture system, I have already stated their notion that if people only knew what was right they would do what was right. So they founded first the Massachusetts Hospital, then its annex for the insane ; then they made the State contribute to the deafand-dumb asylum in Hartford ; they established their asylum for the blind at South Boston. Indeed, they expected to trample out every human ill, exactly as the most optimistic young medical expert in New York, at the moment when I write these lines, expects to trample out every cholera bacillus who shall present his little head in sight of the lens of the most powerful microscope. What these excellent people might have done, had Boston remained the funny little town it was in the year 1820, I do not know. But it did not remain any such place. The population was then 48,298 ; in 1830 it was 61,392. The increase in ten years is forty-one per cent of the population at the first enumeration, — an increase which would be thought very remarkable in the growth of any old city now. It indicates great prosperity. In the same ten years the population of the city of New York increased from 123,706 to 202,589, an increase of sixtyfour per cent. Such figures should be remembered, by the way, by people who tell us that the present rate of the increase of cities is without precedent.

The growth, though rapid, and on the whole encouraging for the manufacturing system of New England, tended to divert capital to a certain extent from that foreign commerce which had been created and nourished by European wars. So soon as capital placed itself in one or another site of the interior, as Lowell, Manchester, Fall River, Holyoke, and the rest came into existence, so soon, of course, the Boston boy found out that there was a world outside of State Street and Milk Street. And now that Boston capital loves to place itself at any point where capital is needed, between Lockwood’s Cape in 82° north latitude and Terra del Fuego on the outside of the Strait of Magellan, there is no longer an opportunity for a Boston boyhood to be spent in the conditions which surrounded me. These were physically almost the same as those which surrounded the boyhood of Samuel Sewall in the seventeenth century, or Henry Knox in the eighteenth.

Edward Everett Hale.