As to the ordinary borrowing and returning of books, the poorest laborer’s child in Boston might be trusted as honest; but when a question of trade came up—­of commercial competition—­then the librarian was bound to bethink himself that his countrymen are very smart.  “I hope,” said the librarian, “you will let them know in England how grateful we are for their present.”  And I hereby execute that librarian’s commission.

I shall always look back to social life in Boston with great pleasure.  I met there many men and women whom to know is a distinction, and with whom to be intimate is a great delight.  It was a Puritan city, in which strict old Roundhead sentiments and laws used to prevail; but now-a-days ginger is hot in the mouth there, and, in spite of the war, there were cakes and ale.  There was a law passed in Massachusetts in the old days that any girl should be fined and imprisoned who allowed a young man to kiss her.  That law has now, I think, fallen into abeyance, and such matters are regulated in Boston much as they are in other large towns farther eastward.  It still, I conceive, calls itself a Puritan city; but it has divested its Puritanism of austerity, and clings rather to the politics and public bearing of its old fathers than to their social manners and pristine severity of intercourse.  The young girls are, no doubt, much more comfortable under the new dispensation—­and the elderly men also, as I fancy.  Sunday, as regards the outer streets, is sabbatical.  But Sunday evenings within doors I always found to be what my friends in that country call “quite a good time.”  It is not the thing in Boston to smoke in the streets during the day; but the wisest, the sagest, and the most holy—­even those holy men whom the lecturer saw around him—­ seldom refuse a cigar in the dining-room as soon as the ladies have gone.  Perhaps even the wicked weed would make its appearance before that sad eclipse, thereby postponing or perhaps absolutely annihilating the melancholy period of widowhood to both parties, and would light itself under the very eyes of those who in sterner cities will lend no countenance to such lightings.  Ah me, it was very pleasant!  I confess I like this abandonment of the stricter rules of the more decorous world.  I fear that there is within me an aptitude to the milder debaucheries which makes such deviations pleasant.  I like to drink and I like to smoke, but I do not like to turn women out of the room.  Then comes the question whether one can have all that one likes together.  In some small circles in New England I found people simple enough to fancy that they could.  In Massachusetts the Maine liquor law is still the law of the land, but, like that other law to which I have alluded, it has fallen very much out of use.  At any rate, it had not reached the houses of the gentlemen with whom I had the pleasure of making acquaintance.  But here I must guard myself from being misunderstood.