ese hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston,--that it is
the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet.

--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a little
mischievously.

Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I 'm
past that! There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in Boston,
from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it tore
into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't thought very
indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of
commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as often as
this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come over it.--No,
Sir,--show me any other place that is, or was since the megalosaurus has
died out, where wealth and social influence are so fairly divided between
the stationary and the progressive classes! Show me any other place
where every other drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with
papas and mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the
"dry pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!

--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said the
young Marylander, good-naturedly.--But I suppose you can't forgive it for
always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of numbers,--tell the
truth now. Are we not the centre of something?

Ah, indeed, to be sure you are. You are the gastronomic metropolis of
the Union. Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
Washington column? Why don't you get that lady off from Battle Monument
and plant a terrapin in her place? Why will you ask for other glories
when you have soft crabs? No, Sir,--you live too well to think as hard
as we do in Boston. Logic comes to us with the salt-fish of Cape Ann;
rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but you--if you open your
mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat oyster, or offers a slice
of the breast of your divine bird, and silences all your aspirations.

And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.

Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;
--Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
Moyamensing hose-company, an