The town has one charm to me, which it shares in common with Baltimore.  Not only is it built on undulating ground, but there are old parts remaining, whereby the eye is relieved from the tiring monotony of broad and straight streets, while the newer parts form a pleasing variety, and bear gratifying evidence of the increasing wealth of its intelligent and industrious population.  Then, again, the neighbourhood of the town has a charm for a wanderer from the old country; the roads are excellent, the fields and gardens are tidied up, creepers are led up the cottage walls, suburban villas abound, everything looks more clean, more soigne, more snug, more filled and settled than the neighbourhood of any other city I visited in America, and thus forces back upon the mind associations and reflections of dear old home.

Having enjoyed a visit to a friend in one of the suburban villas inland, to which he drove me in his light waggon, another vehicular cicerone insisted that I should drive out to his uncle’s, and spend a day at his marine villa, about twelve miles distant.  I joyfully assented to so pleasant a proposition, and, “hitching a three-forty before a light waggon”—­as the term is in America—­we were soon bowling away merrily along a capital road.  A pleasant drive of nine miles brought us to a little town called Lynn, after Lynn Regis in England, from which place some of the early settlers came.  How often has the traveller to regret the annihilation of the wild old Indian names, and the substitution of appellatives from every creek and corner of the older continents; with Poquanum, Sagamore, Wenepoykin, with Susquehanna, Wyoming, Miami, and a thousand other such of every length and sound, all cut-and-dried to hand, it is more than a pity to see so great a country plagiarizing in such a wholesale manner Pekins, Cantons, Turing, Troys, Carmels, Emmauses, Cairos, and a myriad other such borrowed plumes, plucked from Europe, Asia, and Africa, and hustled higgledy-piggledy side by side, without a single element or association to justify the uncalled-for robbery.

Forgive me, reader,—­all this digression comes from my wishing Lynn had kept its old Indian name of Saugus; from such little acorns will such great oak-trees spring.—­To resume.  The said town of Lynn supplies understandings to a very respectable number of human beings, and may be called a gigantic shoemaker’s shop, everything being on the gigantic scale in America.  It employs 11,000, out of its total population of 14,000, in that trade, and produces annually nearly 5,000,000 of women’s and children’s boots, shoes, and gaiters, investing in the business a capital amounting to 250,000l.  Moses and Son, Hyam and Co., Nicoll and Co., and the whole of the three-halfpence-a-shirt-paying capitalists, can show nothing like my shoemakers’ shop, “fix it how you will,”—­as they say in the Great Republic.