down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping and
being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away, according to
the programme.

Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
himself. It takes him a good while; but he will come all right
by-and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!

A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
'em for wash-basins! A new race, and a whole new world for the new-born
human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any
time these 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 Little Boston,--I'm past
that! There isn'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 wasn'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