and the common footway of the towns-people seems to lie to and fro across it.  It is paved, according to English custom, with flat tombstones; and there are also raised, or altar-tombs, some of which have armorial bearings on them.  One clergyman has caused himself and his wife to be buried right in the middle of the stone-bordered path that traverses the church-yard; so that not an individual of the thousands who pass along this public way can help trampling over him or her.  The scene, nevertheless, was very cheerful in the morning sun:  people going about their business in the day’s primal freshness, which was just as fresh here as in younger villages; children, with milk-pails, loitering over the burial-stones; school-boys playing leap-frog with the altar-tombs; the simple old town preparing itself for the day, which would be like myriads of other days that had passed over it, but yet would be worth living through.  And down on the church-yard, where were buried many generations whom it remembered in their time, looked the stately tower of Saint Botolph; and it was good to see and think of such an age-long giant, intermarrying the present epoch with a distant past, and getting quite imbued with human nature by being so immemorially connected with men’s familiar knowledge and homely interests.  It is a noble tower; and the jackdaws evidently have pleasant homes in their hereditary nests among its topmost windows, and live delightful lives, flitting and cawing about its pinnacles and flying-buttresses.  I should almost like to be a jackdaw myself, for the sake of living up there.

In front of the church, not more than twenty yards off, and with a low brick wall between, flows the River Witham.  On the hither bank a fisherman was washing his boat; and another skiff, with her sail lazily half-twisted, lay on the opposite strand.  The stream, at this point, is about of such width, that, if the tall tower were to tumble over flat on its face, its top-stone might perhaps reach to the middle of the channel.  On the farther shore there is a line of antique-looking houses, with roofs of red tile, and windows opening out of them,—­some of these dwellings being so ancient, that the Reverend Mr. Cotton, subsequently our first Boston minister, must have seen them with his own bodily eyes, when he used to issue from the front-portal after service.  Indeed, there must be very many houses here, and even some streets, that bear much the aspect that they did when the Puritan divine paced solemnly among them.

In our rambles about town, we went into a bookseller’s shop to inquire if he had any description of Boston for sale.  He offered me (or, rather, produced for inspection, not supposing that I would buy it) a quarto history of the town, published by subscription, nearly forty years ago.  The bookseller showed himself a well-informed and affable man, and a local antiquary, to whom a party of inquisitive strangers were a godsend.  He had met with several Americans,