The houses on the principal residence streets of Richmond are not built in such close ranks as Boston houses; they have more elbow-room; numbers of them have yards and gardens; and there is not about Richmond houses the Bostonian insistence upon red brick; nevertheless many houses of both cities give off the same suggestion of having long been lived in by the descendants of their builders.  So, too, though the Capitol at Richmond has little architectural resemblance to Boston’s gold-domed State House—­the former having been copied by Thomas Jefferson from the Maison Carree at Nimes, and being a better building than the Massachusetts State House, and better placed—­the two do, nevertheless, suggest each other in their gray granite solidity.

It is perhaps in the quality of solidity—­architectural, commercial, social, even spiritual—­that Richmond and Boston are most alike.  Substantialness, conservatism, tradition, and prosperity rest like gray mantles over both.

Broad Street in Richmond is two or three times as wide as Granby Street, Norfolk’s chief shopping street, and for this reason, doubtless, its traffic seems less, though I believe it is in fact greater.  A fine street to look upon at night, with its long, even rows of clustered boulevard lights, and its bright windows, Broad Street in the daytime is a disappointment, because, for all its fine spaciousness, it lacks good buildings.  I must confess, too, that I was disappointed in the appearance of the women in the shopping crowds on Broad Street; for, as every one knows, Richmond has been famous for its beauties.  In vain I looked for young women fitted to inherit the debutante mantles of such nationally celebrated beauties as Miss Irene Langhorne (Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson), Miss May Handy (Mrs. James Brown Potter), Miss Lizzie Bridges (Mrs. Hobson), and Miss Sally Bruce (Mrs. Arthur B. Kinsolving).

In the ten years between 1900 and 1910 the population of Richmond increased 50 per cent.  Her population by the last census was about 130,000, of which a third is colored.  Norfolk’s population is about 70,000, with approximately the same percentage of negroes.  In both cities there is much new building—­offices downtown, and pretty new brick homes in outlying suburban tracts.  Likewise, in both, the charming signs of other days are here and there to be seen.

Richmond is again like its ancient enemy, Boston, in the wealth of its historical associations, and I know of no city which gives the respectful heed to its own history that Richmond does, and no State which in this matter equals the State of Virginia.  If Richmond was the center of the South during the Civil War, Capitol Square was, as it is to-day, the center of that center.  In this square, in the shadow of Jefferson’s beautiful classic capitol building, which has the glowing gray tone of one of those water colors done on tinted paper by Jules Guerin, Confederate soldiers were mustered into service under