Boston is, in its way, as prolific of contrasts as any part of the United States.  There is certainly no more cultivated centre in the country, and yet the letter r is as badly maltreated by the Boston scholar as by the veriest cockney.  To the ear of Boston centre has precisely the same sound as the name of the heroine of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” and its most cultivated graduates speak of Herbert Spenc_ah_’s Data_r_ of Ethics.  The critical programmes of the Symphony Concerts are prepared by one of the ablest of living musical critics, and are scholarly almost to excess; yet, as the observant Swiss critic, M. Wagniere, has pointed out, their refined and subtle text has to endure the immediate juxtaposition of the advertisements of tea-rooms and glove-sellers.  Boston has the deserved reputation of being one of the best-governed cities in America, yet some of its important streets seldom see a municipal watering-cart, dust flies in clouds both summer and winter, and myriads of life-endangering bicycles shoot through its thoroughfares at night without lamps.  The Boston matron holds up her hands in sanctified horror at the freedom of Western manners, and yet it is a local saying, founded on a solid basis of fact, that Kenney & Clark (a well-known firm of livery-stable keepers) are the only chaperon that a Boston girl needs in going to or from a ball.  The Bostonians are not the least intelligent of mortals, and yet I know no other city in America which is content with such an anomalous system of hack hire, where no reduction in rate is made for the number of persons.  One person may drive in a comfortable two-horse brougham to any point within Boston proper for 50 cents; two persons pay $1, three persons $1.50, and so on.  My advice to a quartette of travellers visiting Boston is to hire four carriages at once and go in a procession, until they find a liveryman who sees the point.

One acute observer has pointed out that it is the men of New York who grow haggard, wrinkled, anxious-looking, and prematurely old in their desperate efforts to provide diamonds and balls and Worth costumes and trips to Europe for their debonair, handsome, easy-going, and well-nourished spouses and daughters; while the men of Boston are “jolly dogs, who make money by legitimate trade instead of wild speculation, and show it in their countenances, illumined with the light of good cigars and champagne and other little luxuries,” while their womankind are constantly worried by the New England conscience, and constantly creating anxieties for themselves where none exist.  There is indeed a large amount of truth in this description, if allowance be made for pardonable exaggeration.  It is among the women of Boston that one finds its traditional mantle of intellectuality worn most universally, and it is among the women of New York that one finds the most characteristic displays of love of pleasure and social triumphs.  It is, perhaps, not a mere accident that the daughters of Boston’s millionaires seem to marry their fellow-citizens rather than foreign noblemen.  “None of their money goes to gild rococo coronets.”