Rhode Island, as I have said, has all the attributes of government in common with her stouter and more famous sisters.  She has a governor, and an upper house and a lower house of legislature; and she is somewhat fantastic in the use of these constitutional powers, for she calls on them to sit now in one town and now in another.  Providence is the capital of the State; but the Rhode Island parliament sits sometimes at Providence and sometimes at Newport.  At stated times also it has to collect itself at Bristol, and at other stated times at Kingston, and at others at East Greenwich.  Of all legislative assemblies it is the most peripatetic.  Universal suffrage does not absolutely prevail in this State, a certain property qualification being necessary to confer a right to vote even for the State representatives.  I should think it would be well for all parties if the whole State could be swallowed up by Massachusetts or by Connecticut, either of which lie conveniently for the feat; but I presume that any suggestion of such a nature would be regarded as treason by the men of Providence Plantation.

We returned back to Boston by Attleborough, a town at which, in ordinary times, the whole population is supported by the jewelers’ trade.  It is a place with a specialty, upon which specialty it has thriven well and become a town.  But the specialty is one ill adapted for times of war and we were assured that the trade was for the present at an end.  What man could now-a-days buy jewels, or even what woman, seeing that everything would be required for the war?  I do not say that such abstinence from luxury has been begotten altogether by a feeling of patriotism.  The direct taxes which all Americans will now be called on to pay, have had and will have much to do with such abstinence.  In the mean time the poor jewelers of Attleborough have gone altogether to the wall.

CHAPTER III.

MAINE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, AND VERMONT.

Perhaps I ought to assume that all the world in England knows that that portion of the United States called New England consists of the six States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.  This is especially the land of Yankees, and none can properly be called Yankees but those who belong to New England.  I have named the States as nearly as may be in order from the north downward.  Of Rhode Island, the smallest State in the Union, I have already said what little I have to say.  Of these six States Boston may be called the capital.  Not that it is so in any civil or political sense; it is simply the capital of Massachusetts.  But as it is the Athens of the Western world; as it was the cradle of American freedom; as everybody of course knows that into Boston harbor was thrown the tea which George III. would tax, and that at Boston, on account of that and similar taxes, sprang up the new revolution; and as it has grown in wealth, and