The warnings continued after my arrival.  I was informed by I don’t know how many persons that Boston was “a circular city,” with a topography calculated to puzzle the simple.  This was true.  I usually go about in strange places with a map, but I found the map of Boston even more complex than the city it sought to explain.  If I did not lose myself, it was because I never trusted myself alone; other people lost me.

Within an hour or so I had been familiarized by Bostonians with a whole series of apparently stock jokes concerning and against Boston, such as that one hinging on the phrase “cold roast Boston,” and that other one about the best thing in Boston being the five o’clock train to New York (I do not vouch for the hour of departure).  Even in Cambridge, a less jocular place, a joke seemed to be immanent, to the effect that though you could always tell a Harvard man, you could not tell him much.

[Illustration:  UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL]

Matters more serious awaited me.  An old resident of Boston took me out for privacy onto the Common and whispered in my ear:  “This is the most snobbish city in the whole world.  There is no real democracy here.  The first thing people do when they get to know you is to show you their family tree and prove that they came over in the Mayflower.”  And so he ran on, cursing Boston up hill and down dale.  Nevertheless, he was very proud of his Boston.  Had I agreed with the condemnation, he might have thrown me into the artificial brook.  Another great Bostonian expert, after leading me on to admit that I had come in order to try to learn the real Boston, turned upon me with ferocious gaiety, thus:  “You will not learn the real Boston.  You cannot.  The real Boston is the old Back Bay folk, who gravitate eternally between Beacon Street and State Street and the Somerset Club, and never go beyond.  They confuse New England with the created universe, and it is impossible that you should learn them.  Nobody could learn them in less than twenty years’ intense study and research.”

Cautioned, and even intimidated, I thought it would be safest just to take Boston as Boston came, respectfully but casually.  And as the hospitality of Boston was prodigious, splendid, unintermittent, and most delightfully unaffected, I had no difficulty whatever in taking Boston as she came.  And my impressions began to emerge, one after another, from the rich and cloudy confusion of novel sensations.

What primarily differentiates Boston from all the other cities I saw is this:  It is finished; I mean complete.  Of the other cities, while admitting their actual achievement, one would say, and their own citizens invariably do say, “They will be ...”  Boston is.