English public building? Unthinkable! England would have insisted on an
English painter--or, at worst, an American. It is strange that a
community which had the wit to honor itself by employing Puvis de
Chavannes should be equally enthusiastic about the frigid
theatricalities of an E.A. Abbey or the forbidding and opaque intricate
dexterity of a John Sargent in the same building. Or, rather, it is not
strange, for these contradictions are discoverable everywhere in the
patronage of the arts.

It was from the Public Library that some friends and I set out on a
little tour of Boston. Whether we went north, south, east, or west I
cannot tell, for this was one of the few occasions when the extreme
variousness of a city has deprived me definitely of a sense of
direction; but I know that we drove many miles through magnificent
fenny parks, whose roads were reserved to pleasure, and that at length,
after glimpsing famous houses and much of the less centralized wealth
and ease of Boston, we came out upon the shores of the old harbor, and
went into a yacht-club-house with a glorious prospect. Boston has more
book-shops to the acre than any city within my knowledge except Aberdeen
(not North Carolina, but Scotland). Its book-shops, however, are as
naught to its yacht clubs. And for one yacht club I personally would
sacrifice many book-shops. It was an exciting moment in my life when,
after further wandering on and off coast roads, and through curving,
cobbled, rackety streets, and between thunderous tram-cars and under
deafening elevated lines, I was permitted to enter the celestial and
calm precincts of the Boston Yacht Club itself, which overlooks another
harbor. The acute and splendid nauticality of this club, all fashioned
out of an old warehouse, stamps Boston as a city which has comprehended
the sea. I saw there the very wheel of the _Spray_, the cockboat in
which the regretted Slocum wafted himself round the world! I sat in an