Washington, and Beacon Streets. It has a Common and a
Frog-pond, and many sprightly squirrels. Its streets are
straight, and cross each other like lines on a chess-board.
It has a state-house, which is the finest edifice in the world
or out of it. It has one church, the Old South, which was
built, as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of
Emancipation was issued. It has one bookstore, a lofty and
imposing pile, of the Egyptian style (and date) of
architecture, on the corner of Washington and School Streets.
It has one magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly," one daily
newspaper, the "Boston Journal," one religious weekly, the
"Congregationalist," and one orator, whose name is Train, a
model of chaste, compact, and classic elegance. In politics,
it was a Webster Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down,
when it fell apart waited for something to turn up,--which
proved to be drafting. Boston is called the Athens of America.
Its men are solid. Its women wear their bonnets to bed, their
nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner. I spent two
hours and half in Boston, and I know.

We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale. Summer lay
on the shining hills, and scattered benedictions. Plenty
smiled up from a thousand fertile fields. Patient oxen, with
their soft, deep eyes, trod heavily over mines of greater than
Indian wealth. Kindly cows stood in the grateful shade of
cathedral elms, and gave thanks to God in their dumb, fumbling
way. Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the plains, little
lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them, and
no premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor
any misgiving of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday.