w, they carefully give a city air to their villages by crowding the
few stores and houses of which they are composed into the likeliest
appearance of an absolute scarcity of space.

They labor unconsciously to look crowded, and would sooner go into a
cellar to eat their oysters than have them in the finest saloon above
ground. And so, if a peninsula like Boston, or a miniature Mesopotamia
like New York, or a basin like Cincinnati, could be found to tuck away
a town in, in which there was a decent chance of covering over the
nakedness of the land within a thousand years, they rejoiced to seize
on it and warm their shivering imaginations in the idea of the possible
snugness which their distant posterity might enjoy.

Boston owes its only park worth naming--the celebrated Common--to
the necessity of leaving a convenient cow-pasture for the babes and
sucklings of that now mature community. Forty acres were certainly
never more fortunately situated for their predestined service, nor more
providentially rescued for the higher uses of man. May the memory of the
weaning babes who pleaded for the spot where their "milky mothers" fed
be ever sacred in our Athens, and may the cows of Boston be embalmed
with the bulls of Egypt! A white heifer should be perpetually grazing,
at her tether, in the shadow of the Great Elm. Would it be wholly
unbecoming one born in full view of that lovely inclosure to suggest
that the straightness of the lines in which the trees are planted on
Boston Common, and the rapidly increasing thickness of their foliage,
destroy in the summer season the effect of breadth and liberty, hide
both the immediate and the distant landscape, stifle the breeze, and
diminish the attractiveness of the spot? Fewer trees, scattered in
clumps and paying little regard to paths, would vastly improve the
effect. The colonnades of the malls furnish all the shade desirable in
so small an inclosure.

For the most part, the proper laying-out of cities is both a matter of
greater ease and greater importance in America than anywhere else. We
are much in the condition of those old Scriptural worthies, of whom it
could be so coolly said, "So he went and built a city," as if it were
a matter of not much greater account than "So be went and built a
log-house." Very likely some of those Biblical cities, extemporized
so tersely, were not much more finished than those we now and then
encounter in our Western and Southern tours, where a po