them. There were girls, too, but not pretty ones, nor, on the whole,
such good imitations of gentility as the young men. There were as many
people as are usually collected at a muster, or on similar occasions,
lounging about, without any apparent enjoyment; but the observation of
this may serve me to make a sketch of the mode of spending the Sabbath by
the majority of unmarried, young, middling-class people, near a great
town. Most of the people had smart canes and bosom-pins.

Crossing the ferry into Boston, we went to the City Tavern, where the
bar-room presented a Sabbath scene of repose,--stage-folk lounging in
chairs half asleep, smoking cigars, generally with clean linen and other
niceties of apparel, to mark the day. The doors and blinds of an oyster
and refreshment shop across the street were closed, but I saw people
enter it. There were two owls in a back court, visible through a
window of the bar-room,--speckled gray, with dark-blue eyes,--the
queerest-looking birds that exist,--so solemn and wise,--dozing away the
day, much like the rest of the people, only that they looked wiser than
any others. Their hooked beaks looked like hooked noses. A dull scene
this. A stranger, here and there, poring over a newspaper. Many of the
stage-folk sitting in chairs on the pavement, in front of the door.

We went to the top of the hill which formed part of Gardiner Greene's
estate, and which is now in the process of levelling, and pretty much
taken away, except the highest point, and a narrow path to ascend to it.
It gives an admirable view of the city, being almost as high as the
steeples and the dome of the State House, and overlooking the whole mass
of brick buildings and slated roofs, with glimpses of streets far below.
It was really a pity to take it down. I noticed the stump of a very
large elm, recently felled. No house in the city could have reared its
roof so high as the roots of that tree, if indeed the church-spires did