ended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about
the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper
which never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny
heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its
clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it
had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough
simply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed
my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day
passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless
first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great
sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed
for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of
literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat's publisher in
the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and
that made a whole world's difference.




XII.

The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,
which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I
suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic.
Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long
leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or
seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied
domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did
not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in
our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat's tea table the