on the corner, in
promiscuous flirtation with the cock-eyed youths of the neighborhood,
unconsciously revealed to me the eternal secrets of adolescence. My
neighbor of the third floor, who sat on the curbstone with the scabby
baby in her bedraggled lap, had things to say about the fine ladies
who came in carriages to inspect the public bathhouse across the
street that ought to be repeated in the lecture halls of every school
of philanthropy. Instruction poured into my brain at such a rate that
I could not digest it all at the time; but in later years, when my
destiny had led me far from Dover Street, the emphatic moral of those
lessons became clear. The memory of my experience on Dover Street
became the strength of my convictions, the illumined index of my
purpose, the aureola of my happiness. And if I paid for those lessons
with days of privation and dread, with nights of tormenting anxiety, I
count the price cheap. Who would not go to a little trouble to find
out what life is made of? Life in the slums spins busily as a
schoolboy's top, and one who has heard its humming never forgets. I
look forward to telling, when I get to be a master of language, what I
read in the crooked cobblestones when I revisited Dover Street the
other day.

Dover Street was never really my residence--at least, not the whole of
it. It happened to be the nook where my bed was made, but I inhabited
the City of Boston. In the pearl-misty morning, in the ruby-red
evening, I was empress of all I surveyed from the roof of the tenement
house. I could point in any direction and name a friend who would
welcome me there. Off towards the northwest, in the direction of
Harvard Bridge, which some day I should cross on my way to Radcliffe
College, was one of my favorite palaces, whither I resorted every day
after school.

A low, wide-spreading building with a dignified granite front it was,
flanked on all sides by noble old churches, museums, and
school-houses, harmoniously disposed around a spacious triangle,
called Copley Square. Two thoroughfares that came straight from the
green suburbs swept by my palace, one on either side, converged at the
apex of the triangle, and pointed off, past the Public Garden, across
the historic Common, to the domed State House sitting on a height.

It was my habit to go very slowly up the low, broad steps to the
palace entrance, pleasing my eyes with the majestic lines of the
building, and lingering to read again the