hese
degenerate days, does not seem to play so important a part in her
society. The names one constantly hears or sees in New York are names
like Astor, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Bradley-Martin, names which,
whatever other qualities they connote, stand first and foremost for
mere crude wealth. In Boston the prominent public names--the names
that naturally occur to my mind as I think of Boston as I saw it--are
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet and novelist; Eliot, the college
president; Francis Walker, the political economist; Higginson, the
generous cultivator of classical music; Robert Treat Paine, the
philanthropist; Edward Everett Hale; and others of a more or less
similar class. Again, in New York and in Chicago (Pullman, Marshall
Field, Armour) the prominent names are emphatically men of to-day and
seem to change with each generation. In Boston we have the names of
the first governor and other leaders of the early settlers still
shining in their descendants with almost undiminished lustre. The
present mayor of Boston, for example, is a member of a family the name
of which has been illustrious in the city's annals for two hundred
years. He is the fifth of his name in the direct line to gain fame in
the public service, and the third to occupy the mayor's chair. No less
than sixteen immediate members of the family are recorded in the
standard biographical dictionaries of America.

While doubtless the Attic tales of Boeotian dulness were at least as
often well invented as true, it is perhaps the case that there is
generally some ground for the popular caricatures of any given
community. I duly discounted the humorous and would-be humorous
stories of Boston's pedantry that I heard in New York, and found that
as a rule I had done right so to do. Blue spectacles are not more
prominent in Boston than elsewhere; its theatres do not make a
specialty of Greek plays; the little boys do not petition the
Legislature for an increase in the hours of school. There yet remains,
however, a basis of truth quite large enough to show the observer how
the reputation was acquired. It is a solemn fact that what would
appear in England as "No spitting allowed in this car" is translated
in the electric cars of Boston into: "The Board of Health hereby
adjudges that the deposit of sputum in street-cars is a public
nuisance."[28] The framer of this announcement would undoubtedly speak
of the limbs of a piano and allude to a spade as an agricult