BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON


At a former period the writer of this had the fortune to serve his country
in an Italian city whose great claim upon the world's sentimental interest
is the fact that--

"The sea is in her broad, her narrow streets
Ebbing and flowing,"

and that she has no ways whatever for hoofs or wheels. In his quality of
United States official, he was naturally called upon for information
concerning the estates of Italians believed to have emigrated early in the
century to Buenos Ayres, and was commissioned to learn why certain persons
in Mexico and Brazil, and the parts of Peru, had not, if they were still
living, written home to their friends. On the other hand, he was intrusted
with business nearly as pertinent and hopeful by some of his own
countrymen, and it was not quite with surprise that he one day received a
neatly lithographed circular with his name and address written in it,
signed by a famous projector of such enterprises, asking him to cooperate
for the introduction of horse-railroads in Venice. The obstacles to the
scheme were of such a nature that it seemed hardly worth while even to
reply to the circular; but the proposal was one of those bold flights of
imagination which forever lift objects out of vulgar association. It has
cast an enduring, poetic charm even about the horse-car in my mind, and I
naturally look for many unprosaic aspects of humanity there. I have an