brilliantly lighted from within; and when, if it is a dark, warm night,
and the briny fragrance comes up strong from the falling tide, the lights
reflected far down in the still water, bring a dream, as I have heard
travelled Bostonians say, of Venice and her magical effects in the same
kind. But for me the beauty of the scene needs the help of no such
association; I am content with it for what it is. I enjoy also the hints
of spring which one gets in riding over the Long Bridge at low tide in the
first open days. Then there is not only a vernal beating of carpets on the
piers of the drawbridge, but the piles and walls left bare by the receding
water show green patches of sea-weeds and mosses, and flatter the willing
eye with a dim hint of summer. This reeking and saturated herbage--which
always seems to me, in contrast with dry land growths, what the water-
logged life of seafaring folk is to that which we happier men lead on
shore,--taking so kindly the deceitful warmth and brightness of the sun,
has then a charm which it loses when summer really comes; nor does one,
later, have so keen an interest in the men wading about in the shallows
below the bridge, who, as in the distance they stoop over to gather
whatever shell-fish they seek, make a very fair show of being some
ungainlier sort of storks, and are as near as we can hope to come to the
spring-prophesying storks of song and story. A sentiment of the drowsiness
that goes before the awakening of the year, and is so different from the
drowsiness that precedes the great autumnal slumber, is in the air, but is
gone when we leave the river behind, and strike into the straggling
village beyond.

I maintain that Boston, as one approaches it and passingly takes in the
line of Bunker Hill Monument, soaring preeminent among the emulous
foundry-chimneys of the sister city, is fine enough to need no comparison
with other fine sights. Thanks to the mansard curves and dormer-windows of
the newer houses, there is a singularly picturesque variety among the