actical expression which
marks pure intellectuality; an alert matron, plainly, almost shabbily,
dressed (aristocratic Boston still scorns sartorial smartness); a very
well-bred young girl with bone spectacles; a student, shabby, like the
Back Bay matron, but for another reason; a writer; a business man whose
hobby is Washingtonia. These, all of them, you may enjoy along with your
cup of tea for three cents, if--and here is the crux--you can only be
admitted in the first place. And if you are admitted, do not fail to
look out of the rear windows upon the ancient Granary Burying Ground,
where rest the ashes of Hancock, Sewall, Faneuil, Samuel Adams, Otis,
Revere, and many more notables. If you have a penchant for graveyards,
this one, entered from Tremont Street, is more than worthy of further
study.

This is one of the many things we could enjoyably do if we had time, but
whether we have time or not we must pay our respects to the State House
(one does not call it the Capitol in Boston, as in other cities), the
prominence of whose golden dome is not unsuggestive, to those who recall
it, of Saint Botolph's beacon tower in Boston, England, for which this
city was named. The State House is a distinctively American building,
and Bulfinch, the great American architect, did an excellent thing when
he designed it. The dome was originally covered with plates of copper
rolled by no other than that expert silversmith and robust patriot, Paul
Revere--he whose midnight ride has been recited by so many generations
of school-children, and whose exquisite flagons, cups, ladles, and sugar
tongs not only compared with the best Continental work of that period,
but have set a name and standard for American craftsmanship ever since.

If you should walk up and down the chessboard of Beacon Hill--taking the
knight's move occasionally across the narrow cross-streets--you could
not help treading the very squares which were familiar to the feet of
that generation of authors which has permanently stamped American
literature. At 55 Beacon Street, down near the foot of the hill and
facing the Common, still stands the handsome, swell-front, buff-brick
house where Prescott, the historian, lived. On Mount Vernon Street
(which runs parallel to Beacon, and which, with its dignified beauty,
won the approval of that connoisseur of beautiful streets--Henry James)
one can pick out successively the numbers 59, 76, 83, 84, the first and
last being homes of T