content."
--TOUCHSTONE.

Two comrades and travelers, who sought a better country than the
United States in the month of August, found themselves one
evening in apparent possession of the ancient town of Boston.

The shops were closed at early candle-light; the fashionable
inhabitants had retired into the country, or into the
second-story-back, of their princely residences, and even an air of
tender gloom settled upon the Common. The streets were almost empty,
and one passed into the burnt district, where the scarred ruins and
the uplifting piles of new brick and stone spread abroad under the
flooding light of a full moon like another Pompeii, without any
increase in his feeling of tranquil seclusion. Even the news-offices
had put up their shutters, and a confiding stranger could nowhere buy
a guide-book to help his wandering feet about the reposeful city, or
to show him how to get out of it. There was, to be sure, a cheerful
tinkle of horse-car bells in the air, and in the creeping vehicles
which created this levity of sound were a few lonesome passengers on
their way to Scollay's Square; but the two travelers, not having
well-regulated minds, had no desire to go there. What would have
become of Boston if the great fire had reached this sacred point of
pilgrimage no merely human mind can imagine. Without it, I suppose
the horse-cars would go continually round and round, never stopping,
until the cars fell away piecemeal on the track, and the horses
collapsed into a mere mass of bones and harness, and the
brown-covered books from the Public Library, in the hands of the
fading virgins who carried them, had accumulated fines to an
incalculable amount.

Boston, notwithstanding its partial destruction by fire, is still a
good place to start from. When one meditates an excursion into an
unknown and perhaps perilous land, where the flag will not protect
him and the greenback will only partially support him, he likes to
steady and tranquilize his mind by a peaceful halt and a serene
start. So we--for the intelligent reader has already identified us
with the two travelers resolved to spend the last night, before
beginning our journey, in the quiet of a Boston hotel. Some people
go into the country for quiet: we knew better. The country is no
place for sleep. The general absence of sound which prevails at
night is only a sort of background which brings out more vividly the
special and unexpecte