Halicarnassus, who, though fertile in evil conceptions, lacks nerve to put them into execution, was somewhat startled at this sudden change of base.  He had no idea that I should really act upon his suggestion, but I did.  I bundled the sugar into my pocket with a grim satisfaction; and Halicarnassus paid his thirty cents, looking—­and feeling, as he afterwards told me—­as if a policeman’s gripe were on his shoulders.  If any restaurant in Boston recollects having been astonished at any time during the summer of 1862 by an unaccountably empty sugar-bowl, I take this occasion to explain the phenomenon.  I gave the sugar afterwards to a little beggar-girl, with a dime for a brace of lemons, and shook off the dust of my feet against Boston at the “B. & W.R.R.D.”

Boston is a beautiful city, situated on a peninsula at the head of Massachusetts Bay.  It has three streets:  Cornhill, Washington, and Beacon Streets.  It has a Common and a Frog-Pond, and many sprightly squirrels.  Its streets are straight and cross each other like lines on a chess-board.  It has a State-House which is the finest edifice in the world or out of it.  It has one church, the Old South, which was built, as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued.  It has one bookstore, a lofty and imposing pile, of the Egyptian style (and date) of architecture, on the corner of Washington and School Streets.  It has one magazine, the “Atlantic Monthly,” one daily newspaper, the “Boston Journal,” one religious weekly, the “Congregationalist,” and one orator, whose name is Train, a model of chaste, compact, and classic elegance.  In politics, it was a Webster Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down, when it fell apart and waited for something to turn up,—­which proved to be drafting.  Boston is called the Athens of America.  Its men are solid.  Its women wear their bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner.  I spent two hours and a half in Boston, and I know.

We had a royal progress from Boston to Fontdale.  Summer lay on the shining hills and scattered benedictions.  Plenty smiled up from a thousand fertile fields.  Patient oxen, with their soft, deep eyes, trod heavily over mines of greater than Indian wealth.  Kindly cows stood in the grateful shade of cathedral elms, and gave thanks to God in their dumb, fumbling way.  Motherly, sleepy, stupid sheep lay on the plains, little lambs rollicked out their short-lived youth around them, and no premonition floated over from the adjoining pea-patch, nor any misgiving of approaching mutton marred their happy heyday.  Straight through the piny forests, straight past the vocal orchards, right in among the robins and the jays and the startled thrushes, we dashed inexorable, and made harsh dissonance in the wild-wood orchestra; but not for that was the music hushed, nor did one color fade.  Brooks leaped in headlong chase down the furrowed sides of gray old rocks, and glided whispering beneath the sorrowful