t so respectable an
aspect, are buildings rising close to each other, inhabited by the poorer
class, whose families are huddled together without sufficient space and
air, and here it is that Boston poverty hides itself. You are more
fortunate on your island, that your population can extend itself
horizontally, instead of heaping itself up, as we have begun to do here."

The first place which we could call pleasant after leaving Boston was
Andover, where Stuart and Woods, now venerable with years, instruct the
young orthodox ministers and missionaries of New England. It is prettily
situated among green declivities. A little beyond, at North Andover, we
came in sight of the roofs and spires of the new city of Lawrence, which
already begin to show proudly on the sandy and sterile banks of the
Merrimac, a rapid and shallow river. A year ago last February, the
building of the city was begun; it has now five or six thousand
inhabitants, and new colonists are daily thronging in. Brick kilns are
smoking all over the country to supply materials for the walls of the
dwellings. The place, I was told, astonishes visitors with its bustle and
confusion. The streets are encumbered with heaps of fresh earth, and
piles of stone, brick, beams, and boards, and people can with difficulty
hear each other speak, for the constant thundering of hammers, and the
shouts of cartmen and wagoners urging their oxen and horses with their
loads through the deep sand of the ways. "Before the last shower," said a
passenger, "you could hardly see the city from this spot, on account of
the cloud of dust that hung perpetually over it."

"Rome," says the old adage, "was not built in a day," but here is a city
which, in respect of its growth, puts Rome to shame. The Romulus of this
new city, who like the Latian of old, gives his name to the community of
which he is the founder, is Mr. Abbot Lawrence, of Boston, a rich
manufacturer, money-making and munificent, and more fortunate in building
cities and endowing schools, than in foretelling political events. He is
the modern Amphion, to the sound of whose music, the pleasant chink of
dollars gathered in many a goodly dividend, all the stones which form the
foundation of this Thebes dance into their places,

"And half the mountain rolls into a wall."

Beyond Lawrence, in the state of New Hampshire, the train stopped a moment
at Exeter, which those who delight in such comparisons might call the Eton
of New En