Y- 1 i. s. GJ. FICTIONAL RAMBLES IN AND ABOUT BOSTON T3 4> - 1) t. 3 & FICTIONAL RAMBLES in & about Boston By jfrances Weston Carrutf) Author of "Those Dale Girls" "The Way of Belinda" etc. NEW YORK MCMII BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY CHESTNUT HILL, MASS, Copyright, 1902, by McClure, Phillips & Company 53982 Published October, 1902, N BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY CHESTNUT HILL, MA tEo t\)Q$c HBostomans $$y &untg tEtjesc Gambles in 1&\)tit Citp #rc &ffrctionatel£ ^Inscribes TAGE CONTENTS PART I. IN MODERN BOSTON i Beacon Hill and Street . . 3 11 The West End 21 in The Charles Street Neigh- bourhood 49 iv In and About the Common . . 61 v A Ramble Round the Public Garden 88 vi The Back Bay 109 vii The South End 144 PART II. IN OLD BOSTON 1 About the Wharves . . . .157 11 The Heart of the Old North End 176 in In and Around Dock Square . 204 CONTENTS iv State Street and the King's page Chapel Neighbourhood . .220 v When Commercial Boston Was Residential 245 vi In Tremont Street and Music Hall 267 PART III. ABOUT BOSTON 1 Cambridge and Lexington 11 Harvard hi Westward iv Toward the Blue Hills v Nahant and Nantasket . 283 1 T -7 339 346 365 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Longfellow's Grave Frontispifxe The gilded dome of the State House 5 The Old Beacon 8 The Athenaeum 11 An Ancestral Home in Mrs. Moulton's "Miss Eyre" ... 13 Tablet marking site of Hancock House 15 The home of Mildred Wentworth 17 The semi-circular windows of the Somerset Club. — Crawford 's "American Politician" ig Beacon Steps. — Howells''s "A Woman s Reason" .... 23 Mount Vernon Place 27 41 Mount Vernon Street— the home of Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis 28 48 Mount Vernon Street — the home of the Coreys .... 29 The perfect Gothic arch formed by the trees that line both sides of Mount Vernon Street. — Helen Reed's "Miss Theodora " 31 No. 59 Mount Vernon .Street 35 A row of old houses in Mount Vernon Street 39 82 Mount Vernon Street — the home of the Randolphs ... 41 Home of Rose Jenness in tl Two Bites at a Cherry" ... 42 Louisburg Square — former homes of Louisa Alcott and Mr. Howells , . 43 73 Pinckney Street — the home of the Lacys ...... 46 African Methodist Church, 68 Charles Street ...... 50 The Church of the Advent and Clergy House, Brimmer Street. 51 Charles Street 54 xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Telescope in the Mall 63 Ticknor Mansion. Union Club. Park Street Church. Mall 65 The Common ... 69 The Long Path . . • 73 The Pond in the Hollow 77 Cows on the Common Si The Liberty Tree 85 The Public Garden 91 The Statue of Washington, near Commonwealth Avenue . . 96 Venus Fountain in the Public Garden 97 The Swan Boats 99 The Arlington Street Church from under the Kilmarnock wil- low by the pond in the Public Garden 103 An Apothecary's Window, Mentioned in James's "Bostonians" 105 The Home of Mrs. Mesh in Arlington Street 107 Home of Mrs. Adams (" Truth Dexter"} in Beacon Street . . 108 The Harvard Bridge — part of the Back Bay ill 296 Beacon Street (The Oval Doorway), the home of " The Autocrat." 302, the home of Mr. Howells 120 Marlborough Street 122 Mrs. Rangeley's house on Marlborough Street. — Arlo Bates's " The Puritans" 123 The Home of the Maxwells . 124 The Home of the Chauncey Wilsons 125 The Avenue through the Park 126 The St. Botolph Club — No. 2 Newbury Street 127 233 Clarendon Street — the home of the late Bishop Brooks 12S Trinity Church 129 Interior Trinity Church 133 The Library 137 The Museum 139 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The latter-day edition of the historic Old South Church . . 141 Concord Square 145 28 Rutland Square — the home of Mrs. Louise (handler Moulton 152 The Shipping at the foot of State Street 159 The inspiration of a bit of Hawthorne allegory 164 The old Salt House, where Hawthorne wrote " The Scarlet Letter" 167 The Lieutenant-Governor's elegant mansion 178 Frankland's house 182 The Home of Paul Revere 1S3 Salutation Alley 1S6 The Old North Church 189 Home of the M'Murtaghs. — Stimscns "Pirate Gold" . . . 193 The house on Hull Street, where Gage is said to have planned the Battle of Bunker Hill 194 Copp's Hill Burying Ground 195 The spot from which Lionel Lincoln watched the battle of Bunker Hill 199 The House of John Tileston in Bynner's " Zachary Phips" . 201 Union (Boston) Stone 206 Faneuil Hall 207 The old Brasier Inn 210 A bookshop in Cornhill 211 The Old State House 221 The Old Colony Bank 226 Burying-ground by King Charles' Chapel 231 Kings Chapel 235 Interior of King's Chapel 239 Greenough's Statue of Benjamin Franklin — City Hall . . . 242 The Corner Bookstore 243 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Old South Church 259 Province House 265 Grave of Benjamin Woodbridge 270 Entrance to the Music Hall 275 Mansion at Medford 287 Christ Church Graveyard 291 Birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes 295 Washington Elm 298 The Longfellow Mansion ; . 299 Elmwood 303 The Road to Concord 307 Monroe Tavern — Lexington 308 Lexington Common 310 The Lexington Minute Man 311 The Johnston Memorial Gate and Harvard Hall 317 The College Yard 321 The Library 325 Holworthy 329 Memorial Hall '. 335 Country Club, Brookline . 342 The Upper Charles River 345 The Governor Shirley Mansion 351 Jamaica Pond 354 A Roxbury Garden 355 The Quincy-Butler Mansion 359 The Stream. — Stimsons "King Noanett" 363 The Cliff. — Stimsons "Pirate Gold" 366 Pulpit Rock, Nahant 369 Nantasket Beach 375 INTRODUCTORY " Come, seek the air ; some pictures we may gain Whose passing shadows shall not be in vain." Holmes. A WORLD of fascinating romance un- folds itself to those who seek to iden- tify the homes and haunts of the characters in Boston fiction. If, as the great dramatist has told us, it is the part of the po- et's genius to give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name, it may interest the ad- mirer and follower of the makers of fiction to devote himself to searching out and oqvina- permanence to persons and localities which, though in sober fact they never had any exist- ence, yet have been and always will be as real as any historic characters of the past ; forming a drama of life such as is woven by the artist INTRODUCTORY in colours so vivid and impressive that the ac- tors become a part of ourselves — their haunts and habitations to be individualized, identified and held in tender remembrance. To the traveler the Old World owes its at- tractiveness quite as much to the creations of Shakespeare, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bal- zac, Hugo and Dumas as to the princes, states- men and soldiers of whose births and deaths history tells us with so much pomp and preci- sion. It was said by an admirer of Henry Esmond that the charm of the Potomac River was not in the military associations so insepa- rably blended with it, but in the fact that on its banks Esmond and the woman who had so patiently waited for his wooing had established themselves ; linking the noble Virginia stream with the memories of the Stuarts and Addison, with the English meadows and with the cam- paigns of Marlborough. Gibraltar's towering might impressed a devotee of Marry at not as being England's gateway fortress of the Med- iterranean, held more than once against a world INTRODUCTORY in arms, but as the scene of the exploits of Mr. Midshipman Easy and the discomfiture of the surly boatswain. Every year a throng of tour- ists wander through the land of Evangeline asking persons native to the soil to point out localities whose names, as a rule, mean nothing to them who are questioned, unless, perchance, they may have read Longfellow's immortal poem. Robinson Crusoe's island has been ex- plored as thoroughly as for buried treasure — the seekers looking not for gold or jewels, but to identify the spring, the cave, or the spot on the sands where Robinson was startled by the solitary footprint. So Boston has been the scene of much that will live in American fiction ; but it may be doubted if it has yet fulfilled all that may be required of it by the poet or novelist. For many years it was the town not only of New England, but of North America, leading polit- ically and commercially as well as intellect- ually, but the men who gave it world-wide fame in literature were not writing fiction. INTRODUCTORY Puritan theology stamps the first Boston lit- erature which, gradually showing a tendency toward broader development, took the form of essays and poetry. About 1830 Nathaniel P. Willis, Boston bred but not born, was the fore- most young American writer. " Longfellow was not yet conspicuous," says Holmes. " Lo- well was a schoolboy. Emerson was unheard of. Whittier was beginning to make his way against the writers with better educational ad- vantages whom he was destined to outdo and outlive. ... If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colours, half a cen- tury ago, he will find in the pages of a small volume entitled Truth, A Gift For Scrib- blers, a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of." Of all the brilliant classic-literature-making- group which later centered about Emerson and Longfellow, only Hawthorne and Holmes strayed into the realms of fiction. James Rus- sell Lowell, perhaps, should be included, for he INTRODUCTORY published a novel called My First Client which met with a dubious fate and long ago disap- peared. Those were the days when " Liter- ature in Boston," says Mr. Howells, "was so respectable and often of so high a lineage that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to be good family." As poet and essayist, Holmes, "the last leaf upon the tree," wrote of the Boston which he knew and loved with a deeper sense of kinship and affection than any of his contemporaries. But the scenes of his fiction are with one exception away from the city by him dubbed " the Hub." This exception is The Guardian Angel — one of what an old lady called his " medicated novels," to the great amusement of the author. In spite of all that novelists have had to say about Boston, to Mr. Arlo Bates belongs the distinction of having presented it in kaleido- scopic form. The many-sidedness of the town and the marked characteristics of its people which stamp them Bostonese the world over pervade his novels, giving them an intense INTRODUCTORY localism which is never provincialism. He strikes the true key in presenting it on its aesthetical, ethical, fashionable, practical and religious sides — the evolution of modern Boston emerging from pro-Puritanism. This, in a more or less degree, is the Boston we find in the pages of such fiction as Truth m Dextcr, The Sentimentalists, Margaret Warrener, The Turn of the Road, Miss Brooks, Ballantyne and Her Boston Experiences. Mr. Howells, a dominant writer of Boston fiction, saturating his pages with its business, social and intel- lectual atmosphere, personifies varied types, which, photographic as they are, fail to present certain phases of the genuine Bostonese. This may be because of his tendency to draw u a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," which was Dr. Holmes's way of putting it in referring to one of his characters. The Bostonians was chosen by Henry James as the title for a novel in which he finds ample space for elaborate and brilliant analysis of women of the class of Olive Chancellor, among- whom the movement INTRODUCTORY for the emancipation of their sex was rampant ; other and equally strenuous types appear in the pages of his New England Winter. A brilliant literary and legal light of Boston, Judge Robert Grant, has purposely refrained, he says, from giving his novels a Boston set- ting, and one looks in vain through his fiction for the streets and monuments of his native city. Politically, Mr. Crawford with An American Politician and Mr. Wainwright with A Child of the Century have the field pretty much to themselves. Delightful and thoroughly genuine are the Bostonians of Dr. Edward Everett Hale and Mrs. Louise Chand- ler Moulton, while we turn to Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis's The Barclays of Boston for a pic- ture of fashionable life in the Hub in the fifties. Other phases of this and an earlier period are depicted in Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's fiction and in such novels as Mr. Stimson's Pirate Gold, Miss Cummins's The Lamplight- er, and Mr. Trowbridge's Martin Merrivalc. The old colonial town, rich in history and INTRODUCTORY traditions, strongly appealed as a background for romance to Hawthorne, Cooper, Bynner and Lydia Child. Writers of Boston fiction have as a rule made use of the actual street nomenclature, which greatly aids the rambler to discover in fact or conjure up in imagination real or ficti- tious haunts and habitations. Much of this nomenclature is picturesque and interesting as reminiscent of the city's history. In that part of the town known as the North End the crooked, narrow, winding streets such as Fleet, Moon, Garden Court, Prince, and Hanover are suggestive of the old London so dear to the heart of the early colonists. Every Bostonian knows that Beacon Hill and street take their name from the old beacon erected in 1634 on the summit of the hill ; that Tremont Street is from Traemount or Tri-Mountain which the settlement was first called ; that Shawmut Av- enue gets its name from the peninsula. More modern is the broad avenue named for the Com- monwealth and running across it the street INTRODUCTORY named for the State. The great Copley and the lesser Allston are suggestive of the art world; Blackstone, Franklin, and Boylston are remem- bered while now and then the name of a na- tional hero appears on the lamp-posts, as in the recent instance of Dewey Square. IN MODERN BOSTON I. BEACON HILL AND STREET TR U E to the traditions of the Bostonese, all the fiction writers of the city pay their tribute to the State House with its splendid gilded dome, which stands on the summit of Beacon Hill. Around the green, in morning light, The spired a?id palaced summits blaze, And, sunlike, from her Beacon height The dome-crowned city spreads her rays. " High in the air, poised in the right place, over everything that clustered below, the most felicitous object in Boston - — the gilded dome of the State House," writes Henry James in A New England Winter. Mrs. Campbell's Bal- lantyne, in her novel of that name, returning to Boston from the west, stretched his arms to 3 FICTIONAL RAMBLES the gilded dome, as if he would embrace it and all Boston at once. And the Autocrat's most celebrated saying is, " Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar." Again and again he lovingly reverts to it. " Boston," at another time he writes, " has glor- ified her State House and herself at the expense of a few sheets of gold-leaf laid on the dome, which shines like a sun in the eyes of her citi- zens, and like a star in those of the approach- ing traveller." Opposite the State House steps the fictional rambler finds the impressive Shaw monument where Mr. Pier's vacillating- hero of The Senti- mentalists paused to ponder on the contrast of the fine young soldier's life with his. He had come up to the gray marble slab, says the author, rising from the edge of the Common. "On the other side of it was the bas-relief in bronze of Robert Shaw, leading his coloured men. Vernon had passed the memorial with- 4 Ha*' " High in the air, poised in the right place, over everything that clustered below, the most felicitous object in Boston — the gilded dome of the State House." — Henry James's " New England Winter.' 1 '' " He stretched his arms to the gilded dome as if he wouid em- brace it and all Boston at once." — Helen Campbell' s "Ballantyjie." IN AND ABOUT BOSTON out raising his eyes, but now as he stood at a distance, with only a glimpse of the back of the monument, the form and features of the un- faltering young soldier were outlined in his mind, with the thought, ' And he was not as old as I when he died.' " On the eastern side of the State House has been erected a shaft to mark the site of the old beacon which first threw its lisfht across the ad- jacent waters. One stately summit from its shaft shall pour Its deep red blaze along the darkened shore ; Emblem of thought, that, kindling far and wide. In danger's 7iight shall be a nation's guide, sings the poet Holmes in A Rhymed Lesson. The stately summit was frequently climbed by the redcoats of Cooper's Lionel Lincoln for a better viewof the doino-s of the town. Here the scene of the novel opens in April, 1775, with a large group of spectators spreading from its conical summit far down the eastern declivity, all gazing intently on a distant sail making toward the harbour. Under the beacon, beside 7 FICTIONAL RAMBLES the tall post that supported the grate, Ralph, " One stately summit from its shaft shall pour Its deep red blaze along the darkened shore ; Emblem of thought, that, kindling far and wide, In danger's night shall be a nation's guide." — Holmes. echoed by Job, reproached Major Lincoln for his loyalty to the King's cause. Down its steep decline, in their childhood, Lincoln's cousins, Cecil and Agnes, many a time went coasting. s IN AND ABOUT BOSTON At the northeast corner of Beacon Street, across from the State House, in a house recently torn down, lived the hero of a Hawthorne ro- mance entitled My Kinsman, Major Molineux. This tale is woven about a zealous Boston pa- triot named Molineux who died in 1774, and a rather amusing light is thrown upon Haw- thorne's story of him by a contemporary writer, who* says: "It is a curious irony of fate that Major Molineux should have a false place in literature at the hands of both Loncrfellow and Hawthorne. The despite done to his memory by the former is less serious than that of the latter. In the Tales of a Wayside Inn in the prelude, the poet writes of the famous hostelry : And flashing on the window pane, Emblazoned with its light and shade, The jovial rhymes that still remain, Writ near a century ago By the great Major Molineux, II horn Hawthorne has immortal made. It is not needed to know the character and po- sition of the 'great Major' to see that the ' jovial rhymes' were not written by him but by * Bates's Writing Masters before the Revolution . 9 FICTIONAL RAMBLES his son, who signed his name to them on the pane. These are the rhymes : What do you think Here is good drink Perhaps you may not know it. If not in haste Do stop and taste You merry folks will show it. Boston, 24th June, 1774, Williatn Molineaux, Jr. Not long after William Junior was roughly handled in an altercation with some of the Welsh troops. The sentiments of the family were well known to the soldiers. Longfellow says : ' Whom Hawthorne has immortal made.' If the reader will turn to A Snow Image and Other Twice Told Talcs, it will be seen that the kind of immortality given the ' great Major ' by Hawthorne is of doubtful value ; in short, it completely reverses his character and sends him down to posterity as a hated Tory, tarred and feathered by outraged neighbours. At the culmination of his story Hawthorne writes, ' Right before Robin's eyes was an uncovered IN AND ABOUT BOSTON cart. There the torches blazed brightest, there the moon shone out like day, and there in tar "When she came to the Athenaeum, she was so tired that she decided to take refuge beneath its friendly shelter." — Eliza Orne White s '■'Miss Brooks." 1 and feathery dignity sat his kinsman, Major Molineux.' " All of which may be resented by FICTIONAL RAMBLES the historian ; but fiction is not fact and the charm of Hawthorne lies in his romancing. East of the site of the Molineux house is the Hotel Bellevue, where for many years Louisa M. Alcott stayed when she came down from Concord. Opposite it stands the jDld Ath- enaeum, soon to be removed to the Back Bay, but on its present site a landmark and distinc- tive Boston institution. This aristocratic li- brary has been frequented by many characters in the fiction of Boston. Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis tells us that old Mr. Edgerton daily read the newspapers there ; Henry James's Mrs. Daintry (A New England Winter) made re- markably free use of it ; two of his Bostonians, Olive and Verena, in pursuit of their studies, had innumerable bi^ books from it ; in Hith- erto, Mrs. Whitney's Hope Devine was a little bit shocked at standing face to face with some of its statuary, particularly the Venuses, and had been half afraid of the Laocoon. Ja- net Brooks {Miss Brooks), Mary's younger sister, took shelter in its vestibule on a IN AND ABOUT BOSTON stormy day, and to her infinite relief and ^if^^-^'^'* "Nan lived in an ancestral home where British officers had danced stately minuets when Massachusetts was a colony." — Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton s "Afiss Eyre.'" pleasure was there discovered later by John Graham. 13 FICTIONAL RAMBLES In colonial times and until 1863 there stood just west of the State House, in Beacon Street, the Hancock mansion, than which, as all who recall it will testify, there was never a more stately or picturesque house. It was sur- rounded by a beautiful garden, and many a Bostonian can yet sniff the delicious fragrance of the lilacs which clustered about the door and over the wall, perfuming the whole neigh- bourhood in the spring. Its owner, Hancock, its traditions and associations are richly histor- ical, and it is not without fictional interest as well. Hancock appears in the pages of Cham- bers's Cardigan, where the hero thus describes him: "He was young, handsome, decidedly vain,though quite free from affectation of speech or gesture. ... He wore an apple-green coat, white silk stockings, very large silver buckles on his pumps, small-clothes of silver-net, tied at the knees with pea-green ribbons, which fell to his ankles, and much expensive lace at his throat and cuffs." It is probable that the Hancock House was 14 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON the one Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis had in mind in picturing Mr. Edgerton's home in The Bar- a n ill "We turn away from the old mansion so easily conjured up by the imagination and see in reality on a low iron fence, a tablet which marks the site upon which it stood." clays of Boston. Calling it the Amory mansion in Miss Eyre, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton 15 FICTIONAL RAMBLES also uses it as a setting for her Nan Amory, who " lived in an ancestral home where Brit- ish officers had danced stately minuets when Massachusetts was a colony." Nan is intro- duced to us in the thick of Theosophical win- ter. " It always is the something winter in that wonderful city," says Mrs. Moulton, "but perhaps nothing else had ever taken hold of it as did Theosophy. If you went out to drink five-o'clock tea and shake hands with your neighbours, you found the company broken up into groups, and in the centre of each one some eloquent woman discoursing of reincar- nation, and Karma, and Devachan." Reluct- antly we turn away from the old mansion, so easily conjured up by the imagination, and see in reality on a low iron fence a tablet which marks the site upon which it stood. A few steps up the street, in a house now occupied by Dr. Paul, we can imagine dear lit- tle Mildred Wentworth (T. B. Aldrich's A Christmas Phantasy) in her blue room over- looking the Common, having her deliciously 16 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON fantastic day-dreams in the midst of her new Christmas toys. Farther down the hill, at No. " In her blue room overlooking the Common was little Mildred Wentworth in the midst of her Christmas toys." — T. B. Aldriclis " Christmas Fantasy ." 40, is the stoop where Margaret Allston had one of the first of Her Boston Experiences, and which house, she says, is in the one block 17 FICTIONAL RAMBLES in that locality where certain families honour- ably continue their ancestral line. In this part of Beacon Street lived May Calthorpe, that diverting young woman in Mr. Bates's Love In a Cloud. " The dwell- ing was rather a gloomy nest for so bright a bird as May. Respectability of the most aus- tere New England type pervaded the big drawing-room. The heavy old furniture was as ugly as original sin, and the pictures might have ministered to the Puritan hatred for art. Little was changed from the days when May's grandparents had furnished their abode ac- cording to the most approved repulsiveness of their time. Only the brightness of the warm April sun shining in at the windows, and a big bunch of dark red roses in a crystal jug, light- ened the formality of the stately apartment." In the middle of this block is the vine-cov- ered, ultra-exclusive Somerset Club, where Warren Hartwell put in half his days before he met Margaret Allston. It was also the rendezvous of Marion Crawford's American < X3 H l=! - O to P _^- '^ C3 ;£ ~ 5 o 7i wt *-* o c O <*-, <-j a 3 s. t/1 - ^ u ^c is S. V 1 i- |, i/i i~ 1 > Q fr o J 3 o c jS te i! U 1 3 o rt u c It 1 ft nl 1> 19 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Politician and his friends, one of whom, Van- couver, was particularly fond of standing- in one of the semi-circular windows and watching the passers-by. At the corner below is the smaller Puritan Club, likewise a haunt of Warren Hartwell's ; and of Vernon Kent, one of the sentimentalists in Mr. Pier's novel of that name. The atmosphere of this locality is sympathetically expressed by the heroine of Her Boston Experiences, who says she " al- ways peers around for a fleeting glance of Priscillas, John Aldens, or other far-away peo- ple who rightfully belong among those quaint old houses, still breathing out history and ro- mance." II. THE WEST END FOR the western and northern slopes of Beacon Hill many novelists have a strong predilection, notably Mr. How- ells, who, particularly on the northern side of the hill, finds in the homely life of the unfash- ionable residents ample material for the por- FICTIONAL RAMBLES trayal of certain types of Bostonians which he presents to us with such fidelity. These are "those old-fashioned thoroughfares at the West End of Boston which are now almost wholly abandoned to boarding-houses of the poorer classes. Yet they are charming streets," and in them lived the Hallecks, the Hubbards (A Modern Instance), Lemuel Barker {The Min- ister s Charge), Dr. Olney, Rhoda Aldgate and Mrs. Meredith {An Imperative Duty), and many other of Mr. Howells's fictitious char- acters. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, too, is partial to this locality with its " streets of charming houses without any modern improvements over behind Beacon Hill, and beyond the State House. In her recent story, Miss Theodora, Helen Leah Reed gives us a delightful series of pictures of the old West End. Number 9 Beacon Steps (Howells's A Wo- man's Reason) is given as the residence of Joshua Harkness and his daughter Helen. " The house was rather old-fashioned, and it was not furnished in the latest taste, but it • "BEACON STEPS." HOWELLS'S "A WOMAN'S REASON." " Streets of charming- houses over behind Beacon Hill and beyond the State House." — Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney s "JfitAerto." 23 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON made the appeal with which things out of date or passing out of date touch the heart." Bea- con Steps is not Beacon Street, says Mr. Howells in the novel, " but it is of like blame- less social tradition." As an actual street it never had any exist- ence in fact, but the name was suggested to Mr. Howells by a short flight of steps which lead down from the State House to Temple Street, and though no definite house was in- tended, this was the locality he had in mind. In another of his novels, A Modern Instance, his Clover Street is in reality Myrtle Street, where, a few doors from Joy Street, is the little house rented by the Bartley Hubbards. "It seemed absurdly large to people who had been living for the past seven months in one room ; and the view of the Back Bay from the little bow-window of the front chamber added all out- doors to their superfluous space." To the east of them, at 63 Hancock Street, is the boarding- house to which Janet ( Eliza Orne White's Miss Brooks} came in search of young Rheinhart. 25 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Passing down Derne Street and through Bowdoin Street, we come to Bulfinch Place, on the right, called Canary Place by Mr. Howells, who finds lodgings there for the Bartley Hubbards shortly after they came to Boston. Here, too, on the southern side of the street, is the Hotel Waterson, described in The Minister s Charge as the St. Albans, where Barker worked in various capacities un- til (in the novel) the hotel burned. North of this, in Bowdoin Square, is the Revere House, in and around which transpires much of An Imperative Duty. The Bartley Hubbards also stopped at this hotel, where Bartley entered his name on the register with a flourish. Bril- liantly lighted Bowdoin Square and the high- pillared portico of the Revere House were also wonderingly observed on his wanderings by Barker's The Minister s Charge. This hotel was one much patronized by Mr. and Mrs. Howells during their residence in Belmont when, attending social functions or the theatre in Boston, they found it more convenient to 26 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON spend the night in town. " Some colour of my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious "That commodious nook which is known as Mount Vernon Place."' — Henry James 's "A A T ew England Winter." experiences of people in my books," Mr. How- ells says in his Literary Friends and Ac- quaintances. If we now climb " those up-hill streets that converge to the State House," and stop at the 27 FICTIONAL RAMBLES top of the Hill, we come directly under the shadow of the dome, to " that commodious nook which, is known as Mt. Vernon Place," in 41 MOUNT VERNON STREET — THE HOME OF MRS. HARRISON GRAY OTIS which resided Henry James's Miss Lucretia Daintry {A New England Winter^) — delightful Miss Lucretia, "who wore her bonnet as scien- tifically poised as the dome of the State House, and had in an eminent degree the physiog- nomy, the accent, the costume, the conscience, and the little eyeglass of her native place." 23 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON 48 MOUNT VERNON STREET THE HOME OF THE COREYS " The whole place wears an air of aristocratic seclusion." — Howells 's "Rise of Silas Lapham." North of this "nook" is Mount Vernon Street, in which lived an astonishing number 29 FICTIONAL RAMBLES of fictitious persons, whose literary creators give it a preference over Beacon Street as an aristocratic, residential thoroughfare. A fine old house, Number 41, at the corner of Joy Street, was the home of Miss MehitableOuincy, whom we meet in Mrs. Louise Chandler Moul- ton's Miss Eyre. This house has interest in fact as well as fiction, for here lived that bril- liant woman, novelist and social leader, Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, who wrote The Barclays of Boston there. A few doors down on the same side of the street is Number 48, the home of the Coreys (Howells's The Rise of Silas Laphani). This house is now a small hotel called the Curtis, but was formerly the home of one of Mr. Howells's friends, and its entrance and part of the inter- ior remain as when he knew and described it. To many, Bromfield Corey is by far the most delightful of Mr. Howells's creations, and it is with pleasure that we meet him in more than one of the author's books. No one forgets that memorable dinner given for the Laphams 30 S ? rt En .a -> — -s 3i IN AND ABOUT BOSTON by the Coreys, in the reading of which we can scarcely be made to believe that we are not actually attending it, so strong is Mr. How- ells's realistic touch. Familiar with the dining room we are keenly interested in the rest of the house, and delighted when we are permit- ted by the author to wander into Mr. Corey's sanctum, the library, where Lemuel Barker (The Ministers Charge) "found himself dropped in the midst of a luxury stranger than the things they read of in those innumerable novels. The dull, rich colours on the walls, the heavily rugged floors and dark wooded leathern seats of the library where he read to the old man ; the beautiful forms of the famous bronzes, and the Italian saints and martyrs in their baroque or Gothic frames of dim p-old- the low shelves with their ranks of luxurious bind- ings, and all the seriously elegant keeping of the place flattered him out of his strange- ness." Corey, at this time, it will be remem- bered, was alone at home while his family were at the shore, because he " would rather be blind 33 FICTIONAL RAMBLES in Boston than telescopic at Beverly or any other summer resort." Looking down from the Coreys, we get a most beautiful view of " the perfect Gothic arch formed by the trees that line both sides of Mount Vernon Street" (Helen Reed's Miss Theodora). At Number 59, at the top of the hill, we find the home of the poet and novelist, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His near neighbour is the imaginary Mrs. Buskirk (Pier's The Sentimentalists), who lives in one of this " row of stately fine old houses, with little plots of lawn in front and high iron fences ; they were of four high-ceilinged stories with well-propor- tioned bay-windows and deep vestibules, in which were tall jars of plants and palms." In his Two Bites at a Cherry, Mr. Aldrich speaks of crisp crocuses blooming in these little front yards in the spring. Mr. Arlo Bates rarely has an actual house in mind in describing residences, but so real to him are the homes of his characters that he has fallen into the way, he says, of inserting an 34 ■&#**AM 35 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON imaginary house in the desired locality. So, though the fiction rambler may not literally number them, he can pretty safely conclude that in this block of Mount Vernon Street lived Mrs. Gore {The Puritans), in whose drawing-room occurred the Persian reading when " Persian was the latest ethical caprice," and one of the forms of the " ethical jugglery, the spiritual and intellectual gymnastics such as the Bostonians love." Here we also find " the iron gate which, between stately stone posts, shuts off the domain of the Frostwinches (The Puritans) from the world, and marked with dignity the line between the dwellers on Mount Vernon Street, and the rest of the world." If we follow Ashe and Mrs. Fenton into the drawing-room of this house, we enter " an apartment whose very walls were incrusted with conservative traditions. . . . The chief decoration, one felt, was the air of the place's having been inhabited by generations of so- cially immaculate Boston ancestors. There was a savor of lineage amounting almost to 37 FICTIONAL RAMBLES godliness in the dark, self-contained parlours ; and if pedigree were not in this dwelling im- puted for righteousness, it was evidently held in becoming reverence as the first of virtues." In this exclusive neighbourhood must have lived Peter Calvin (The Philistines), " a wealthy and well-meaning man against whom but two grave charges could be made — that he supposed the growth of art in this country to depend largely upon his patronage, and that he could never be persuaded not to take him- self seriously. Mr. Calvin was regarded by Philistine circles in Boston as a sort of re-in- carnation of Apollo, clothed upon with modern enlightenment, and properly arrayed in re- spectable raiment." Judge Rathmire, whose fortunes were so closely intermingled with The Curse of the Old South Church, is described in that novel as living in splendid style in Mount Vernon Street. A view of the charming block of houses before which we have been loitering was to be had by the Kents ( Pier's The Senti- 3§ 39 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON mentalists), who lived directly opposite in a thin, flat-fronted house by which Mr. Pier 7 *< n^mmt^mmmax* i ~ ^«< ■ I H^lif Pi ' 'f ; "^"Dl] I ■"*" If »> j **" »- ■K 1 t^r-M ™ --fl .1 i i J Si ' -m V i ■ ■•■ — ,,*.. i--i ipi sj '. S****^ «S3«EfeJ«WSi| g Safest 82 MOUNT VERNON STREET — THE HOME OF THE RANDOLPHS " He had almost reached their house when he saw a slender girl coming down the steps." — Miss White's "Miss Brooks." meant anyone of the several that answers to this description. Below the Kents on the same side of the street at Number 82, is the house 41 FICTIONAL RAMBLES in which the creator of the happy-go-lucky Randolphs (Miss White's Miss Brooks) im- " One of the last spells of the past was lifted for him when he saw strange faces looking' out of those sun-purpled window-panes," — T. B- Aldricti s " Two Bites at a Cherry," agined them as living. Here the Brooks girls stayed with their sister when they were in town, while on the steps of this house Janet had that chance encounter with John which so changed the current of her life. 42 ■J: -«i '3 S- o ft 43 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON John T. Wheelwright, to whose Child of the Century we have made allusion, lives at Number 99 Mount Vernon Street, and wander- ing from here through Willow and into Chest nut Street we find a few steps up the hill a beautiful and well-preserved old house which answers to the description of the home of Rose Jenness in Aldrich's Two Bites at a Cherry. Whitelaw, the hero of this story, re- turning to Boston after fifteen years' absence, found " people whom nobody knew occupied the old mansion. One of the last spells of the past was lifted for him when he saw strange faces looking out of those sun-purpled window- panes." This picturesque, vine-covered resi- dence was at one time the home of Edwin Booth, and is now used as a private school for boys. Returning through Willow Street and cross- ing Mount Vernon we come into quaint old Louisburg Square, where, on the south side we find the former homes, a few doors apart, of Louisa M. Alcott and Mr. Howells. At Num- 45 FICTIONAL RAMBLES ber 2 Silas Lapham and his associates first came into being, though the book was not 73 PINCKNEY STREET THE HOME OF THE LACYS completed until after the novelist had moved to Beacon Street. In this Square John (Mrs. Campbell's Ballantyne) found charming Mrs. LeBaron living ; and overlooking the Square, 4 6 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON in Pinckney Street, was Marion's former home, where years later, advised by Mrs. Le Baron, Ballantyne found lodgings in the then " anti- modern street." This house is Number 73, given over to boarders or lodgers, among whom one mieht have discovered Craighead ( Truth Dexter) before he married. The character of this once aristocratic street is in these days very similar to the change in other parts of the Hill. This is remarked upon by Anna Farquhar {Her Boston Experi- ences), who says that this is the section reputed to be Bohemia. " The majority of the old homes in Pinckney Street are converted into lodging-houses, although a few professional families still occupy an entire house apiece. There are to be found rooming spinsters of Mayflower descent, generally poor connec- tions of the same families residing in Beacon Street not far away, ■ — near enough to mention frequently and intimately ; musicians ; news- paper people ; painters ; incipient authors and a few full-fledged ; teachers ; composers ; im- 47 FICTIONAL RAMBLES pecunious youths with high spirits and one ' dress suit ' among several ; female typewriters and private secretaries. Here is the freedom of the Latin Quarter, with but a small amount of its license. ... In truth, this Boston Bohemia stands for good spirits and innocent uncon- ventionally, and is several times more virtuous than Boston society, no matter how pretentious- ly and flamboyantly the little country tries to disprove its virtue." This is the atmosphere of that recent and brilliant Boston novel, Margaret Warrener, thougrh it is evident that the author, Miss Alice Brown, is purposely vague in locating that in- teresting colony which she calls Babine. And in Pinckney Street, we are sure, was the cosy third floor sitting-room of that splendid woman and sculptor, Helen Greyson (Arlo Bates's The Pagans). " The apartment," we are told in the opening paragraph of the novel, " was evidently that of a woman, as numerous details of arrangement and articles of feminine use suggested ; and quite as evidently it was the 4S IN AND ABOUT BOSTON home of a person of taste and refinement, and of one, too, who had traveled." III. THE CHARLES STREET NEIGH- BOURHOOD FROM the western slope of Beacon Hill, where, as Emerson sings, " Each street leads downward to the sea, — " we come down into Charles Street and a local- ity closely identified with the fiction of Arlo Bates, Henry James, Howells and other lesser literary lights. At the period of which Henry James writes in The Bostonians Charles Street was a place of semi-fashionable residences, one of which is described by the novelist as the home of Olive Chancellor. To-day, like the adjacent streets, it is largely given over to boardino- and lodo-ino- houses, so that it is nat- ural in many novels to find masculine charac- ters lodging there. To enter it from Beacon Street we find a few doors along the identical little Italian fruit shop where Graham first saw Mary Brooks 49 FICTIONAL RAMBLES AFRICAN METHODIST CHURCH 68 CHARLES STREET (Eliza Orne White's Miss Brooks). "His eyes were arrested by the rich colouring of the red apples and yellow oranges, which showed off to especial advantage in juxta- position to the large ' ' She wished densely to sur- bunches of purple round herself with the blackness from which she had sprung," — and greeil grapes, Howellss "An Imperative Duty" and the dusky red bananas that hung from the walls in great clusters. The dim gaslight gave a semi - obscurity to the place, so that its ugly features were softened, and Graham thought of certain Dutch paintings he had seen abroad. Into this commonplace back- ground there presently stepped a figure radi- ant with life and colour. . . . Suddenly the poor little shop was transformed, and Graham thought of Una, whose face ' made a sunshine in the shady place.' " He followed her from the shop up Mount 50 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT AND CLERGY HOUSE, BRIM- MER STREET Vernon Street to her sister's home, it will be remembered, but we detach ourselves from them at the corner to take a passing glance at the African Metho- dist Church, a rather picturesque edifice to "The church was appointed which Rhoda (HoW- with a richness beautiful to see." — Arlo Bates s "Puritans." e 1 1 S ' S Imperative Duty), sick with the sudden knowledge that she was of negro blood, was led to a meet- ing by an old coloured woman. " She had no motive in being where she was except to confront herself as fully and closely with the trouble in her soul as she could . . . she wished densely to surround herself with the blackness from which she had sprung, and to reconcile herself to it by realizing and owning it with every sense." West of this church, clustering at the water's edge, is the exclusive Brimmer Street quarter, 51 FICTIONAL RAMBLES which tiny section, a novelist has said, covers more of the real wit, wisdom and worldliness than any one other part of Boston. Here, in one of the whimsical little streets, amid some strictly Sabbatarian and conventional families, and the quality of the artistic life, lived the Lesters, an evening at whose house was among Margaret Allston's Boston Experiences. Here, too, we find the Church of the Advent, with its Clergy House, which, under the thin dis- guise of the Nativity, plays a conspicuous part in Arlo Bates's novel, The Piiritans. Every one will recall the dramatic description of the midnight service at the Nativity. " The music on this occasion was most elaborate, the very French millinery of sacred music. . . . The church, moreover, was appointed with a richness beautiful to see. The vestments might have moved the envy of high Roman prelates, and the altar plate shone in gold and precious stones." The Father Superior of the Clergy House, in which lived Maurice Wynne and Philip Ashe, of the novel, was Father 52 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Frontford, whom Mr. Bates stoutly denies having drawn from the actual incumbent. Mr. Bates says he has drawn but one char- acter from life, and that was Dr. Ashton of The Pagans, whose identity was unsuspected save by the prototype and his fiancee. But such genius has this author for depicting the Bostonese as he really is that there is no one of his fictitious characters who has not been fitted by the public to some prominent person. This has been both amusing and annoying to Mr. Bates, whose tribulations in this line were undoubtedly in his mind when he wrote Love in a Cloud, in which he takes occasion to remark that "If the scene of a novel be laid in a pro- vincial city, its characters must all be identified. That is the first intellectual duty of the readers of fiction. To look at a novel from a critical point of view is no longer in the least a thing about which any reader need concern himself ; b:.t it would be an omission unpardonably stu- pid were he to remain unacquainted with some original under the disguise of every character." 53 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Near the Church of the Advent, in Brimmer Street, stands the bachelor apartment where Bellingham lived (The Ministers Charge), the delightful interior of which Mr. Howells pictures for us most charmingly on the morning Barker breakfasted there. To turn from here into Charles Street again we come upon the block of houses in one of which lived Olive Chancellor (Henry James's The Bostonians). After Verona came to live with Olive, this was the only spot in Charles Street that had any significance for Ransom, the Mississippian, whom we first meet in Olive's drawine-room tete-a-tete with her sister, Mrs. Luna, who flippantly explains to him that Olive is "a female Jacobin — a nihilist, consorting with witches and wizards, mediums 54 CHARLES STREET " — he heard the door open within the deep embrasure in which, in Charles Street, the main portals are set." — James's "The Bostonians" IN AND ABOUT BOSTON and spirit-rappers and roaring - radicals." Olive had the good fortune to dwell on that side of Charles Street toward which, in the rear, "the afternoon sun slants redly . . . over a brackish expanse of anomalous character which is too big for a river and too small for a bay." This was also the view to be seen from Gra- ham's chambers {Miss Brooks), which were high in a house across the way and farther down, at Number 127. These lodgings, as described by Miss Eliza Orne White, were the actual rooms of her friend, Miss Lucretia Hale, a sister of Edward Everett Hale, who loved her view out over the water, but commonly found, as did Graham, that her friends objected to the coal sheds in the foreground. Mary, the heroine of Miss Brooks, when she came to the tea John gave in his chambers, "went to the window, from which a pale gray strip of Charles River could be seen in the distance, with the spires and houses of Cambridge rising above it, and looking in the misty atmosphere 55 FICTIONAL RAMBLES like a blurred charcoal sketch. Her attention, however, was riveted by some coal sheds that loomed up conspicuously in the foreground. ' You like your view because it is your dispo- sition to make the best of things,' she said. ' Instead of looking facts squarely in the face you idealize them. If I, for instance, with my different temperament, were in your place, I should say plainly, ' Those coal sheds are hid- eous ; they spoil my view.' " Graham, not drawn as a Bostonian, but one of the most de- lightful men in Boston fiction, is a composite sketch from two western relatives of the au- thor — one middle-aged and the other a young man from whose combined characteristics she modelled her hero. Before he married and became a United States Senator, John Harrington (Crawford's An American Politician) had rooms in Charles Street, and though Miss Eugenia Brooks Frothingham is vague as to locality, it is safe to surmise — since it is the usual abiding-place of Boston bachelors in fiction — that Dan and 56 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Garrison (VVw Turn of the Road) had their apartment there. At Number 164, on the water side of the street, once lived the Autocrat whose library windows overlooked the basin of the Charles — a view from which he drew perpetual inspi- ration. He found the water craft a source of endless interest, and the contemplation of them caused him to write this noble tribute to wo- man : " I have seen a tall ship glide by against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible tow-line, with a hundred strong arms pulling it. Her sails hung unfilled, her streamers were droop- ing ; she had neither side-wheel nor stern- wheel, still she moved on stately, as if with her own life. But I knew that on the other side of the ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so majestically, there was a little toilinof steam-tuof with heart of fire and arms of iron, that was huof^m^ it close and dras:- ging it bravely on ; and I knew that if the little steam-tuor untwined her arms and left the tall ship, it would wallow and roll about, and 57 FICTIONAL RAMBLES drift hither and thither, and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither. And so I have known more than one genius, high- decked, full-freighted, wide-sailed, gay-pen- noned, that, but for the bare, toiling arms and brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little wife that nestled close in his shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could part them, and drao-Qfed him on against all the tide of circumstance, would soon have gone down the stream and been heard of no more." Nearby, at 148, we find an interesting liter- ary centre in the home of Mrs. James T. Fields, who lingers on in the old house so full of as- sociations. Not the least of the charms of this house, the front of which presents a common- place exterior to the passer-by, is the deep garden at the rear, with its benches and trees and shrubs and flowers, and always at its edge that bit of the sea known to the Bostonese as "the river" or "the bay," beloved by Mrs. Fields and felt in many of the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, who spends much time with her. 58 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Quaint and elaborately designed landscape screens are to be found in most of the win- dows of the Charles Street residences — a mark as distinctive of this neighbourhood as are the purple window-panes of Beacon Hill. Beautiful gardens were not uncommon at the West End when Mr. Howells first knew Boston, and not far from Mrs. Fields, in lower Pinckney Street, which he calls Rumford, he pictures in A Modern Instance a. charming one. " Mrs. Halleck liked better than mountain or sea the high-walled garden that stretched back of their house to the next street. . . . They laid it out in box-bordered beds, and there were clumps of hollyhocks, sunflowers, lilies and phlox in different corners ; grapes covered the trellised walls ; there were some pear trees that bore blossoms, and sometimes ripened their fruit beside the walk." It was Halleck, it will be remembered, who said : " I don't think there is any place quite so well worth being born in as Boston. It's more authentic and individual, more municipal after the old pat- 59 FICTIONAL RAMBLES tern, than any other modern city. Even Bos- ton provinciality is a precious testimony to the authoritative personality of the city." At the end of Charles Street, stretching northward across the water, is the bridge where Dan {The Ttirn of the Road) walked alone to fight the horror of his approaching blindness, and there had a chance encounter with Kate Randolph, for whom at that time, he found it difficult to conceal his contempt. This bridge is the one of which Graham {Miss Brooks) said that he often wished he could make his poorer neighbours feel the refreshment, almost the in- spiration in a walk across it just at sunset, or in the twilight when the lights were beginning to come out one by one. In Martin Merrivale, Mr. Trowbridge re- lates how his hero, accompanied by Cheesy and the others in their tramp to Boston crossed the bridge to enter the city just at dusk. Cheesy, a typical country boy, gives his first impressions of the city in a characteristic com- ment : " I had no ide' it was settled so clust 60 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON' here." Over the bridge for many years ran the horse cars to Cambridge, — a line patron- izedby Basil ( The Bostonians) when he went out there to see Verona Tarrent — the same tedious route over which Mrs. Tarrent had spent hours in "jingling, aching, jostled journeys" — what Bostonian or Cantabridgian does not remem- ber them ? — " between Charles Street and her suburban cottage." The old wooden bridge of which these novelists wrote has given way to a modern steel structure, which may or may not make its appearance in the Boston fiction of the future. IV. IN AND ABOUT THE COMMON TO the fiction rambler the Common, that great stretch of green a forest of splendid trees in the very heart of the city, is full of flitting shadows — peopled by old friends and acquaintances, whom, in imagin- ation we meet at every turn. Toiling heavily up the Park Street mall late on a hot summer day, we seem to see Mr. 61 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Joshua Harkness (Howells's A Woman 's Reason), struggling to get home, but so ill that he drops at last on a bench, remaining there until an obliging policeman finds a carriage to take him home. At the head of this mall Bart- ley Hubbard and Marcia (Howells's A Modern Instance), taking their first stroll here one win- ter's day, stopped to see the boys coasting under the care of the police between two long lines of spectators. In this mall, too, on one of the near-by benches Martin Merrivale, in the novel of that name, and the little blind Alice sat many a day while he described the beautiful slopes and regal trees about them. " We are in a magni- ficent rolling park," he said to her, " laid out in avenues and paths, with long, double rows of such trees' as I have described, running in al- most every direction. The city is on three sides, but on the west there is a river that gleams like silver. Beyond that are blue hills, all asleep under the hazy sky. On the hills there are woods and houses, and on the river a 62 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON slow-moving sail. I wish you could see all this, my deai child." The gentle Alice, though " Ever since I had a ten-cent look at the tran- sit of Venus . . . through the telescope in the Mall, the earth has been wholly different to me from what it used to be," — Holmes s "Over the Tea- Cups." a fictitious character, was suggested to Mr. Trowbridge by his friendship with a woman who was an interesting psychologic study, she 63 FICTIONAL RAMBLES having remarkable prophetic visions, as Alice did. No doubt Martin and Alice in their walk down the mall often encountered near the Tremont Street entrance, the telescope man whom Holmes has immortalized : " Ever since I had a ten cent look at the transit of Venus . . . through the telescope in the mall," he says, " the earth has been wholly different to me from what it used to be." As in the Autocrat's time, ever cheerfully ready is he to-day to show the wonders of the planet. At the head of Park Street, across from this mall, stood until within a few years the beau- tiful Ticknor mansion — during George Tick- nor's time a rallying-point for literary Boston, and likewise famed as being the house where Lafayette stayed during his visit in 1824. This is, undoubtedly, the house where Margaret and Laura lived in Mrs. Louise Chandler Moul- ton's A Letter and What Came of It. Next door down the sloping street is the Union Club, shown, as is the mansion in the il- c 4 - :/ ■/, c -; -. o _ _ 3 65 IN A N 9 A I €> U T BOSTON lustration, before either had undergone altera- tions. Sewell, Mr. John T. Wheelwright's Child of the Century \ was a member of this club, and, it will be remembered, entertained Strong at breakfast there. " Sewell was a being brought to manhood under the aegis of a protective tariff and a Puritan ancestry," says his creator. " His whole life had been spent on that part of the earth's surface which is contained in a cir- cle with a radius of five miles, and with the tarnished ofilt dome of the State House as a centre ; that favoured spot of earth where civic pride contends for the mastery over human souls, with hatred of taxes — for the true Bos- tonian never denies his birthplace save to the tax-collector. Of course, he had at intervals emerged, incrusted with prejudices as with an armour, from this magic ring, in short, tangent trips, having had the daring to penetrate one winter to the mournful live-oaks and gladsome skies of Florida, to dodge the treacherous east winds ; and in an autumn ramble as far north as the Saguenay, flowing majestically through 67 FICTIONAL RAMBLES the great Canadian forests ; but the centrip- etal force of this ' Hub planet,' so to speak, had always a much stronger effect upon him than the centrifugal ; and like those red woolen balls fastened to a rubber string, which in our boyhood caused us glee, he sought his native town with the more rapidity, the farther away from it he strayed. Though he did not revel in existence there, somehow he seemed to be- long in the old town." This is a photographic picture of the con- servative Boston type. Sewell, however, was capable of doing the unexpected, and in the opening chapter of the novel, having suddenly decided to go to Europe, we learn that " he tacked upon his office-door the legend : ' Back in five minutes,' engrossed in his neatest legal hand-writing, walked up to his rooms, packed his valise, hailed a coupe, and drove to the station without a word of good-bye to a soul in the city, after thirty years of residence." It is interesting to know that Mr. Wheelwright originally intended Sewell to be a kind of 68 o :- — s "3 *> b* £ U C ■S c bfi „ O I* S >> o o. tc c £ :- or ^ « K 71 -^ 6 9 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Yankee Pickwick who travelled about in search of adventure ; but he got involved in the Mugwump campaign of 1884, and became ruined by what Mr. Wheelwright called, in speaking of him, " the fatal contact with poli- tics. Just below the club, Roweny (Mrs. Keats Bradford) took an apartment because she liked the odour of business which in recent years has crept into the street. At the corner, fac- ing in Tremont Street, is the Park Street Church which Martin (Trowbridge's Martin Merrivale) attended. On the western slope of the Common is the beautiful Beacon Street Mall, which seemed to Lemuel Barker (Howells's The Minister s Charge) a kind of grove, so attractive and home-like to the country lad that he lingered on one of the benches, where misfortunes soon befell him. Later in his career he took a memorable walk through this mall with Made- line Swan. Here, too, came Bartley Hubbard and Marcia (Howells's A Modern Instance), 71 FICTIONAL RAMBLES who, so far from knowing that they must not walk in the Common, used to sit down on a bench there in the pleasant weather, and watch the opening of the spring. To the literary rambler the Common holds no walk so full of interest as " the long path," running down from opposite Joy Street south- ward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston Street, which the Autocrat and the Schoolmistress walked together. " I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit)," says the Autocrat, " as we came op- posite the head of this path on that morning. I think I tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible. At last I got out the question, — Will you take the long path with me ? — Certainly, — said the schoolmistress, — with much pleasure. — Think, — I said, — be- fore you answer : if you take the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more. — The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow had struck her. One of the long granite blocks 72 * i; AM ■r = 3 'I 1. r- u "J3 — 5 ho£ s S - , • •• l . • • • ***v -' ' i. — u ■~> is • ■= =JS w O /. «, 7,-oq , ■¥* - x >• a »■*'. );1 — — u .- 5- Kb 3 o ,3 73 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON used as seats was hard by, — the one you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. — Pray, sit down, — I said. — No, no, she answered, softly, — I will walk the long path with you ! " How delightful to have been the old gentleman who met them about the middle of the way down, walking arm in arm ! The granite seat has been removed from the mall, but the gingko- tree remains, and no doubt its delicate flutter- ing leaves are still whispering love secrets to the neighbouring tree-tops. From the Joy Street mall across the hollow which holds the Frog Pond is the most charm- ing view on the Common, we are told by Mr. Arlo Bates in The Pagans, one of the charac- ters of which novel, Helen Greyson, frequent- ly traversed this path on her way from her home on Beacon Hill to her studio. The Frog Pond is described by Mr. Howells in The Minister s Charge as the place where, after a wretched night on one of the near-by benches, Barker washed his hands and face, while other people were asleep all round him. 75 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Across the green in the Tremont Street mall used to sit old Mr. James Bowdoin (Stim- son's Pirate Gold) for half an hour before breakfast every morning, walking over from his home in Colonnade Row over the way. And here, no doubt, sat the hero of Looking Backward, " finding an interest merely in watching the throngs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow-citi- zens and their ways become to me." The Common, with its malls and well-regu- lated intersecting paths, is not now quite the sunny meadow and pasture for cows Cooper's Lionel Lincoln, in the novel of that name, found it when first he came to Boston, though soon after his arrival the bucolic rusticity of the scene was broken by the quartering of British soldiers. The impish Job Pray, whose weird and daring- utterances astonished his red-coat auditors, told Lionel he objected to the sol- diers because they starved the cows. " Boston cows," said he, " don't love grass that British 7 6 z ■• u en .2 £ 77 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON soldiers have trampled on." Many a time in those anxious days Lionel, listening for a stir of soldiery on the Common, heard only the "faint lowing of cattle from the meadows." In TJic Rebels Lydia M. Childs pictures the Common invaded by the British, and so, too, does Mr. Chambers in his colonial novel, Car- digan. " I had never before seen so man)' sol- diers together," says the hero, " nor such a brilliant variety of uniforms. The townspeople, too, lingered to watch the soldiers, some sul- lenly, some indifferently, some in open enjoy- ment. These latter were doubtless Tories, for in their faces one could not mistake the expres- sion of sneering triumph. Also many of them talked to the soldiers, which earned them un- concealed scowls from passing citizens." Of the Common thus invaded Holmes con- tributes his picture : And over all the open green, Where grazed of late the harmless kine, The cannon's deepening ruts are seen, The war-horse stamps, the bayonets shine, 79 FICTIONAL RAMBLES The clouds are dark with crimson rain Above the murderous hireling's den, And soon their whistling showers shall stain The pipe-clayed belts of Gage's men. What would seem to us now as strange a spectacle as the cows was the spinning craze, which led the belles of the colony to bring their wheels to the Common. This odd scene Bynner describes in Agnes Surriage. " Rows of young women with their spinning wheels were busy at work in the open air," he says, " while elderly men and matrons went up and down the hill to give them countenance and keep at a distance the gaping crowd. 'Tis the fashion," Frankland explained to Agnes, " to encourage industry and thrift ; these are the daughters of our most substantial citizens come forth here to give an example to the meaner sort.' " From the coquetry of the pretty minxes he suspected they enjoyed the admiration of the swains close at hand, and he laughingly hurried Agnes away lest she join the ranks. Near the Common half-way down in West Street, was the Latin School attended by the 80 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON hero of Wheelwright's A Child of the C 'etitury, and Philip Sanderson in Mrs. Otis's The Bar- clays of Host on. Just around the corner in Mason Street is " the Old P31m, that subter- ranean retreat known to bachelors and busy husbands," where the elder Craighead {Truth Dexter) heard his son unpleasantly discussed. Turning from here through an alley to Washington Street, and walking down a short distance to the corner of Washington and Es- sex Streets, we come upon the exact spot where in Revolutionary days stood the Lib- erty Tree. Of this section of the town as de- scribed in the novels of colonial life nothing actually remains ; but strolling in this locality, imagination sweeps away the modern business blocks and whirr of traffic, to conjure up a pic- ture of these stirring days when the Sons of Liberty flitted about this neighbourhood, then almost pastoral. In The Rebels we, Are. told by the novelist that there was shot into Governor Hutchinson's rooms one evening an arrow to which was fastened a slip of paper bearing S3 FICTIONAL RAMBLES these words : " Lieutenant Governor, Member of the Council, Commander of the Castle, Judge of the. Probate, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court ! You are hereby commanded to appear under the Liberty Tree within one hour, to plight your faith that you will use no more influence against an injured and exasper- ated people." Discussing this, the Governor explained to Somerville that the Liberty Tree was a large elm opposite Frog Lane, where the mob dared to suspend their insulting effi- ofies. This historic tree stood beside a smaller one in the yard of a dwelling, where it re- mained until the British cut it down in Au- gust, 1775. The rambler who finds it difficult to picture this in imagination may be inter- ested to look up on the wall of the business building in Washington, just below Essex Street, and see the memorial bas-relief of the Liberty Tree, which has been placed there. A few steps north, about opposite the present Haywood Place, stood in Washington (then called Newbury) Street the White Horse Tav- 84 1*> — r3 B 3 "o ~ 3 2 1> £ 4_, - ? O 43 ^i stance." i , , r^ i thought the Garden rather pretty and just absurd enough to be in- teresting — she half expected to see a banana tree grafted onto a beech — just to be decora- tively unique, and the gardeners, she said, had contrived to make the statues seem designed for centres and reliefs to their flower schemes. She thouo-ht there couldn't be too many statues — " the orood ones are beautiful and the bad ones are quaint. They're different from bad poetry or bad pictures." 97 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Westward from the bench where Virginia was sitting is the Ether Monument mentioned in Truth Dexter, while the Washington and Venus statues in close proximity to her are many times alluded to in Mr. Howells's fiction, notably in The Minister s Charge, where we learn that Barker, for the first time in the Gar- den, observed the image of Washington on horseback and a naked woman in a orranite basin, which he thought ought not to be al- lowed there — the Venus shocked his inexperi- ence. Bartley Hubbard (A Modern Instance), however, who was already beginning to get up a taste for art, boldly stopped and praised the Venus. He and Marcia during their first months in Boston frequently resorted to the Garden, where they admired the bridge and the rockwork and the statues. Ford {The Undiscovered Country), who strolled here when the whole precinct rested in patrician insensibility to the plebeian hour of seven, surprised the marble Venus without her shower on, but he never sat by the statue, 99 IN AND A ii O U T B O S T O N preferring a bench under the Kilmarnock wil- lows by the pond. These beautiful willows are described in The Sentimentalists, and un- der one of them we find Hartwell, the hero of Her Boston Experiences, alone on a bench — driven to so shocking a disregard of the con- ventionalities by desperation. " I had no idea," exclaims the heroine, discovering him there, " a Bostonian with connections would do anything so plebeian as to sit in the Public Garden on a bench." She and one or two of her friends were venturesome enough to sit there occasionally, but they were not Bosto- nians. Bounding the Garden on the east is Charles Street, and returning to this thoroughfare we get into step with Graham (Elisa Orne White's Miss Brooks), who, walking there with Janet unexpectedly, in a desperate mood tells her that he loves her. Great is his amazement when she replies : " I have cared for you a long time. When I am with you I am happy, it does not matter where we are ; and when I FICTIONAL RAMBLES am away from you, it is the feeling that you are in the world too, belonging to me in a certain sense, because you are my friend, that makes the best part of all my days." This is one of the few events in Boston fiction which occurs out-of-doors, city life, naturally, not lending itself to much action in the open be- yond the casual meeting of characters as they traverse the streets. At the corner of Charles and Boylston Streets is the apothecary's window before which dear old Miss Birdseye ( The Bostonians), who was always round the streets, stood with Basil Ransom, the Mississippian, waiting for her South End car — she, the while, protesting vigourously against the idea that a gentleman from the South should pretend to teach an old abolitionist the mysteries of Boston. This corner and the Providence station near by are identified with the delightful, fond-of- entertainments Susan and her original escort (Susans Escort) whom the humour of Dr. Hale has made for us. Susan, finding it un- IU3 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON pleasant to go about alone at night in Boston, conceived the idea of making herself an escort after this fashion : " She bought a cheap and "... They stood in the sun, with their backs against an apothecary's window." — James's "The Bostonians," light gossamer overcoat, a travelling cap, a dozen toy masks and a pair of badly worn check pantaloons. She also bought rattan enough, and the wire of hoop-skirts, for her purpose. She sewed to the bottom of the pan- 105 FICTIONAL RAMBLES taloons two arctics. From the rattan, with an old umbrella slide, she made a backbone and two available legs to support the mackintosh, and on the top of the backbone she could ad- just either of the masks which she preferred with the travelling cap. The whole thing would shut together like a travelling-; easel. The mask would go into her leather bag, which, like others of her sex, she carried every- where. The rest could then be slid into a lono- umbrella case." Her adventures with this dummy are inimitably told in the story, in which we are assured that in the halcyon days of " the escort's " first success Susan enjoyed her winter of entertainments as she had never en- joyed a winter before. For, if you choose, in Boston, says Dr. Hale, "there is nothing you may not see and hear and know and under- stand in the heavens above, or the earth be- neath, or the waters that are supposed to be under the earth." The clever Susan, who lived in the suburbs on the Providence road, always on arriving at the station stepped out 106 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON to that sheltered lee where you wait for Cam- bridge Street cars and opened up her new friend to his own proportions. It is simple The home of Mrs. Mesh in Arlington Street. — -James's "A A T ew England Winter." enough to identify this starting-point of hers outside of the now abandoned station. Craighead [Truth Dexter), returning from Alabama, came in to Boston at the Providence Station which loomed positively palatial to the 107 FICTIONAL RAMBLES returning traveller. The vista of the Public Garden through the narrow framing of Church Street, the . objurgations of rival cab-drivers, the long line of electric cars crawling about the corner of Charles like a migration of saturnian ants, and the tireless current of uncon- cerned humanity pouring through the channel of Boylston, — all combined to thrill him with a re- turning sense of vital- ity and power. Truth also got her first im- pressions of the city here. Ford and Phil- lips (Howells's The Undiscovered Country!) lodged in Boylston Street which runs beside the Garden on the south. At the corner of Boylston and Arling- ton Streets, facing the Garden, is the Arlington Street church referred to in the same novel. ioS " Mrs. Adams lived in that sun- niest part of Beacon Street which fashionable residents are abandon- ing to fashionable dressmakers." — " Truth Dexter." IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Beyond this, farther down the street, we pass the residence of Mrs. Mesh (James's A New England II 'inter), with whom Rachel Torrance spent the winter and where that most tiresome of prigs Florimond JDaintry, was frequently to be found. Just around the corner, east- ward, is the residence described as Mrs. Adams's {Truth Dexter) "in that sunniest part of Beacon Street which fashionable residents are abandoning to fashionable dressmakers, suffering it to connect, as it were, by the handle of a dumb-bell, the two aristocratic bulks of the Milldam and Beacon Hill." VI. THE BACK BAY THE new land, commonly known as the Back Bay, was made in the early fifties, when the process of filling in the bay began, and plans were drawn on which were laid out the streets with names which seem to have been borrowed from the British peerage. Thirty years more or less were con- sumed in filling in the bay, with the result that 109 FICTIONAL RAMBLES it became the Court End of the city, fulfilling the prophecy of its projectors. But those were years of dust, of rattling gravel trains, of a be- wilderment of annoyances which drove more than one of the steady-going citizens into rural retirement, and some, it is to be feared, into the quiet of the grave. This made land forms a scenic background in fiction for a dominant phase of modern Bos- ton — neither literary, nor sesthetical, nor of a distinctive atmosphere, but fashionable and up-to-date on a metropolitan model. Regard- ing with high disfavour this section of the town, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney years ago wrote of it {Hitherto}: "The Back Bay has been filled up, and a section of Paris dumped down into it." Here we find the " water side of Beacon Street " and the " sunny side of Com- monwealth Avenue," which, as Mr. Howells says, mean so much more than the words say. Curiously enough, while the less desirable side of Beacon Street is fashionable,the same cannot be said of the avenue, where only the " sunny 3 £ V ^i £ 8 XI "^ X! a 3 ^ ^ 3 £^ § a 03 1-1 ^) S XI ja ^ >- u u < Si M — z K - IN AND ABOUT BOSTON side," fashionably speaking, is " possible," and no novelist, intent upon picturing smart society in the Hub, fails to be cognizant of these dis- tinctions. Of these two residential streets, Beacon, though less beautiful, is more aristocratic. Frivolous, worldly Beacon Street, Mrs. Farrin- der (James's The Bostonians) called it, to the annoyance of Olive, who hated to hear it talked -about as if it were such a remarkable place, and to live there were a proof of worldly glory. In A New England Winter the same novelist tells us that Florimond greatly admired this (then) new street on the artificial bosom of the Back Bay. " The long straight street lay air- ing its newness in the frosty day, and all its individual facades, with their neat, sharp or- naments, seemed to have been scoured, with a kind of friction, by the hard, salutary light. Their brilliant browns and drabs, their rosy surfaces of brick, made a variety of fresh, vio- lent tones, such as Florimond like to memorize, and the lar^e clear windows of their curved 113 FICTIONAL RAMBLES fronts faced each other across the street, like candid, inevitable eyes. There was something almost terrible in the windows ; Florimond had forgotten how vast and clean they were, and now, in their sculptured frames, the New Eng- land air seemed, like a zealous housewife, to polish and preserve them. Not far from Arlington Street in Beacon was, we imagine, the home of Mrs. Sam Wynd- ham (Crawford's An American Politician). She was a woman, the novelist says, who did her duty in the social state in which she was called in Boston, reserving the right to do many things according to her mood while fol- lowing most of the established Beacon Street customs. Beacon Street receives Monday af- ternoons, and all Boston came to Mrs. Wynd- ham's receptions, " excepting all the other ladies who live in Beacon Street, and that is a very considerable portion of Boston, as every schoolboy knows." We are at once told the age of Mrs. Wyndham, for " it is as easy for a Bostonian to conceal a question of age as for a 114 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON crowned head. In a place where one-half of society calls the other half cousin, and went to school with it, everyone knows and accurately remembers just how old everybody else is." This matter of cousinship on the Hub is also commented on by Mr. Arlo Bates in Love In a Cloud : " May, as it is the moral duty of every self-respecting Bostonian to be, was re- lated to everybody who was socially anybody." It has been repeatedly said that Marion Crawford drew Mrs. Sam Wyndham from a cer- tain world-renowned social leader, whose beau- tiful home until recently was on " the water side " not far from Arlington Street, and he is not the only novelist thus accused, for this same brilliant woman is at once proclaimed the pro- totype of any feminine character of marked in- dividuality and social prominence who appears in the pages of Boston fiction. Of course, knowingly says the public, she is the original of Mrs. Sam Wyndham, and of Mrs. Chauncey Wilson (Bates's The Puritans), and did not Miss Anna Farquhar exactly picture her as FICTIONAL RAMBLES Mrs. Bobby Short {Her Boston Experiences), who always sailed in late to receptions with a string of men in tow u like a graceful ship in full sail with several tugs steaming in her wake." This determination on the part of the public to see in purely fictitious women an actual one is a little hard on the supposed " model," and those novelists whose characters are the crea- tures of their brain. To return to the house of Mrs. Sam Wynd- ham, Crawford makes a most amusing comment relative to its number. " It is a peculiarity of Boston to put the number of the houses on the back instead of the front, so that the only cer- tain course to follow in searching for a friend is to reach the rear of his house, by a circuit- ous route through side streets and back alleys, and then, having fixed the exact position of his residence by astronomical observation, to re- turn to the front and enquire for him. It is true that even then one is frequently mistaken, but there is nothing- else to be done." Evidently Mrs. Sam Wyndham did not, like 116 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Mrs. Daintry (James's A New England Win- ter), follow the old Boston custom of ornament- ing her door with a large silver plate, the exhibition of which Mrs. Daintry preferred to the more distinguished modern fashion of sup- pressing the domiciliary label. The Autocrat makes mention of these Beacon Street door plates, which in his day were a matter of course. In the neighbourhood of Mrs. Sam Wynd- ham lived Miss Schenectady, at whose house we first meet John Harrington, who is the American politician which gives the novel its title. This Harrington, says his creator, was a constant source of interest, and not infre- quently of terror, to the good town of Boston. " True, he was a Bostonian himself, a chip of the old block, whose progenitors had lived in Salem, and whose very name breathed Pilgrim memories. He even had a tea-pot that had come over in the Mayflower. This was greatly venerated, and whenever John Harrington said anything more than usually modern his friends 117 FICTIONAL RAMBLES brandished the tea-pot, morally speaking, in his defense, and put it in the clouds as a kind of rainbow — a promise that Puritan blood could not go wrong. Nevertheless, Harring- ton continued to startle his fellow-townsmen by his writings and sayings, so that many of the grave sort shook their heads and swore that he sympathized with the Irish and be- lieved in Chinese labor." Beacon Street was the locality in which lived Bayard's uncle, Mr. Hermon Worcester (Miss Phelps's A Singular Life), though the author says she had, and never does have, for the homes of her characters any particular houses in mind. Bayard, she has told us in her Chap- ter From a Life, is her dearest hero. The house of most interest as we stroll down the water side of Beacon Street is No. 296, once the home of the Autocrat and now of his son Judge Holmes. Mr. Howells, for three years his near neighbour,opens the door for us in a charming fashion {Literary Friends and Acquaintance), and having conducted us to IN AND ABOUT BOSTON the library, shows us the view from the win- dow as the Autocrat saw and loved it. " He said that you could count fourteen towns and villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous monuments accenting the different attractions of it : the tower of Me- morial Hall at Harvard ; the obelisk on Bun- ker Bill ; and in the centre of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he ex- pected to greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world. But the prospect, though generally the same, had cer- tain precious differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fan- cied these were to be enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to 119 FICTIONAL RAMBLES ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupu- 296 BEACON STREET (THE OVAL DOORWAY), THE HOME OF " THE AUTOCRAT " 302, THE HOME OF MR. HOWELLS "When you come to the Back Bay, give me the water side of Beacon Street." — Ho Wells's " The Hise of Silas Lapham" lously neat as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious little contrivances IN AND ABOUT BOSTON for helping his work, which he liked to show you ; for a time a revolving bookcase at the corner of his desk seemed to be his pet ; and after that came his fountain pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine in the inkstand ; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in any- wise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps taken a peep at some- thin? he was examining- through his micro- scope, he sat down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the other." At No. 302, just below the Autocrats, is the house occupied by Mr. Howells, in the library of which he wrote much of his later Boston fiction. He had this block in mind in describ- ing the home of Miss Kingsbury (A Woman s Reason), and also the site of the ill-fated man- sion of Col. Lapham {The Rise of Silas Lap- ham). " When you come to the Back Bay," said the Colonel to young Corey while showing him over the house, " give me the water side FICTIONAL RAMBLES of Beacon Street. . . . The Bay spreads its glassy sheet before them, empty but for a few- small boats and a large schooner, with her sails close-furled and dripping like snow from her spars, which a tug was rapidly towing toward " Marlborough, a straight, long street with houses just alike." — Howellss "The Minister' 's Charge." Cambridge. The carpentry of that city, em- banked and embowered in foliage, shared the picturesqueness of Charlestown in the dis- tance." Parallel to and one block south of Beacon Street is Marlborough, " a straight, long street, with houses just alike on both sides and bits of grass before them," called by Mr. Howells IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Holingbrook in describing it as the street in which lived the Rev. Mr. Sewell, whom the novelist has intimately involved in the affairs of Silas Lapham and in The Minister 's Charge. " — they neared Mrs. Rangelev's house on Marl- borough Street." — Arlo Bates's " The Puri- tans" Half a block away lived Miss Vane, of the lat- ter novel, and somewhere in this street lived Mrs. Rangeley ( Bates's The Puritans), where so much that was eventful happened to Mau- rice Wynne. At No. 459 Marlborough Street is the town house of Mr. j. F. Stimson, the novelist and 123 FICTIONAL RAMBLES The home of the Maxwells on the "sunny side" of Common- wealth Avenue. — Eliza Orne White s "Afiss Brooks." author of Pirate, Gold, the characters of which are old friends, many of whose haunts and homes we have dis- covered in our ram- bles. Commonweal th Avenue, or in the vernacular, "the Ave- nue," with its beauti- ful park through the centre, is next in impor- tance to Beacon Street in the pages of Boston fiction. We know that the Maxwells [Miss Brooks) lived there, as did the Rowans and Dr. McDowell {The Sentimentalists) ; so, too, did the Chauncey Wilsons [The Puritans), Mrs. Wiley (Truth Dexter), we suspect, and the inconsequent Grangers [Her Boston Experi- ences) were quite content with it when they might have lived in Beacon Street ! All these persons being fashionables, lived 124 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON The home of the Chauncey Wil- sons — at the corner of Common- wealth Avenue and Hereford Street. — Arlo Bates's " The Puritans." on " the sunny side " — the Maxwells be- tween Arlington and Berkeley Streets, in a beautiful vine-cov- ered house, while be- low them is the gray stone dwelling 1 of the Rowans — the girl, but not her brother, one of the most pro- nounced of The Senti- mentalists. Indeed, her temperament is re- sponsible for the fact that the title of Mr. Pier's novel is plural rather than singular. It was originally his intention to build this story mainly around his hero, Vernon Kent, but Frances Rowan developed such an excess of sentimentality, and Mrs. Kent became so in- sistent that a change of title was necessary. In Mrs. Kent we have a case of a character dominating her creator. She was intended to play a clever second to her son, instead 125 FICTIONAL RAMBLES of which she showed a decided preference for the centre of the stage, which she kept with such persistence that Mr. Pier was forced to let her take things into her own hands, as a result of which she is one of the most interesting women to-day in Boston fiction. At the corner of the Avenue and Hereford Street we find the im- posing house described by Mr. Bates in The* Puritans as the home of the Chauncey Wilsons. " On the proper side of the Avenue with a regal " Mrs. Daintry was very fond of this beautiful prospect."— front of marble and with James's "A New England Win- ter -" balconies of wrought iron before the wide windows above, one of es- pecially elaborate workmanship having once adorned the front of the palace of the Tuileries. Pillars of verd antique stood on either side of the doorway, as if it were the portal of a temple." 126 THE AVENUE THROUGH THE PARK IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Turnincr now to stroll down the Avenue through the park, we come upon the much dis- cussed and much despised statues of states- men — one for every block, to which Virginia THE ST. BOTOLPH CLUB — NO. 2 NEWBURY STREET Kent calls Ballington's attention. Mr. Bates's characters in The Philistines were greatly agi- tated over plans for a new statue, about which they had conflicting and most violent opinions, which leads the author to say : " The inner history of the effigies which in Boston do duty as statues would be most interesting reading:, 127 FICTIONAL RAMBLES amusing or depressing as one felt obliged to take it. To know what causes led to the pro- 233 CLARENDON STREET — THE HOME OF THE LATE BISHOP BROOKS " The two clergymen left the house and went down the street together." — Arlo Bates's "The Puritans.'" duction and then to the erection of these mon- strosities could hardly fail to be instructive, although the knowledge might be rather 128 c is §, — c < - - '; 4-. c ° i-. < 1) . - a - C 2 § ™ — O — -Z ° a 5= u •r. fs s " „-5 ^ §^ r. J '^ — S ?* - •a ^ 195 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON to which — so Job Pray said (Cooper's Lionel Lincoln ) ( rage secretly retired to plan the battle of Bunker Hill. Remarkably well preserved inside and out is the house, unchanged since it was built. It is now occupied by a venerable little Irishman "bowed with his fourscore years and ten " — a well-known and unique character in a neighbourhood Italian — who is persuaded sometimes to allow within his gates the stranger permitted not to conjure up the shades of Cooper's characters, but quaintly made conversant of the fact that mine host, now retired from active business, is the oldest living fish merchant on T Wharf. It is but a few steps on to Copp's Hill bury- ing-ground where Each in his narrow cell forever laid The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. Here, too, sleeps the gentle Grace Osborne, who moves like some spirit from another world through the pages of The Rebels, the hero of which, Captain Somerville, breaking faith with her, likewise broke her tender heart. Everyone 197 FICTIONAL RAMBLES remembers the exquisite letter of forgiveness and farewell she left for him and which was fowarded to the King's Head Tavern, Balti- more, where he was then supposed to be. " Three weeks after a young man called upon the sexton and requested the key of Mr. Os- borne's tomb. With weak, irregular steps he entered the house of death, and raised the lid of the coffin last placed there. . . . Not a sigfh, not a tear relieved the bursting ano-uish of his heart. His eye accidentally rested on the inscription: — Grace Osborne, aged 19. Departed this life May 27th, 1769." A month later Captain Somerville died and was laid to rest not far from his mourned love, in the south- east corner of the cemetery where the tomb of the Hutchinson family, of which he was a member, still remains. The beautiful coat-of- arms of the aristocratic family emblazons the slab of sand-stone which covers the entrance to the tomb desecrated by an act of vandalism, for the name of Hutchinson has been obliterated and that of Thomas Lewis cut in its place. 198 IN AND A B O U T BOSTON With broad and brilliant strokes in Lionel Lincoln Cooper paints for us this famed hill. THE SPOT FROM WHICH LIONEL LINCOLN WATCHED THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL " — he, too, is for Copp's, where we can all take a lesson in arms by studying the manner in which Howe wields his battalions." — Cooper's "Lionel Lincoln." He has described it by moonlight, when the scene was so weird and uncanny that Lionel refused to wander there among; the graves ; 199 FICTIONAL RAMBLES again at night in stirring times when, restless and excited, Lionel found himself issuing upon the open space that is tenanted by the dead. " On this eminence the Eno-lish o-eneral had caused a battery of heavy cannon to be raised, and Lionel, unwilling to encounter the chal- lenge of the sentinels, inclining a little to one side, proceeded to the brow of the hill, and seating himself on a stone, began to muse deeply on his own fortunes and the situation of the country. . . . The stillness of midnight rested on the scene, and when the loud calls of "all's well" ascended from the ships and batter- ies, the momentary cry was succeeded by a quiet as deep as if the universe slumbered under this assurance of safety." From this elevation, with Clinton and Burgoyne, Lionel watched through a spy-glass the fighting at Bunker Hill — told by the novelist in so graphic and pictorial a man- ner that Bancroft, the historian, says it is the finest description of the battle we have. In these days there was an unobstructed view of Charlestown, and the whole scene of H z S P IN AND ABOUT BOS T O N the bloody struggle lay before these men, who, in the beginning, thought it a glorious spectacle but quickly began to realize that the incessant roll of the American musketry was something to be respected, nay feared ; and when, as the conflict proceeded the result was known, the bewildered group on Copps gazed in each others' faces with undisguised amazement, and then made a mad rush down the hill to the shore and a boat which they ordered to quickly convey them to the scenes of operations. To appreciate the sensation of Major Lincoln and his brother officers of that momentous day cne must turn to the sixteenth chapter of Lionel Lin- coln which alone would have given Cooper fame. A stone's throw from Copp's Hill, at the corner of Prince and Margaret Streets, stands the home of Master John Tileston (Bynner's Zachary Phips). Time has laid its destruc- tive hand on the old house, which, neverthe- less, holds its own as one of the few remaining examples of the simple architecture of pre- Revolutionary days. 203 FICTIONAL RAMBLES III. IN AND AROUND DOCK SQUARE THREADING ourwaynow down Prince and west through Salem Street, we cross Blackstone Street, named for the man who founded Boston. This ec- centric individual is made by Hawthorne to play the part of the priest in his tale The May-pole of Merry Mount. At least in the story he is accused of so doing by the austere Endicott, who, calling him " priest of Baal," demands that he throw off the dis- guise he has assumed as one of the large party of merrymakers, who were assisting in the nuptials of the Lord and Lady of the May. Hawthorne is characteristically vague in the matter. Indeed, in a note appended to the tale he says : " The Rev. Mr. Blackstone, though an eccentric, is not known to have been an immoral man. We rather doubt his iden- tity with the priest of Merry Mount." Northwestward from here at the corner of Chambers Street and Green Lane was the 204 IN AND ABOUT B O S I N "Wild Goose Tavern" described in Robert W. Chambers's colonial novel Cardigan. The tavern — an ancient, discoloured, rambling structure, with a weather-vane atop, and a long- pillared porch in front, from which hung a bush of sea-weed, and a red sign-board depicting a creature which doubtless was intended for a wild goose" — was not, the author says, in an aristocratic neighbourhood. "Warehouses, ship- chandlers, rope-walks, and scrap-iron shops lined the streets, interspersed with vacant, bar- ren plots of ground, rarely surrounded by wooden fences. . . . Northward across the misty water the roof and steeples of Charles- town reddened in the sun ; to the west the cannon on Copps Hill glittered, pointing sea- ward over the Northwest Water Mill. From somewhere in the city came the beating of drums and the faint squealing of fifes ; the lion banner of England flapped from Beacon Hill ; white tents crowned the summit of Valley Acre ; the ashes of the Beacon smoked." This was the city as first seen by Cardigan. 205 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Returning now to Blackstone Street and crossing it, we continue a few steps in Hanover Street, when a sharp turn to the left brings us into Marshall Street and up to the Boston Stone, where, on the night of the 14th of August, 1765, Henry Osborne lingered to watch the ominous bon-fire on Fort Hill so vividly described in the opening chap- ter of The Rebels. Though this stone bears the date of 1 737 and has a "He leaned a moment on Un- Un '^ UQ history, it is Jon (Boston) .Stone listening to passe( } unnoticed by the distant tumult. — Lydia M, r J Child- s -The Rebels." the ma j or i ty Q f per . sons who frequent the neighbourhood. From here we pass down Union Street or take a short cut to North Street by Creek 206 •' z C -43 207 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Lane and Scottow's Alley, emerging- upon Faneuil Hall, in Dock Square. Frankland, the Collector (Bynner's Agnes Surrzage), attended the great meeting there when Master John Lovell pronounced the fu- neral oration upon the widely mourned Peter Faneuil, and the novelist gives us an amusing account of a conversation after the meeting, between the Collector and Master Pel ham, who, jealous of the honour conferred on his brother pedagogue, consoled himself by tart criticism of the oration. In The Rebels is also pictured a Faneuil Hall meeting, this an exciting one called by Samuel Adams to pro- test against the ruined mansion of Hutchin- son and petition the Legislature to repair it at the expense of the State. On the south side of Faneuil Hall, partially hidden in old Corn Court, is standing the his- toric Hancock Tavern which figures in Byn- ner's Zachary Phips. The stable yard where Zach loved to mingle with the crowd of teams- ters, hostlers and hangers-on, is no more, but 209 FICTIONAL RAMBLES the house itself has undergone few changes and its bar would seem to be doing at the present time' as flourishing a business as in the days of Zach and again of Talleyrand, who is said to have sojourned there when in Boston in 1795. The sign of the tavern bearing the weather-stained features of Governor Hancock has been removed from the door and placed in a room teemino" with historic but, alas! no lit- erary interest. Such interest, how- ever, centres in the neigh- bourhood of Dock yard of the old Brasier Inn." — q 1 ■ 1^ • . 1 Bynner's "Zachary Phips" oqiiare, WUlcn IS tne scene of much of Lionel Lincoln. When the young British major frequented it, its centre was a swineine bridge thrown across an inlet from the harbour and extending a short distance into 210 "Wandering into the stable- IN AND ABOUT BOSTON the area, forming' a shallow dock. The square was composed of low, gloomy buildings, in one of which, a warehouse standing within the memory of many persons, the mysterious Ralph lived with Abigail and Job Pray. A short walk up through here across Adams Square and we come upon Cornhill, as quaint and interesting as its London prototype. The character of the street has changed some- what since Trowbridge's A far tin Af err hale, the hero of the novel of that name, sought out a publisher there for his precious manuscript, The Beggar of Bagdad, but if publishers have largely abandoned it to other trades, booksellers still find it a lucrative field, and on either side of its winding street are fascinating antiquar- ian shops. Martin Merrivale hopefully seek- ing out a publisher lives through sensations still vivid in the experience of his creator, John T. Trowbridee, when, as a vouna- man, he went to New York to seek his literary fortunes It is more than probable that to Cornhill also came the brave-hearted old Master Byles 213 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Gridley (Holmes's The Guardian Angel), bringing his protege, the embryo poet, Gifted Hopkins, to call on a publisher who might be persuaded to purchase his MS., a collection of poems entitled " Blossoms of the Soul." In referring to this fictitious young poet Holmes says : " Perhaps I have been too hard with Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of rhymesters to which he belongs. I ought not to forget that I, too, introduced myself to the reading world in a thin volume of verses, many of which had better not have been written, and would not be reprinted now, but for the fact that they have established a right to a place among my poems in virtue of long occupancy. Besides, although the writing - of verses is often a mark of mental weakness, I cannot forget that Joseph Story and George Bancroft each pub- lished his little book of rhymes, and that John Ouincy Adams had left many poems on record, the writing of which did not interfere with the vast and important labors of his illustrious career." 214 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Across from Cornhill, on the space now oc- cupied by Codmen's Buildings, once stood Earl's Coffee-house, from which Zach (Bynner's Zachary Phips) started out to New York on the fast mail coach, the Flying Cloud. At the head of Cornhill, in the former residence of one John Wendell, was the Royal Custom House at the time Frankland (Bynner's Agnes Surriage) was Collector. Near by was the studio of John Smybert, who, by Frankland's order, painted the portrait of Agnes. Some- times at her sittings, the novelist says, she ran across the little Jack Copley whom Smybert was teaching, and of whom he truly prophesied when he said : " He hae the richt stuff in him. . . . he's bound to q-o far ahead o' his old mais- ter ane o' thae days." Through this old Scot's estate Brattle Street in after times burst forth into Scollay Square. Just south of here in Queen Street, now Court, lived the Osbornes [The Rebels) where Governor Hutchinson and his family took refuse at the time his mansion was attacked. 215 FICTIONAL RAMBLES In Queen Street, says the author of Cardigan, was the elegant mansion of Mrs. Hamilton who plays a leading part in the book. Here also was the Court-house and prison where Cardigan and Jack Mount were confined. " From the 29th of October until the 15th day of December chained ankle to ankle, wrist to wrist, and wearing a steel collar from which chains huno- and were riveted to the rin^s on my legs, I lay in that vile iron cage known as the ' Pirates' Chapel ' in company with Mount and eight sullen, cursing ruffians." Identified with this street are the tragic ficr- ures of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter of which Holmes wrote : / snatch the book, along whose burning leaves His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves. The jail where Hester Prynne was confined was the Old Prison in Prison Lane, as it was called before it became Queen and later Court Street. This is not the jail described in Car- digan, but a structure of a much earlier date. " Some fifteen or twenty years after the settle- 216 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON ment of the town {The Scarlet Letter) the wooden jail was already marked with weather- stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more an- tique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel- track of the street, was a grass-plot, much over-grown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the por- tal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild-rose bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate orems, which mi^ht be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the con- demned criminal as he came forth to his doom in token that the deep heart of Nature could 217 FICTIONAL RAMBLES pity and be kind to him." This jail as well as " Pirates' Chapel " (Chamber's Cardigan) stood on the site of the present old Court House in Court Street. The immediate neighbourhood was the mar- ket place in which Hester Prynne (The Scarlet Letter) was forced to exhibit herself with her baby in her arms and the ignominious letter on her breast, and at the western extremity of the market place was the scaffold, " a penal machine which now for two or three genera- tions past, has been merely historical and tra- ditional among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promo- tion of good citizenship, as ever was the guil- lotine among the terrorists of France. . . .Hes- ter's sentence bore that she should stand a cer- tain time upon the platform, but without under- going the grip about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine." The scaffold stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church situated where now 2lS IN AND A B O U T Ji O S T O N stands the Rogers building. Historically this was the first church of Boston built originally on ground at the head of what is now State Street, a site occupied by Brazer's Building, but in 1640, just before the opening- of 7V/e Scarlet Letter romance, it was removed to the locality Hawthorne describes. There the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale preached the Election Ser- mon, and vivid in every mind must be his sen- sational disclosure and the events preceding and following it. That The Scarlet Letter is founded on fact is well known, but it has been stoutly denied that Hawthorne drew his erring minister from the Rev. Thomas Cob- bett, of Lynn, who, in 1649, tne y ear named, actually delivered the Election Sermon. In this locality stood the town pump in Court Street, which, aided by Hawthorne's Muse, thus invoked the passer-by : " Like a dram-seller on the Mall at muster-day I cry aloud to all and sundry, in my plainest accents and at the very tip-top of my voice : ' Here it is, gentlemen ! Here is the good liquor ! Walk up, 219 FICTIONAL RAMBLES walk up, gentlemen, walk up, walk up. Here is the superior stuff ; here is the unadulterated ale of Father Adam — better than Cognac, Hol- lands, Jamaica, strong beer, or wine of any price ; here it is by the hogshead or single glass, and not a cent to pay ! Walk up, gen- tlemen, walk up, and help yourselves ! ' ' In modern Court Street was the office of Mr. David Willis (Aldrich's GoliatJi) and pre- sumably of another lawyer in fiction, Tom Harbinger (Bates's Love in a Cloud) who was never known to stir from his office without his bag — "a lawyer's green bag is in Boston as much a part of his dress as his coat is." IV. STATE STREET AND THE KING'S CHAPEL NEIGHBOURHOOD WE now reach the head of State Street where stands, as in the old days, the Town House, now known as the Old State House. In one of its state rooms occurred the celebration in honour of the Louisburgr heroes to which reference has THE OLD STATE HOUSE " Through days of sorrow and of mirth, Through days of death and days of birth, Through every swift vicissitude Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood." — Longfellow, IN AND ABOUT BOSTON been made of the description of this event in the pages of Agues Surriage. Among the many pictures adorning the rooms of this his- toric building, now preserved as a museum, two have distinct literary value — one, the full- length portrait of that noted woman and novel- ist, Mrs. 'Harrison Gray Otis; the other a re- production of the portrait of Holmes's cele- brated " Dorothy O." his Grandmother s mother : her age, I guess Thirteen summers, or something less; Girlish bust, tit womanly air; Smooth, square forehead with uprollcd hair, Lips that lover has never kissed; Taper fingers and slender wrist; Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade; So they painted the little maid. Standing beneath the lion and the unicorn of the old State House we find Jamie McMur- tagh (Stimson's Pirate Gold) on the twenty- seventh day of May, eighteen fifty-four, watching a scene memorable in the history of Boston and thus graphically pictured for us by the novelist : " Through historic State 223 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Street, cleared now as for a triumph, marched a company of Federal troops. Behind them, in a hollow square, followed a body of rough- appearing men, each with a short Roman sword and a revolver ; and in the open centre, alone and handcuffed, one trembling negro. The fife had stopped, and they marched now in a hushed silence to the tap of a solitary drum ; and behind came the naval marines with cannon. The street was hung across with flags, union down or draped in black, but the crowd was still. And all along the street, as far down as the wharf, where the free sea shone blue in the May sunshine, stood, on either side, a close rank of Massachusetts militia, with bayonets fixed, four thousand strong, restraining, behind, the fifty thousand men who muttered angrily, but stood still. Thus much it took to hold the old Bay State down to the Union in 1854, and carry one slave from it to bondage. Down the old street it was South Carolina that walked that day beneath the national flag, and Massachu- 224 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON setts that did homage, hiding her time until her sister State should turn her arms upon the emblem." A familiar tramping ground was this busy commercial thoroughfare to Jamie, who always walked " twice daily up the street to the Old Colony Bank, bearing in a rusty leathern wal- let anything, from nothing to a hundred thou- sand dollars, the daily notes and discounts of James Bowdoin's Sons." This bank, under the disguise of the Old Colony, is the Boston National Bank, which, since 1803, has been doing business at Number 50 State Street. The imaginary Mr. James Bowdoin was one of the directors, as was in reality his prototype, Mr. Josiah Bradlee, and it will be remembered that Jamie took, a clerkship there when his old firm ceased to do business in India Wharf. Jamie, a most Dickensy character, owes his being to the brain of Mr. Stimson, but it was said that he is suggestive now and then of a former messenger of a bank named Brecken- ridge, who, early in the century, began life as 225 FICTIONAL RAMBLES an " inside man " — as the Boston phrase is — in the Bradlee family. The pirate gold from "Jamie always walked twice daily up State Street to the Old Colony Bank, bearing in a rusty leathern wallet anything, from nothing to a hundred thousand dollars, the daily notes and discounts of James Bowdoin's Sons." — Siimsotis "Pirate Gold." which Mr. Stimson's story gets its title, and which was responsible for all the joy and misery in J amie's life, really lay, as described, in its little 226 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON mouldy bag " for nearly thirty years, high on a shelf, in an old chest, behind three tiers of tins of papers, in the deepest corner of the vault of the bank. It was never merged in other funds, nor converted, nor put at interest. . . . but carried, in specie, in its original pack- age ; four hundred and twenty-three American eagles and fifteen hundred and fifty-six Span- ish doubloons. Deposited by de Soto, June twenty-fourth, eighteen hundred and twenty-nine; for the benefit of whom it may concern? And it very much concerned Jamie, whom to know is to sorrow for and love. The State Street of to-day is graphically de- scribed by Mr. Edward Bellamy in Looking Backzvard. " Toward three o'clock," the hero says, " I stood on State Street, staring, as if I had never seen them before, at the banks and brokers' offices, and other financial institutions, of which there had been in the State Street of my vision no vestige. Business men, confi- dential clerks, and errand boys were thronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a 227 FICTIONAL RAMBLES few minutes of the closing hour. Opposite me was the bank where I did business, and presently I crossed the street, and going in with the crowd, stood in a recess of the way- looking on at the army of clerks handling money, and the cues of depositors at the teller's windows. An old gentleman whom I knew, a director of the bank, stopped a moment. ' In- teresting sight, isn't it, Mr. West?' he said. 1 Wonderful piece of mechanism ; I find it so myself. . . . It's a poem, sir, a poem, that's what I call it. Did you ever think that the bank is the heart of the business system ? From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux, the life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in the morning ;' and pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed on smiling. . . . Alas for the poor old bank direc- tor with his poem ! He had mistaken the throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart." Retracing our steps back again through Court Street we come to Tremont Row where IN AND ABOUT BOSTON the hero of Miss Phelps's A Singular Life had his unpleasant quarter of an hour with the maudlin Job Slip. Bayard, it will be remem- bered, was driving to the station with Helen Carruth when he came upon the delinquent. " Struggling in the iron grip of two policemen of assorted sizes, the form and tongue of Job Slip were forcibly ornamenting Tremont Row." Rescued by his minister, "Job, who was not too far gone to recognize his preserver, now threw his arms affectionately around Bayard's recoiling neck and became unendurably maud- lin. In a voice audible the width of the street, and with streaming tears and loathsome bless- ings, he identified Bayard as his dearest, best, nearest, and most intimate of friends." Just beyond here in Tremont Street is the Museum, a theatre dear to the hearts of the Bostonese, where Edward Everett Hale's de- lightful characters go frequently to see the well-remembered William Warren. In A Modern Instance Mr. Howells describes the place as old Bostonians remember it : tl They 229 FICTIONAL RAMBLES passed in through the long colonnaded vesti- bule, with its paintings and plaster casts, and rows of birds and animals in glass cases on either side, and Marcia gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects, endeared by associa- tion, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston playgoer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians swarming upon him ; the painty-necked os- triches and pelicans ; the mummied mermaid under a glass bell ; the governor's portraits ; the stuffed elephant ; Washington crossing the Delaware ; Cleopatra applying the asp ; Sir William Pepperel at full length, on canvas, and the pagan months and seasons in plaster, . , . were dim phantasmagoria amid which she and Bartley moved scarcely more than real." Adjoining the Museum is the venerated burying-ground and — Chapel, last of sublunary things That shocks our echoes with the name of Kings. Hawthorne tells us that Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth {The Scarlet Letter) dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the 230 231 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON site on which King's Chapel has since been built. "It had the graveyard," says the ro- mancer, " on one side, and so well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their re- spective employments, in both minister and the man of physic." Rich in fictional association is this burying- ground where, in their last sleep lie Dimmes- dale and Hester Prynne. Many years after Dimmesdale died "a new arave was delved near an old and sunken one, in that burial- ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings ; and on this simple slab of slate there appeared the semblance of an en- graved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald's wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend ; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever- 233 FICTIONAL RAMBLES glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow : — " 'On a field, sable, the letter A, gules' " To curious investigators are pointed out several graves which bear a slight resemblance to the one thus described, on which in Haw- thorne's day, he asserts, was plainly to be seen the letter A, visible now on no tombstone save only as it takes form in the necromancy of the imagination. Here, too, lie the Shirleys who figure in the pages of Agues Surriage and Mrs. Lechmere, Ralph, Job and Abigail Pray of Lionel Lin- coln. The tomb of the Shirleys — real per- sonages in fiction — remains, but it is impossible to designate the spot where the proud families of Lechmere and Lincoln were wont to inter their dead. The slate, Cooper says, has long since mouldered from the wall ; the sod has covered the stone. King's Chapel, venerated by present day Bostonians, vies with the old burying-ground in fictional interest. Here, with his relatives 234 us £ 3 u - « -^ - 5 M M .S 5S a <, v I o .1 235 IN AND A B C) U T B S T O N and brother officers, Major Lincoln (Cooper's Lionel Lincoln) worshipped ; so, too, did the Bowdoins, Jamie and Mercedes {Pirate Gold) ; Frankland, Agnes and the Shirleys {Agnes Surriage), and Olive Chancellor (Henry James's The Bostonians). Lionel and Cecil were married there during the Revolution and a glance into the interior of the church shows the same laboured columns with their slender shafts admired by Lionel and the same chancel rails on which Cecil threw her mantle before accompanying him to the foot of the altar. " With some eclat," St. Clair and Mercedes {Pirate Gold) were likewise married there. The mind busying itself with these imagin- ary festivities sees them fade away, to be fol- lowed by two funeral processions, which rise from the pages of fiction and flit phantom-like down the aisles. The first is that of Mrs. Shirley, the Governor's lady {Agnes Surriage), which peoples the church to the limit of the galleries with her mourners — "the Honour- able his Majesty's Council and the House of 237 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Representatives and avast Number of the prin- cipal Gentry of both Sexes of this and the Neiorhbourino- Towns." This distinguished gathering melts away and a smaller one files in following the casket of Mrs. Lechmere {Lionel Lincoln) whose funeral train " though respect- able was far from extending to that display of solemn countenances which Boston, in its peace and pride, would not have failed to exhibit on any similar occasion." On the south side of the wall of the Chapel is a mural tablet to Frances Shirley, the Governor's lady who lived in fact as well as fancy. In The Bostonians Henry James asserts that to the intense Olive Chancellor, evening ser- vice at King's Chapel was only one degree more solemn than going to the theatre. Anna Farquhar, the author of Her Boston Experi- ences, humourously chronicles a woman suffra- gist meetingr here which the heroine out of curiosity attended with Aunt Drusilla. But a true spirit of reverence for " the quaint church with its high-backed box pews cushioned in 238 sS ■5^ 239 IN AND ABOUT B O S T O N red stuff, its old-fashioned English gallery and high pulpit reached by winding stairs," took her there many a Sunday afternoon to vesper service. Shadowed by this ancient church and bury- ing-ground, in busy School Street, in front of the City Hall, stands the statue of Benjamin Franklin, in alluding to which Dr. Hale in My Double and How He Undid Me says : "Rich- ard Greenough once told me that in studying for the statue of Franklin he found that the left side of the great man's face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling. If you go and look at the bronze statue you will find he has repeated this ob- servation there for posterity. The eastern profile is the portrait of the statesman Frank- lin, the western of poor Richard." Across the street is the Parker House or " Parker's" as it is familiarly known where the " Saturday Club gathered about the long table (Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy) such a rep- resentation of all that was best in American 241 FICTIONAL RAMBLES literature as had never been collected within so small a compass. Most of the Americans greenough's statue of benjamin franklin — city hall " — the left side of the great man's face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling." — E. E. Hales "Afy Double ami How He Undid Me y whom educated foreigners cared to see — leav- ing out of consideration official dignitaries, 242 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON whose temporary importance makes them ob- jects of curiosity — were seated at that board.'' V i^^BL— a|B*-- -• t * ■ wtrv^^st *■ ''■■■Li" A/^'te ^«i v'ffll^H " I never can go into that famous ' Corner Book- store ' and look over the new books . . . without seeing half a dozen which I want to read, or at least to know something about." — Holmes's "Over the Teacups." Howells makes frequent allusions to this hotel in his Boston novels, particularly in April Hopes and here Craighead {Truth Dexter) dis- 243 FICTIONAL RAMBLES patched a significant message over the wires to Truth in Alabama. Just below this house at the northeast cor- ner of School and Washington Streets stands a quaint little building, erected in 171 2, where, commercially speaking, much of the Boston fiction has had its be^inninp-s. This is the old Corner Bookstore, fifty years ago "a nervous centre of the growing literary system, where," says a contemporary writer, " Mr. Fields played destiny to the association of authors and launched the second volume of the Atlantic, the first that bore his imprint." Perhaps it is not generally remembered that this magazine owes its name to Holmes. A favourite haunt was this bookstore of the genial Autocrat, who in alludinor to it once wrote : " I never can go into that famous ' Corner Bookstore ' and look over the new books in the row before me, as I enter the door, without seeing half a dozen which I want to read, or at least to know something about. . . . The titles of many of them interest me. I look into one or two, 244 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON perhaps. I have sometimes picked up a line or sentence, in these momentary glances be- tween the uncut leaves of a new book, which I have never forgotten." V. WHEN COMMERCIAL BOSTON WAS RESIDENTIAL THE commercial section of the Boston of to-day differs from the Boston of fifty years ago as much, perhaps, as the city of the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury had changed from the town of wooden houses of the Revolutionary era. Modern en- terprise has transformed the old streets, while a whole and entirely new Boston has risen on land which was submerged by every tide and where in fresh winds the salt whitecaps rolled and tumbled oftentimes to the destruction of the viaduct of the railroads which had boldly bridged the waste of waters which surrounded the almost inland city. In the beginning of its life Boston was essentially a commercial town and its inhabitants looked to the sea for their 245 FICTIONAL RAMBLES bread and for their riches. The wealth of its people was in ships above and far above every- thing else. With the broadening of its scope as the profits from manufacturing came to the front, the relative importance of its commer- cial interests declined, and the residences of its wealthiest citizens, instead of clinging along the water front, where tall masts could be seen from the windows and where the smell of tar constantly greeted the resident, pushed toward the westward, as if the salt water had become of less interest. Be^innincr our rambles in this section of the city at Fort Hill Square we recall the days of The Rebels when the spot was not the level square we find it, but a hill eighty feet high and well fortified. After the Revolution the hill, crowned with its park and stately man- sions, as well as the streets at its foot or which crawled up its steep sides, were the birthplaces of the older generation of aristocratic present- day Bostonians. In imagination we climb to its summit to find, as described in Pirate Gold, 246 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON the home of Miss Abigail Dowse which stood where the sea breezes blew fresh through the white June roses in the garden. Leaving the Square and wandering west- ward through High Street we come upon Pearl Street, where, near High, once stood (1822-1849) the Athenaeum, a most interesting picture of which is preserved for us in the pages of Holmes's A Mortal Antipathy. "In those days," he reminisces, "the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of at- traction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our first idea of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the com- paratively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in that agreeable resort of amateurs and artists. How the pictures on those walls in Pearl Street do keep their places in the mind's gallery ! Trumbull's Sortie of Gibraltar, with red enough in it for one of our sunset afterglows ; and N eagle's full- length portrait of the blacksmith in his shirt sleeves ; and Copley's long waistcoated gentle- 247 FICTIONAL RAMBLES men and satin-clad ladies — they looked like gentlemen and ladies, too; and Stuart's florid merchants and high-waisted matrons ; and All- ston's lovely Italian scenery and dreamy, un- impassioned women, not forgetting Florimel in full flight on her interminable rocking-horse, — you may still see her at the Art Museum; and the rival landscapes of Doughty and Fisher, much talked of and largely praised in those days ; and the Murillo, — not from Mar- shal Soult's collection; and the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum a hundred dollars; and Cole's alle- gorical pictures, and his immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for noth- ing ; and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the Athenaeum building in Bea- con Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not 2J.S IN AND ABOUT BOSTON more generously, than in those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned fish-horns ?" If we turn from here into Pearl Place which runs through to Oliver Street we can conjure up the residence of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum (Holmes's The Guardian Angel), for this was undoubtedly the locality described in the novel as Carat Place. Many things transpired in this house, notably the party given for Myrtle at which dear old Master Byles Gridley, Gifted Hopkins and Clement Lindsay were exhibited as lions. " Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though her acquaintances were chiefly in the world of fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weak- ness for what she called clever people. She therefore always variegated her parties with a streak of young artists and writers, and a liter- ary lady or two ; and, if she could lay hands on a first-class celebrity, was as happy as an Amazon who had captured a Centaur. . . . She knew how to give a party. Let her only have carte blanche for flowers, music and 249 FICTIONAL RAMBLES champagne, she used to tell her lord, and she would see to the rest. . . He needn't be afraid : all he had to do was to keep out of the way. . . Labour was beautifully subdivided in this lady's household. It was old Ketchum's business to make money and he understood it. It was Mrs. K.'s business to spend money, and she knew how to do it." Somewhere near here was the fashionable boarding school which Myrtle attended " where there were some very good instructors for girls who wished to get up useful knowledge in case they might marry professors or ministers." Parallel with Pearl Street and next to it runs Congress Street originally called Green Lane, but known as Atkinson Street when this sec- tion of the town was residential. Here, not far from Milk Street, was, says Holmes, in his novel A Mortal Antipathy, " a large, square painted brick house, in which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary butterflies. The father 250 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON was editor of the ' Boston Recorder,' a very re- spectable but far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by that class of the com- munity which spoke habitually of the first day of the week as 'the Sabbuth.' The son was the editor of several different periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which he studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and colour, and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep but real, though somewhat frothed over by his worldly experiences." These two men were Nathaniel Willis and his more widely known son Nathaniel P. Willis, de- scribed by Holmes as something between a re- membrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipa- tion of Oscar Wilde. From Congress Street continuing- througdi Hig;h Street we come next to Federal, of in- terest to the fictional rambler because here was that old building — a terra-cotta manufac- tory where Grant Herman (Arlo Bates's The 251 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Pagans) had his studio. "It was a great mis- shapen place, narrow, half a hundred feet long, and disproportionately high, with undressed brick walls and cement floor. The upper half of one of the end walls was taken up with large windows, before which were drawn dingy cur- tains. Here and there about the place were scat- tered modeling-stands, water-tanks mounted upon rude tripods, casts, and the usual lumberof a sculptor's studio ; while upon the walls were stuck pictures, sketches and reproductions in all sorts of capricious groupings. In one cor- ner a flight of stairs led to a gallery high up against the wall, over the rude railing of which looked the heads of a couple of legless statues. From this gallery the stairs continued to ascend until a door near the roof was reached, leading to unknown regions well up in the building behind which the studio had been built as an afterthought. On shelves were confusedly dis- posed dusty bits of bronze, plaster, coarse pot- tery and rare glass ; things valueless and things beyond price standing in careless fellowship. 252 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON A canvas of Corot looked down upon a gro- tesque, grimacing Japanese idol, a beautiful bronze reproduction of a vase of Michael An- o-elo stood shoulder to shoulder with a bean- pot full of tobacco ; a crumpled cravat was thrown carelessly over the arm of a dancing faun, while a cluster of Barye's matchless ani- mals were apparently making their way with great difficulty through a collection of pipes, broken modeling-tools, faded flowers and loose papers. Everywhere it was evident that the studio of Herman differed from heaven in at least its first law." In his description of this Mr. Bates permits himself one of his rare drawings "from the model." The original, the studio of Bartlett, the well-known sculptor, was the fascinating place pictured in the novel. Here, many a night in conclave gay gathered that brilliant group of men typical of the finest spirit of Bo- hemianism as lived twenty years ago in Boston by such men as Bartlett, Hunt and George Fuller — -friends and associates of Mr. Bates 253 FICTIONAL RAMBLES whom it is natural to suppose were more or less in his mind when he created The Pagans. In an old house in Federal Street Miss Lu- cretia and other members of the aristocratic Daintry family (James's A New England Win- ter) were born in the early part of the last cen- tury. This locality in its modern commercial aspect is identified with The Rise of Silas Lapham, for here was his counting-room and the warehouses where the redoubtable Colonel carried on his mineral paint business. "The streets were all narrow and most of them crooked in that quarter of the town ; but at the end of one the spars of a vessel penciled themselves delicately against the cool blue of the afternoon sky. The air was full of a smell pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, and of oil. . . The cobblestones of the pave- ment were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels, and discoloured with iron rust from them ; here and there, in wandering streaks over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt water with which the street had been sprinkled." 254 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Turning back from Federal through High, we come into Summer Street, famed as the most beautiful residential thoroughfare of its day in Boston. In writing of this neighbourhood in I [itJicrto Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney reminds us that those were the days " when the city was not conglomerate but individual, and there were houses of home quiet in cool, watered streets and unprofaned ' Places,' where vines covered the house fronts and caged birds sang in the windows, and great crowns of forest trees surged up among the chimneys." Boston, she says, was in her pleasant young matronhood then. Near Church Green at the intersection of Bedford and Summer Streets — the trian^u- lar piece of land, on which then stood a church, is now solidly built over by wholesale stores — lived the Holgates (Hitherto) with a charming garden at the back of their house. In much of her Boston fiction Mrs. Whitney describes city life with a rural flavour. Washington Street, busiest of thoroughfares, into which Summer leads, in its shopping dis- 255 FICTIONAL RAMBLES trict fifty years ago is referred to in Mrs. Whit- ney's Hitherto as "dear old mixed-up Wash- ington Street, where everything was small and wedged together and you knew your way by the angles and corners, and nothing stared out at you through great plate glass, but you must know enough to begin with to go in and en- quire." That priggish young hero of Mr. Henry James's A New England Winter, Florimond (who owed his romantic name to the fact that everyone was reading ballads in Boston at the time he was born, and his mother had found the name in a ballad), in walking through Washington Street observed that " supreme in the thoroughfare was the rigid groove of the railway, where were oblong receptacles of fab- ulous capacity, governed by familiar citizens, jolted and jingled eternally, close on each oth- er's rear, absorbing and emitting innumerable specimens of a single type. The road on either side was traversed periodically by the sisterhood of shoppers laden with satchels and parcels and protected by a round-backed 256 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON policeman." Though this was as seen by Florimond twenty years ago, it remains an exact picture of the street to-day. Mr. Howells, in A Woman s Reason, makes a characteristic comment in writing of this locality when he says : " There is doubtless more shopping in New York or London or Paris, but in these cities it is dispersed over a larger area, and nowhere in the world perhaps has shopping such an intensity of physiognomy as in Boston. It is unsparingly sincere in its expression. It means business, and the sole business of the city seems to be shopping." This street produced a most unpleasant effect upon the hero of Bellamy's Looking Backward when he awoke from his long sleep to the Boston of the nineteenth century. " I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood and laughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I could not have helped it, with such a mad humour was I moved at sight of the intermi- nable rows of stores on either side, up and 257 FICTIONAL RAMBLES down the street as far as I could see — scores of them, to make the spectacle more utterly pre- posterous — within a stone's throw devoted to selling the same sort of goods. Stores ! stores ! stores ! miles of stores ! Ten thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse, as they were ordered through one great store in every quar- ter, where the buyer, without waste of time or labour, found under one roof the world's assortment in whatever line he desired." Leaving the shopping district and proceed- ing eastward we approach, at the corner of Washington and Milk streets, that hallowed spot where stands the Old South Church, one of the oldest monuments in Boston. So splen- didly historical a thing was not to be ignored by the poet and novelist. Sings Dr. Holmes: Full sevenscore years our city's pride — The comely southern spire — Has cast its shadow, and defied The storm, the foe, the fire. 258 Full sevenscore years our city's pride- The comely southern spire — Has cast its shadow, and defied The storm, the foe, the fire." — Holmes. 259 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON In the eighteenth century the people of Lydta M. Child's Rebels listened with varied emo- tions to the deafening clang from the steeple which was part of the celebration of the repeal of the Stamp Act. And Cooper's British Lionel Lincoln on his return to Boston had his first glimpse of the edifice — known through- out New England with a species of veneration — when led there by Job Pray, who said: " This is what you call a church, though I call it a meetin' 'us. ... It's no wonder you don't know it, for what the people built for a temple the King has turned into a stable." On enter- ing, Cooper tells us, Lionel was amazed to find he stood in an area fitted for the exercise of the cavalry. The naked galleries and many of the original ornaments were standing ; but the accommodations below were destroyed, and in their places the floor had been covered with earth for the horses and their riders to prac- tice in the cavesson. " The abominations of the place even now offended his senses, as he stood on that spot where he remembered so 261 FICTIONAL RAMBLES often to have seen the grave and pious colo- nists assemble in crowds to worship." This is what is meant by the last line on the tablet now in front of the church, which in its en- tirety reads : Old South. Church gathered in 1669. First House built in 1670. This House erected 1729. Desecrated by British Troops, 1775-6. Chaplain J. J. Kane chooses this old land- mark whereon to hang his weird tale, Ilian; or the Curse of the Old South Church of Boston, which, as he says, is the story of a great crime and the punishment meted out to the guilty — in the narration of which he apparently drew inspiration from every quarter of the globe and the oceans of the world, which he takes pleasure in mentioning at length in his introduction, written in 1888 on board the U. S. flagship Pensacola. The porch of the church is the scene of many secret meetings between 262 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Professor Homerand, of this novel, and the beautiful Southern spy, Helen Claymuire, of South Carolina, frequently at an hour when the bell tolled midnight. Here, frenzied at the thought that the Professor meant to marry Miss Rathmire, the Southern woman called down the malediction of retributive divine justice upon their union. It was a terrible curse — prophetic of accumulated miseries — and with it she left him. "He looked up at the face of the clock to find pity there, but the square steeple only frowned down upon him, as if to corroborate the fearful words just spoken." All of which did not prevent this Dr. Jekyll- and-Mr.-Hyde sort of man from marrying Miss Rathmire on the day appointed. "At noon the bell in the steeple of the Old South Church rang out a wedding refrain, and the edifice was packed to overflowing. After the ceremony, in the porch of the church, the bridegroom was destined to encounter his former love stand- ing . . . like a statue of the goddess Athena, 263 FICTIONAL RAMBLES calm, dignified and haughty, with a look of scorn that pierced to the soul of the guilty man." How the curse affected the life of the Professor, all who run may read in the pages of Ilian. Emerging from the porch — by Chap- lain Kane so darkly shadowed — into the sun- shine of the street, it is charming to look up and imagine what, no doubt, the poet N. P. Willis saw : On the cross-beam under the Old South bell The nest of a pigeon is builded well. In Colonial days the Old South stood al- most under the windows of the dignified Prov- ince House, the residence of many of the royal governors. This ancient abode was standing as late as 1864 on the site of what is now Province Court and was originally sur- rounded by fine lawns and trees as shown in the illustration. Hawthorne, who weaves four fanciful legends about it — Howes Masquerade, Edward Randolph's Portrait, Lady Eleanore s Mantle, and Old Esther Dudley — thus describes it in his day : " Entering an arched passage, 264 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON "The square front of the Province House, three stories high, and surmounted by a cupola, on the top of which a gilded Indian was dis- cernible." — Hawthorne's "Legends of the Prov- ince House." which penetrated through the middle of a brick row of shops, a few steps transported me from the busy heart of modern Boston into a 265 FICTIONAL RAMBLES small and secluded courtyard. One side of this space was occupied by the square front of the Province House, three stories high, and sur- mounted by a cupola, on the top of which a gilded Indian was discernible, with his bow bent and his arrow on the string, as if aiming at the weathercock on the spire of the Old South." This Indian was carved by Deacon Shem Drowne, to whom, as the hero of one of Hawthorne's tales, allusion has been made. In earlier times than this the historic man- sion is to be seen in festival attire if we go with Captain Somerville, the Osbornes and Dr. Willard of The Rebels, who, walking out to wit- ness the celebration of the repeal of the stamp act, stop opposite the Province House to ex- amine the fanciful devices that had been pre- pared, in the eagerness of gratitude and joy. A full-length picture of Liberty hurling a broken chain to the winds particularly at- tracted their attention. Another picture of this interesting house we have in Mr. Chamber's 266 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Cardigan when on a rainy night " the Gover- nor was giving a play and a supper to the wealthy Tory families of Boston and to all the officers of the British regiments quartered in the city. . . . The stony street echoed with the clatter of shod horses, the rattle of wheels, the shouts of footmen, and the bawling of chair- bearers. In the Province House fiddlers were fiddling, . . . in the street we could hear them plainly and the sweet confusion of voices and a young girl's laughter." VI. IN TREMONT STREET AND MUSIC HALL DIRECTLY north of the Province House, and like it now demolished, stood in Tremont Street, at the cor- ner of Beacon, the Tremont House, where Thackeray, Dickens and other foreign notables stayed, and which, Dickens said, " had more galleries, colonnades, piazzas and passages than he could remember or the reader would believe." He has left us a most 267 FICTIONAL RAMBLES amusing account of the first order he gave at this hotel : " Dinner, if you please," said I to the waiter. " When ? " said the waiter. "As quick as possible," said I. " Right away? " said the waiter. After a moment's hesitation I answered, " No," at a hazard. "Not right away?" cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that made me start. I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, " No ; I would rather have it in this private room. I like it very much." At this I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind ; as I believe he would have done but for the interposition of another man, who whispered in his ear, " Directly." li Well ! and that's a fact ! " said the waiter, look- ing helplessly at me : " Right away." I saw now that " Right away " and " Directly " were one and the same thing. So I reversed my previous answer, and sat down to dinner ten minutes afterward ; and a capital dinner it was. John T. Trowbridge, in his novel Martin Merrivale, tells us that the hero had an unsat- isfactory meeting with his uncle at the Tre- mont House, while it is further invested with 26s IN AND ABOUT BOSTON literary interest from the fact that in one of its private rooms were held, in the forties, the meetings of "The Jacobins' Club," humour- ously so dubbed by the literary men of which it was formed — radical thinkers and reform- ers, all of them. In literature these men, says a recent writer, " were essayists, ready to over- haul art, science, philosophy and theology with improved microscopes." The side windows of the Tremont House overlooked the Granary Burying-ground — a burial-QTound, according to a Western hu- mourist, being " part and parcel of all Boston hotels." Bynner's hero, Sir Harry Frankland, attended the burial in the Granary ground of Mr. Peter Faneuil, and nearby is the grave of young Benjamin Woodbridge, beside which the Autocrat and the Schoolmistress mourned so sentimentally. " The grey squirrels," says the Autocrat, "were looking out for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in the light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial-ground. He was 269 FICTIONAL RAMBLES on a grave with a broad blue slate stone at its head and a shrub growing on it. Stop before " Stop before we turn away and breathe a woman's sigh over poor Benjamin Woodbridge's dust. Love killed him, I think. . . . The Schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave." — " The Atitocrat of the Breakfast Table." we turn away and breathe a woman's sigh over poor Benjamin Woodbridge's dust. Love killed him, I think. . . . The Schoolmistress dropped 270 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON a rosebud she had in her hand, through the rails, upon the grave." In The Pagans of Arlo Bates we find Fenton, from one of the windows of his studio, admiring the tops of the trees of the old Granary ground opposite. This interesting burying-ground gets its name from the town granary which in the early days it surrounded. Across from here a little eastward stands Tremont Temple, to-day a new edifice in place of the one in which, in The Bostonians, Henry James writes: "The only thing that was still actual for Miss Birdseye was the elevation of the species by the reading of Emerson and the frequentation of Tremont Temple." And in another part of the novel he tells us that Verena Tarrant's mother had no higher ambi- tion for her daughter than she should marry a person connected with public life — which meant for Mrs. Tarrant that his name would be visible in the lamplight, on a coloured poster, in the doorway of Tremont Temple. To the initiated the place recalls the man, 271 FICTIONAL RAMBLES a musical eccentric, who under a thin disguise figures as Killings in Martin Merrivale. He made himself notorious in the Boston of his day by purchasing at auction in Tremont Temple the first ticket sold for Jenny Lind's concert, for which he paid the fabulous price of $625. This so roused public curiosity that his hitherto slimly attended concerts were crowded, and his seemingly reckless expendi- ture of money proved the good investment he intended. In speaking recently of this man — the prototype of Killings — Mr. Trowbridge said that many Bostonians would recall certain posters which flooded such shop windows as would take them during Jenny Lind's stay. Very large and highly coloured posters they were, representing a group of three figures — the central one, Jenny Lind, flanked by P. T. Barnum, her manager, in the act of presenting to her with a great flourish the man to whom her song was " beyond the dreams of ava- rice." In Martin Merrivale Killings also figured as publisher and editor of the Liter- 272 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON ary Portfolio, which existed in fact as the Literary Museum. Near Tremont Temple, with entrances in Hamilton place, School and Winter Streets, is the Music Hall, recently descended to the level of variety shows, but for many years a distinctive institution not to be overlooked by any novelist wishing to portray Boston faith- fully. " As all the world knows," says Henry James, in The Bostonians, " the opportunities in Boston for hearing good music are numerous and excellent, and it had lono- been Olive's practice to cultivate the best. She went in, as the phrase is, for the superior programmes, and in the high, dim, dignified Music Hall which has echoed in its time so much eloquence and so much melody, and of which the very propor- tions and colour seem to teach respect and at- tention, shed the protection of its illuminated cornice upon no faces more intelligently up- turned than those of Olive and Verena." This was the hall daringly engaged for Verena's debut, by Olive, who felt it was the 273 FICTIONAL RAMBLES only temple in which the votaries of their creed could worship. Brainy little Dr. Prance de- scribed the place as pretty big, but not so big as Olive Chancellor's ideas — ideas for the emancipation of her sex, destined to be ruthlessly crushed by the masculinity of the determined Basil Ransom. Who does not remember how, suddenly coming to Boston for Verena, her found her appearance in Music Hall immensely advertised. " As he gazed down the vista, the approach for pedestrians which leads out of Winter Street, he thought it looked expectant and ominous." And that night we know the impatient audience called in vain for Verena, who never made the great speech which was to liberate her sex from bon- dage, but was literally snatched bodily from the anteroom by her masterful lover, who dra- matically whirled her off to live for him in- stead of for the " cause." It was during a Symphony concert in Music Hall that Truth Dexter in the novel of that name, inwardly tortured by the thought that 274 •fi^. 2S a •§ 1) ._ en ^ 275 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON her husband did not love her, was taken ill and rushed precipitately from the building. To these Saturday evening concerts accompanied, after he went blind, by the ever devoted Kate, came Dan Howard, whom Miss Frothingham makes appeal so tremendously to our sympa- thies in The Turn of the Road. As Mrs. Staggchase's guest (Arlo Bates's The Pfiilis- tincs) Miss Marrivale is taken to the concerts " where a handful of people gathered to hear the music, and all the rest of the world crowded for the sake of having been there." These concerts are always preceded by a pub- lic rehearsal on Friday afternoons, which, in Her Boston Experiences, Margaret Allison as- sures us no one enjoys, in the ordinary accep- tation of that term, but every one respects, exalts, bends the knee, imbibes — yea, even unto the state of worship known at Beyreuth. Another novelist, Eliza Orne White, in her clever portrayal of a typical young woman of the Hub, unhesitatingly declares that Mary {Miss Brooks) went to the rehearsals from a 277 FICTIONAL RAMBLES sense of duty mingled with a desire to see her friends. John Graham, whom she dragged along, owned frankly to himself that he went to see Mary. It was only Janet, of the Brooks family^ who really loved the music which " ex- alted her, and made her feel there was no heroic deed she could not do." Though the af- fair was called a lecture, in accordance with the time-honoured custom of Boston, Crawford would have us understand it was a political speech his hero, An American Politician, made there. In his audience was a little colony of Beacon Street. " It is not often that Beacon Street goes to such lectures, but John was one of themselves." In Tremont Street, only a few steps away from old Music Hall (the new one, called Sym- phony Hall, is out in Huntington Avenue), is the Studio Building, once the working place exclusively of artists, but now encroached upon bv business in one form or another. Two of Arlo Bates's Pagans, Arthur Fenton and Tom Bendy, had studios there, where in reality oc- 278 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON curred, recently said Mr. Bates in discussing this novel, far more brilliant and original talk among the actual Pagans than is the imaginary conversation he makes for them. Bently's studio, says the novelist, was the envy of all his brother artists with its " stuffs from Algiers, rugs from Persia and Turkey ; weapons from Tripoli and India and Tunis ; musical instru- ments from Egypt and Spain ; antiques from Greece and Germany and Italy; and pottery from everywhere." Differing, but equally luxurious was Fenton's, where much that was dramatic in the book occurs. 279 ABOUT BOSTON I. CAMBRIDGE AND LEXINGTON SURROUNDING the Three-hilled City are what may some time become part of it, but now, and even more years ago, were communities having an independent existence, yet closely united to the metropolis. Dorchester Heights, historic as the command- ing eminence on which the Americans erected their batteries to drive the British fleet from the harbour, has become in these later days South Boston ; the pudding-stone region of Roxbury and the ancient Charlestown have joined as a part of the greater city, while Cambridge — "old Cambridge," as its many lovers fondly call it — remains an independent community. Our grandfathers tell us that before the 283 FICTIONAL RAMBLES days of the railroads when communication was over the highways, the teamsters hauling freight to and from Boston were wont to spend the night at Cambridge or Roxbury before and after leaving the city, thereby en- abling them to appear in town in the very early morn as well as to make a fresh start at dawn well away from the cobble-stone pave- ment of the centre of business. Consequently at the " Neck " which connected Boston with Roxbury, at the west end of Cambridge bridge, and at a point on the Mill Dam where it inter- sected with a road to Brookline, there devel- oped such clusters of buildings as might be the natural growth of business from such a source. Small taverns surrounded by piazzas ; huge barns and stables which rambled off into a wilderness of open sheds ; blacksmith's shops with open doors, smoking forges, ring- ing anvils and stamping horses ; wheelwrights, harness makers, coopers and cobblers carrying on their trades in the humble frame buildings which were the homes of these artizans. Of 284 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON such primitive little centres of business there are few traces to-day, but from them grew the closely built streets of Cambridge-port and the busy traffic of the extreme South End. The old Cambridge of colonial davs forms the setting for Bynner's Penelope s Suitors. Penelope Pelham, who existed in fact as well as in fiction, was a charming young woman who came from the old England to the New in 1638 and married, under rather unusual cir- cumstances, Governor Bellingham. The nov- elist, in journalistic form, has her tell us that on landing she went " straightway to brother William's plantation at Cambridge, which is three miles and over from the town of Boston. He hath a large plantation and a fine house, with a troop of people, amongst which are sev- eral blackamoors." In the beautiful warden of this estate the Governor declared his love to Penelope, whose fiance, Buckley, made a dra- matic scene by appearing at an inopportune moment. Penelope was married to Governor 285 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Richard Bellingham in 1641 and survived him many years, dying in Boston in 1 702. Another of Bynner's heroines, Agnes Surri- age, frequently went with Sir Harry Frank- land to Cambridge, and is quite as much iden- tified with Hobgoblin Hall, not far away — the finest estate of its time in New England. The grand old mansion, confiscated at the time of the Revolution, is still standing and well worth a trip to Medford to see. Agnes and the Collector, the novelist tells us, went there many a time to wait upon Mistress Penelope Royall. Fictional interest in Cambridge centres in and about Harvard Square, with a ramble westward as far as Mount Auburn. Of the University peopled with fictitious students whose haunts we wish to discover, much will be told in the following chapter. For the moment the town itself as the novelists have depicted it, occupies us. " Cambridge," says Mr. Pier in The Peda- gogues, " is romantic in much the same way as 286 287 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Rome is modern. One never really thinks of it being so, and yet it is. Rome is over- shadowed by its past : Cambridge is made op- pressively real by the proximity of Boston. Cambridge is, after all, not a city : it is a soul." The charming atmosphere of the old univer- sity town was strongly felt by Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, who remarks in The Barclays of Boston, that the Gordons, fresh from the splendour and magnificence of foreign courts, preferred the quiet simplicity of a Cambridge life to the more pretentious one of a city. " There is an equality and evenness in the condition of all the society connected with the University which completely extinguishes all striving for what is perpetually in the mouths of our people." In his Suburban Sketches Mr. Howells gives many a delightful glimpse of rural Cambridge as he found it when he went there to live. " It was very quiet," he tells us. " We called one another to the window if a large dog went by our door ; and whole days passed without the 28q\ FICTIONAL RAMBLES movement of any wheels but the butcher's upon our street, which flourished in flag weed and buttercups and daisies and in the autumn like the borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of the succory." He dwells, too, on the climate, so disagreeable in the winter, so lovely in the spring. " Then, indeed, Charlesbridge ap- peared to us a kind of Paradise. The wind blew all day from the southwest and all day in the grove across the way the orioles sang to their nestlings." The beauty and witchery of the Cambridge spring is a theme on which all the novelists writing of this locality wax elo- quent. Leading into Harvard Square is the avenue now called Massachusetts, the Cambridge residential part of which Henry James de- scribes in The Bostonians as a street " fringed on either side with villas offering themselves trustfully to the public. . . The detached houses had, on top, little cupolas and belve- deres, in front pillared piazzas — on either side 290 c -. g q 5 S l O <, p : W 3 291 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON a bow window or two, and everywhere an em- bellishment of scallops, brackets, cornices and wooden flourishes. They stood for the most part on small eminences lifted above the im- pertinence of hedge or paling, well up before the world with all the good conscience which in many cases came from a silvered number af- fixed to the glass above the door." Off this avenue was the temporary lair of Dr. Tarrent {The Bostonians), "a wooden cot- tage, with a rough front yard, a little naked piazza facing upon an unpaved road, in which the footway was overlaid with a strip of planks. These planks were embedded in ice or liquid thaw, according to the momentary mood of the weather, and the advancing pedestrian trav- ersed them in the attitude, and with a good deal of the suspense of a rope dancer." In Monadnoc Place a sightless soundless, inter- spaced embryonic region was the dismal resi- dence of the mesmeric healer. Just beyond the college yard, northwestward in Garden Street, stands the historic old Christ 293 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Church, the graveyard of which is of fictional interest as being the spot where Ralph (Cooper's Lionel Lincoln) under exciting and gruesome conditions, told Lionel the strange story of his parentage. " Thou hast reached the spot," dramatically announced the old man, " where moulder the bones of one who long supported thee. Unthinking boy, that sacri- legious foot treads on thy mother's grave." The rambler will look in vain for this fictitious grave, but there are many actual ones of inter- est, notably that of Madame Vassall who was one of the family whom Agnes and the Collector {Agnes Surriage) visited at Hobgoblin Hall. She lived in the man- sion now known as the Longfellow House, and the poet pays his tribute to the great lady: In the village churchyard she lies. Dust in her beautiful eyes ; No more she breathes, nor feels, nor stirs ; At her feet and at her head Lies a slave to attend the dead-, But their dust is as white as hers. 294 C rt £ -v. (U _ — !> oj c c; O ■5 I c C i> o £ £ c c o ^95 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Nearby, on what is now a part of the grounds of the Law School building, stood (until 1884) the ' o-ambrel-roofed house" which was the birthplace of the Autocrat, and in Revolution- ary days the headquarters of General Artemus Ward — where many stirring military incidents occurred. Lovingly and lengthily the Auto- crat writes of this house in A Mortal Antip- athy while everyone is familiar with his de- scription of it in his poem Parson TurrelVs Legacy. Know old Cambridge ? Hope you do — Born there? Don't say so ! I was too. (Bom in a house suit h a gambr el-roof , — Standing still, if you must have proof . — " Gambrel ? — Gambrel f " — Let me beg You'll look at a horse's hinder leg, — First great angle above the hoof,— That's the gambrel ; hence gambrel-roof.) One of his most famous poems, " Old Iron- sides," was written here. Across the way in Garden Street is the his- toric old Washington elm gazed upon with awe by Mr. Pier's pedagogues, and immortal- 297 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Eighty years have passed, and more Since under the brave old tree Our fathers gathered in arms and swore They would follow the sign their banners bore, And fight till the land was free." — Holmes's "'Under the Washington Elm, ized — like so much else of the old town which he loved — by the Autocrat. 298 m — so is J2 ■§ S in O 1) (U OOH 299 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON In this locality lived one summer two of The Pedagogues^ Jessie and Gorch, in a square brown house in which they had taken rooms. A vine-screened porch extending across the front of the house became the sta^e on which much of this serio-comic story was played. The Pedagogues in their hours of recreation made frequent excursions to hallowed scenes. We find them plucking sprigs from Longfel- low's hedcre in front of the beautiful old man- sion and lingering in the park across the way — the field, now called Longfellow's garden, a memorial to the poet who during his lifetime kept it open that he might have an unobscured view of the landscape and the Charles River, which he loved and which winds in and out of so much of his verse. Thou hast taught me, Silent River, Many a lesson deep and long ; Thou hast been a generous giver ; I can give thee but a song. Beyond Longfellow's, in the same street, is the Brattle house, for a time the home of Mar- 301 FICTIONAL RAMBLES garet Fuller, while here roomed the historian and novelist Motley during his Harvard years. The Pedagogues also made pilgrimages to Elmwood, where, we are told, they derived a certain satisfaction from peering through the fence at Lowell's house. From here they found it but a short distance to Mount Auburn for a spear of grass from Longfellow's grave. Mr. Sanderson {The Barclays of Boston) was buried in Mount Auburn, where he reposed, the novelist says, in a lowly tomb amid bloom- ing flowers and cypress trees. In Mr. Bell- amy's Looking Backward we have a picture of this beautiful cemetery on Decoration Day when Julian West and the Bartletts went out there from Boston to " do honour to the mem- ory of the soldiers of the North who took part in the war for the preservation of the Union of the States. The survivors of the war, escorted by military and civic processions and bands of music, were wont on this occasion to visit the cemeteries and lay wreaths of flowers upon 302 go 1 ft, 3 s 303 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON the graves of their dead comrades, the cere- mony being a very solemn and touching one." The beautiful avenue called Massachusetts which leads out from Cambridge through Ar- lington to Concord is richly historic and of in- terest to the fictional rambler, because over it marched Lincoln, Polvvorth and other of the red- coats on that memorable night when, far ahead of them, Paul Revere was spreading the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm For the country-folk to be tip and to arm, ****** through the gloom and the light, The fate of a nation was riding that night. Such a scene appealed strongly to the im- agination of Hawthorne, who, in Septimus Felton, tells us that " There were stories of marching troops coming like dreams through the midnight. Around the little rude meeting- houses there was here and there the beat of a drum and the assemblage of farmers with their weapons. So all that night there was marching, there was mustering, there was 3^5 FICTIONAL RAMBLES trouble ; and, on the road from Boston, a steady march of soldiers' feet onward, onward into the land whose last warlike disturbance had been when the red Indians trod it." On the westward road along which the red- coats marched is an old tavern known then and now as the Monroe Tavern — the head- quarters of Lord Percy. Hot Percy goad his slow artillery Up the Concord road, sings Lowell. This tavern is described by Mr. Howells in his volume called Three Villages. On Lexington Common, which is said to be as high as the top of Bunker Hill, Pitcairn's troop encountered the minute-men, and Lionel Lincoln, with beating heart, heard shouted by his major : " Disperse, ye rebels, disperse. Throw down your arms and disperse ! " These memorable words were instantly followed by the reports of pistols and the fatal mandate of "Fire!" when a loud shout arose from the whole body of soldiery, who rushed upon the open green and threw in a close discharge on all before them. 306 307 3 o8 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON "Great God!" exclaimed Lionel, "what is it ye do? Ye fire at unoffending men ! Is there no law but force ? Beat up their pieces, Polworth ; stop their fire." " Halt ! " cried Polworth, brandishing his sword fiercely among his men. " Come to an order, or I'll fell ye to the earth ! " But the excitement which had been gathering to a head for so many hours, and the animosity which had so long been growing between the troops and the people, were not to be repressed at a word. It was only when Pitcairn himself rode in among the soldiers, and, aided by his officers, beat down their arms, that the uproar was gradually quelled, and something like order was again restored. Before this was effected, however, a few scattering shots were thrown back from their flying adversaries, though without material injury to the British. When the firing had ceased, officers and men stood gazing at one another for a few moments, as if even they could foresee some of the mighty events which were to follow the deeds of that hour. The smoke slowly arose, like a lifted veil, from the green, and, mingling with the fogs of morning, drove heavily across the country, as if to communicate the fatal in- telligence that the final appeal to arms had been made. Every eye was bent inquiringly on the fatal green, and Lionel beheld, with a feeling allied to anguish, a few men at a distance writhing and strug- 309 FICTIONAL RAMBLES gling in their wounds, while some five or six bodies lay stretched upon the grass in the appalling quiet of death. Sickening at the sight he turned and walked LEXINGTON COMMON " When the firing had ceased, officers and men stood gazing at one another as if even they could foresee some of the mighty events which were to follow the deeds of that hour." — Cooper s "Lionel Lincoln." away by himself, while the remainder of the troops, alarmed by the reports of the arms, were eagerly pressing up from the rear to join their comrades. 310 THE LEXINGTON MINUTE MAN 3TI IN AND ABOUT BOSTON A granite stone marks this spot to-day, and nearby is Kitson's spirited statue of Captain John Parker, the Minute-man who said : " Stand your ground. Don't fire unless forced upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it beein here." Mr. Howells writes sympathetically of Lex- ington village — a little too far from Boston to be strictly suburban in aspect — where, he says, the local feeling is larger than the place. "As Dr. Holmes has remarked (Howells's Three Villages), American cities and villages like to think of themselves as the ' good old ' this and that ; but at Lexington, more than anywhere else out of Italy, I felt that the village was to its people the patria" II. HARVARD WHEN we consider the LIniversity's place in published fiction, how small whatever we may discern is in com- parison with the vast jungle of romance it might furnish, if its yearly inpouri ng of our 313 FICTIONAL RAMBLES youth could tell us of their hearts' desires and their rainbow castles ! Of Harvard in its infancy we learn some- thing from Penelope Pelham (Bynner's Penel- ope s Suitors), who, seeing it in 1638, made note of it in her journal to this effect : " They have here set up a small school, which they call a college, and have made Herbert treas- urer thereof." About fifty years later Carew and Courtney (Stimson's King Noanctt), jour- neying by canoe from Boston to Springfield, stopped at Cambridge to buy powder and then visited the college. " There was but one building ; and on entering it we found no pro- fessors, but some eight or ten young fellows, and these were all the students ; and they were sitting around smoking tobacco, with the smoke of which the room was so full that you could hardly see ; and the whole house smelt so strong of it that when I was going up-stairs I said, ' This is certainly a tavern.' They could hardly speak a word of Latin. They took us to the library, where there was nothing in par- 314 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON ticular. . . . Then they accompanied us down to the river to hail us off." In one of his novels (A Mortal Antipathy) Holmes comments on the great strides the University took about the middle of the last century. " During all my early years," he says, "our old Harvard Alma Mater sat still and lifeless as the colossi in the Egyptian desert. Then all at once, like the statue in Don Gio- vanni, she moved from her pedestal. The fall of that ' stony foot ' has effected a miracle like the harp that Orpheus played, like the teeth which Cadmus sowed. The plain where the moose and the bear were wandering while Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, where a few plain dormitories and other needed buildings were scattered about in my schoolboy days, eroans under the weight of the massive edi- fices which have sprung up all around them." Many of the Boston novels touch upon Harvard life, notably Mr. Howells's April Hopes, Henry James's The Bostonians and Mr. Pier's The Sentimentalists ■ while the 315 FICTIONAL RAMBLES hero of Mr. Wheelwright's A Child of the Century wrought for many years to obtain two pieces of parchment, which entitled him to write after his name, " Harvard, A.B., LL.B." But for fiction dealing more exclusively with the students we must turn to the pages of Fair Harvard, Hammersmith, Guemdale, and more recently The Prelude and the Play, Harvard Stories, Harvard Episodes, The Diary of a Freshman, The Pedagogues, and those two capital short stories, The Colligo Club Theatricals, Warren's The Girl and the Governor and Owen Wister's Philosophy Four. Polio's Journey to Cambridge, an amusing satire on the Rollo Books, should not be omitted from the list. Fair Harvard, published anonymously, is considered a faithful picture of life at the Uni- versity in the fifties and had a great vogue. So, too, had Hammersmith and Guemdale, which cover a somewhat later period, x^ll three of these novels are read with interest to- day. The modern Harvard man (^landrail 316 317 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON says there is no such thing as the " typical Harvard man") in various phases we find cleverly portrayed by Charles Macomb Flan- drau in Harvard Episodes and The Diary of a Freshman; similar " undergrads" make up Mr. Post's Harvard Stories. When " Uncle George " [Rollds Journey to Cambridge) took Rollo to the University he told him that one of the greatest benefits of a course at Harvard " was that derived from viewing the noble architectural specimens all around him." And though it was not intended Uncle George should be taken seriously, he undoubtedly was genuine in his admiration of buildings which are famous, and about which the novelists write with enthusiasm. The rambler who would seek out the haunts of fictional students would, naturally enough, upon arriving at Harvard Square turn toward the Yard as the beginning of his tour of inves- tigation. Passing through one of the beauti- ful memorial gates now in process of construc- tion, it is interesting to recall that at the time 319 FICTIONAL RAMBLES of which Henry James wrote in The Bostoni- ans the Yard was enclosed by means of a low rustic fence, " for Harvard," he says, " knows nothing either of the jealousy or the dignity of high walls and guarded gateways." This novelist then pictures the enclosure in the fol- lowing manner : " The Yard or college precinct is traversed by a number of straight little paths over which, at certain hours of the day v a thousand undergraduates with books under their arms and youth in their step, flit from one school to the other. The rectangular structures of old red brick wore an expression of scholastic quietude, and exhaled a tradition, an antiquity." An atmosphere distinctly Cantabrigian we find in the opening chapters of a recent novel, The Prelude and the Play. The signature, Rufus Mann, is supposed to be the pseudonym of Mrs. Shaler, who, as the wife of Professor Shaler, is well qualified to know whereof she writes. She has slightly disguised her locality by calling the town Canterbury, and many of 320 I 321 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON her characters are said to be drawn from per- sons well known in the University life. But this is so commonly said by the public that authors have ceased to be disturbed by it. Some of the people in The Prelude and the Play lived, we imagine, in Ouincy Street about where Professor Shaler's house stands, for the view the author describes is as seen from his windows. From the library Alexandra, the heroine, "looked out upon the college yard, which, with its spires, domes, towers and dor- mitories, in the gray, light, soft, enshrouding snow, seemed to her partial fancy to wear a look of stately conventual repose. And then, the bell ceasing to clang, from out the lecture rooms crowds of men poured forth. These, falling more or less into professional ranks, clad in long ulsters caused her to think of bands of Benedictine monks ; only the frozen landscape forbade the thought of cheering vine- yards such as tradition affixes in sunnier lands to the monasteries of the accomplished order." All the buildings connected with the Uni- 323 FICTIONAL RAMBLES versity were shown to Ransom by Verena (The Bostouians) when he went out to Cam- bridge to see her. He was greatly impressed by the Library, " a diminished copy of the chapel of King's College at the greater Cam- bridge." This is the library to which Felton (Hawthorne's Septimus Fcltoii) came from Concord in search of scientific books relating to his studies. Herrick, in his story The Man Who Wilis also alludes to it in speaking of one of his hero's ancestors. " The pastor's eloquence waxed into books that are found to- day on the shelves of the Harvard library, with the University book-plate recording their gift by the author." Some of the fictitious students are eiven rooms in the Yard, while as many others are not. Flandrau's men are not often found living there. George Talcott, the hero of The Prelude and the Play, roomed in the Yard, but the author does not tell us where ; Jack Randolph {Harvard Stories) roomed in Thayer ; his windows, we are told, commanded 324 s Pd <" K 'bo si 325 IN AND ABOU I BOS I () \ the approaches to Appleton Chapel, about which cluster many collect- traditions, in and out of fiction. Some Hammersmith fellows, Ayres and Van Courtland, of Fair Harvard, and the hero of April Hopes lived in Holworthy — "that old hall that keeps its favour with the students in spite of the rivalry of the newer dormitories." Here Mr. Howells shows us the interior of a student's room : " the deep window nooks and easy chairs upholstered in the leather that seems sacred alike to the seats and the shelves of libraries ; the aesthetic bookcases, low and topped with bric-a-brac ; the etchings and prints on the walls ; the foils crossed over the chimney, and the mantel with its pipes, and its photographs of theatrical celebrities tilted about over it — spoke of conditions foreign to Mrs. Pasmer's memories of Har- vard." Conspicuous in Hammersmith is Harvard Hall, " with its portraits of placid benefactors of the University smiling down upon many a 327 FICTIONAL RAMBLES lad floundering in an ebbing flood of classics, and consuming his pencil in despair." Beside Harvard is Massachusetts, also a re- citation hall, which, like Sever, is identified with the scenes of Mr. Pier's inimitable novel The Pedagogues, wherein he presents a young instructor wrestling with the raw (and exas- perating) material of a class in English compo- sition and literature in the summer school. In and about these halls the rambler will find their prototypes any midsummer day. From the South and West come most of these actual students — gray-haired women, many of them, who expect their instructors — to quote Mr. Pier, " in six short weeks to purge them of provinciality, to give them a catholic appre- ciation of literature, to instruct them in new methods of teaching, and to teach them to write — to write — to write. . . ' My object in coming here ' " (said a fictitious one, and it is the sentiment of most of the actual students) " ' is to learn to be a writer of fiction, preferably strong and passionate. I am familiar with the 3?s * ■5 I 329 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON works of Shakespeare, Byron, Ouida and E. 1\ Roe. I know no other language than my own. It has been conjectured that the experiences of the most satirical of instructors, Alfred Honore Palantine, were those of his creator, Mr. Pier. This, however, is not the case, as Mr. Pier, though a Harvard man, never taught there. Between Massachusetts and Harvard Halls is the Tree so prominent in all the Class-day festivities, and to which full justice has been done by all the fictionists who find this fete day an inspiring theme. " What short descrip- tion can do justice to it ! " exclaims the author of Hammersmith, and Mr. Howells, in a suc- cession of charming photographs, devotes to it the first seven chapters of April Hopes. One of Mr. Flandrau's characters, Beverly Beverly (A Class Day Idyl), has a class-day unique, we imagine, in college annals. In continuing through the Yard on our way to Memorial Hall, we pass the College Pump, 331 FICTIONAL RAMBLES "in warm weather," says a recent writer, " one of the hardest-worked of all the college belong- ings." It is affectionately alluded to by the novelists, and we half expect to find Hammer- smith's face under its mouth, "where he had cooled his lips so many times, rushing in from cricket, or football, or rapid constitutional, just in time for recitation." Passing out through the Yard to Cambridge Street we come to Memorial Hall, elaborately described and scenically used in all the stories pertaining to Harvard life. In writing of the impression that this building made on his Mis- sissippian hero of The Bostonians, Henry James says : H The Hall was buttressed, cloistered, turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had never seen anything ; though it didn't look old, it looked significant ; it covered a larofe area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. It was detached from the rest of the collegiate group, and stood in a grassy triangle of its own." Here, in Sander's Theatre, fictional heroes 332 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON deliver their orations and receive their degrees, while Memorial itself on Class-day becomes the scene of gay festivities in the way of spreads and dances. This Hall was erected in memory of the sons of Harvard who died during the civil war. In Hammersmith we are given pictures of those stirring times when the students went off to the front amid the cheers and blessings of their classmates. At the end of this novel the author, writing in 1877, says: "Yonder Memorial Hall has writ- ten the names of some on its immortal tablets, where the thronging youth of to-day, who come up annually to the old university, may read the bright record and the brightening names. The lives of these will not have been in vain if they shall teach their successors in the happy college walks and ways, consecrated by their heroic feet, that courage, high dar- ing, devoted sacrifice of self, are not alone to be admired amon^ the ancient Greeks and Romans." How some of these '' successors " of Ham- 333 FICTIONAL RAMBLES mersmith and his friends feel about the beau- tiful Hall is suggested with exquisite feeling by Mr. Flandrau in his story Wellington. Hay dock, it will be remembered, was taking his mother into Memorial. The beautiful transept was dark at first, after the sunlight outside. Then it lifted straight and high from the cool dusk into the quiet light of the stained windows. Except for the faint echo of their footsteps along the marble floor, the two moved from tablet to tablet in silence. Somewhere near the south door they stopped, and Phillip said, simply : "This one is Shaw's." When they passed on and out, and sat in the shade on the steps, Haydock's mother wiped her eyes. The long, silent roll-call always made her do that. " It was a great, great price to pay," she said at last. "I never knew how great," said Phillip, w until I came here one day and tried to live it all over, as if it were happening now. Before then the war seemed fine, and historic, and all that, but ever so far away. It's been real since then. I thought of how all the little groups of fellows would talk about it in the Yard between lectures, and read the morning papers while the lectures were going on ; and how the in- structors would hate to have to tell them not to. 334 S V. u 5 7,^ S 335 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON And I thought what it would be like to have the men I know . . . getting restless and excited, and sitting up all night at the club, and then throwing down their books and marching away to the front to be shot ; and how I would have to go along, too, be- cause — well, you couldn't stay at home while they were being shot every day and thrown into trenches. I don't think you ever realize it very much until you think about it that way. . . . But it isn't as though you felt it were all a hideous waste. It did some- thing great ; it's doing something now. It can never stop, for every year the new ones come — the ones who don't know yet." Strolling from Memorial down Kirtland we come to Divinity Avenue, at the end of which is Divinity Hall, where Saulsbury and Hamil- ton (Fair Harvard} lived, "in secure retreat from the world, devoting themselves to study in monastic seclusion. . . . Divinity Hall was built at a time when funereal gloom was deemed essential for the perfect development of the Christian character." Verena Tarrent (The Bostonians) knew young men who were study- ing for the Unitarian ministry in that "queer little barrack at the end of Divinity Avenue.' 337 FICTIONAL RAMBLES From here we retrace our steps across the Yard to the Square and thence down Lin- den Street to the corner of Mount Auburn, where we find Claverly, in which lived Sears Walcott 2nd, Haydock, Fields, Hewitt and other of the men of Mr. Flandrau's Harvard Episodes. Many events — comedy and tragedy intermingled — occurred in Claverly, among these men who are clever pen portraits of the Harvard men of to-day. This hedonist deals frankly with the varying aspects of Harvard life about which, as presented by him, the un- initiated will learn much, particularly from the discussion which takes place in that story called The Chance: Around the corner from Claverly in Holyoke Street is the Hasty Pudding Club House, the scene of one of Mr. Post's Harvard stories — In the Early Sixties. At this club house Beverly Beverly (Flandrau's The Class Day Idyl) spent a wretched quarter of an hour en- deavouring to escape from his ridiculous en- tanglement with that clinging tormentor, " the 33S IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Millstone." Hammersmith and Goldie were Pudding men in the days when the club rooms were in Stoughton Hall, up the stairway of which " legions of trembling neophytes have climbed before and since." III. WESTWARD FROM Beacon Street in Boston, extend- ing westward, some fifteen years or more ago, was a famous road called the Mill- dam (now the Beacon Street Boulevard), where lovers of horseflesh were wont to display the points of their favourites and fast trotting was the order of the day. During the winter, in the sleighing season, it became what Bartley Hubbard (Howells's The Rise of Silas Lap- ham) called a carnival of fashion and gaiety on the Brighton road to make a part of which was one of the keenest enjoyments of Colonel Lapham. Not that the "carnival of fashion" appealed to him, but the excitement of speed- ing his mare was a sensation of which he never wearied. 339 FICTIONAL RAMBLES The Milldam of those days is thuspictured for us by the novelist : "The beautiful landscape widened to right and left of them, with the sun- set redder and redder, over the low irregular hills before them. They crossed the Milldam into Longwood ; and here, from the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which thousands of cutters came and went. Some of the drivers were already speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines, between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road. . . But most of the people in those elegant sleighs and cutters had so little the air of the great world that one knowing it at all must have wondered where they and their money came from ; and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed, like that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim, almost fierce alertness ; the women wore an air of cou- rageous apprehension. At a certain point the Colonel said, ' I'm going to let her out, Pert,' and he lifted and then dropped the reins lightly on the mare's back. She understood the signal 340 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON and, as an admirer said, 'she laid down to her work.' Nothing in the immutable iron of Lap- ham's face betrayed his sense of triumph as the mare left everything behind her on the road. Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her flying wraps about her, and shield- her face from the scud of ice flungr from the mare's heels to betray it ; except for the rush of her feet, the mare was as silent as the peo- ple behind her; the muscles of her back and thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to an alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing a hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but unmolested by the policemen, who probably saw that the mare and the Colo- nel knew what they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to interfere with trotting- like that. At the end of the heat Lapham drew her in, and turned off on a side street into Brookline." The Colonel was then in the vicinity of the present Country Club, built since his day in 341 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Brookline, and the scene of much of Arlo Bates's Love in a Cloud. Here the inconse- quential Jack Neligage — one of the few men in Boston, the novelist says, entirely free from any COUNTRY CLUB, BROOKLINE " Before the front of the house was a sloping lawn which merged into an open park, here and there dotted with groups of budding trees." — Arlo Bates's "Love hi a Cloud." weakness in the way of occupation beyond that of pleasure-seeking — played polo, a game in which he excelled. All the characters in this novel were polo enthusiasts or pretended to be ! and the Country Club, dubbed by Mr. Bates " County Club," during the weeks of early 342 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON spring was a popular rendezvous. " The exhil- aration of the spring day, the pleasure of tak- ing up once more the outdoor life of the warm season, the little excitement which belongs to the assemblage of merry-makers, the chatter, the laughter, all the gay bustle combined to fill the County Club with a joyous atmosphere." Brookline, the most aristocratic and by many regarded as the most beautiful of the environs of Boston, was the home of that mysterious and unique individual Mr. Austin May (Stim- son's Residuary Legatee), who, driving to his house on his arrival from Europe, noted that "the road was walled in and roofed over by a dense canopy of foliage borne by arching American elms ; and through its green walls, dense as a lane in Jersey, only momentary glimpses were to be had of shaven lawns and quiet country houses. When they came to a gate, with high stone posts, topped by an ancient pair of cannon balls, the carryall turned in. A moment after they had passed the screen of border foliage, May found himself in 343 FICTIONAL RAMBLES the midst of a wide lawn, open to the sunlight, but rimmed upon all points of the compass by a distant hedge of trees. . . In the centre of this stood an elderly brick house, its southern wall quite green with ivy. In front of it was a large pavilion low and stone built, rising with- out apparent purpose from the side of an ar- tificial pool of water, rimmed with rich bands of lilies." How Austin May and May Austin came to dwell together in the old ivy-covered house, must be left to the novelist to tell. Un- fortunately in the book he does not aid us by mention of exact locality to identify the house, yet he assures us that if we drive by there, some summer afternoon, we will " note about the windows those frilled and pleated things that denote the presence of a woman's hand." Out through these country roads tramped Dan, led by Walter (Miss Frothingham's The Turn of the Road) on that hideous night when he went blind. " He was maddened with physical pain that did not subside with the 344 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON loss of sight, and after the long strain of sleepless nights and mental anguish his nerves had given way. He lurched heavily in walk- THE UPPER CHARLES RIVER "where the reflections of its wooded banks and circuitous loveliness remind one of the Thames above Richmond." — Margaret All- stons "Her Boston Experiences" ing, and blamed Walter for letting him stum- ble, and there were terrible times when he fought for the light with his hands, as a drown- ing man fights for air. At those moments Walter held him with all his strength and with 345 FICTIONAL RAMBLES a prayer on his lip. The night seemed an aeon of chaotic and hideous darkness. It was not till the East grew pale that Dan allowed himself to be forced upon a bench, and, leaning his head against a tree behind him, fell into the unconsciousness of utter exhaustion." Beyond the scene of this tragedy lie the Newtons (called the Garden City) where the beautiful Charles and a large canoe club fur- nish boating for hundreds of pleasure-seekers. There Margaret Alston {Her Boston Experi- ences) canoed on the upper Charles, "where the reflections of its wooded banks and cir- cuitous loveliness remind one of the Thames above Richmond." IV. TOWARD THE BLUE HILLS HAVING raced over the Milldam with Silas Lapham, an exhilarating sleigh- ride in another direction is open to those who will drive with Craighead and his wife {Truth Dexter} "through Boston's circle of clinging parks, Jamaica Plain, Dedham and 346 IN AND ABOUT BOS T () N Milton, embracing the lofty ledges of the Blue Hills and the heights of Dorchester, where Washington had erected his decisive batteries. . . . Truth felt new life tingle in her veins as she and her husband sped along the shining, slippery roads, the black span under Van's masterly control gradually passing every rival equipage, and the keen sleigh rails throwing showers of hardened snow into the air at every turn or swerve." The heights of Dorchester which they passed homeward bound are identified with Cooper's Lionel Lincoln, who, with Cecil, aided by Ralph, escaped from here to Boston under the fire of Washington's batteries. " Ralph led his companions by a long and circuitous path to the shores of the bay. Here they found, hid in the rushes of a shallow inlet, a small boat that Lionel recognized as the lit- tle vessel in which Job Pray was wont to pur- sue his usual avocation of a fisherman. Enter- ing it without delay, he seized the oars, and aided by a flowing tide, he industriously urged 347 FICTIONAL RAMBLES it towards the distant spires of Boston. The parting- shades of the night were yet struggling with the advance of day, when a powerful flash of light illuminated the hazy horizon, and the roar of cannon, which had ceased toward morning, was heard again. But this time the sound came from the water, and a cloud arose above the smoking harbour, announcing that the ships were again enlisted in the contest. This sudden cannonade induced Lionel to steer his boat between the islands ; for the castle and southern batteries of the town were all soon united in pouring out their vengeance on the labourers, who still occupied the heights of Dorchester. . . In short, while he laboured at the oars, Lionel witnessed the opening scene of Breed's acted anew, as battery after battery, and ship after ship, brought their guns to bear on their hardy countrymen, who had once more hastened a crisis by their daring enter- prise." Dorchester is commonly known as the pud- ding-stone district because of the vast amount 348 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON of loose boulder cast about. The legends of the pudding-stone are legion. The Autocrat gives one, and his version of it in a poem called "The Dorchester Giant" in which his inimitable humour has full sway. He says that a giant of old gave to his wife and children a pudding stuffed with plums which in their rage they flung over all the country round about : Giant and mammoth have passed away. For ages have floated by ; The suet is hard as a marrow-bone, And every plum is turned to a stone, But there the puddings lie. Atzd if some pleasant afternoon, You'll ask me out to ride. The whole of the story I will tell. And you shall see where the puddings fell And pay for the punch beside. In Roxbury, which adjoins Dorchester, is standing in Eustis Street what remains of the stately old mansion which, nearly a century and a half ago, was the abode of Governor Shirley, one of the most dis- 349 FICTIONAL RAMBLES tinguished ot the royal governors. Then it stood remote from the highway with a com- manding view of the sea, the distant town and surrounding country, perched upon its granite foundation, and approached by an impossible flight of granite steps. Here many of the scenes of the earlier chapters of Bynner's Agnes Surriage transpire. Mrs. Shirley, a most gracious woman, interested herself in Frankland's protegee from the beginning and gave her at once the inestimable advantage of her patronage. After the " bare-legged dis- hevelled little hussev " had taken on some polish we have in the novel a charming account of a musical party here when Agnes was per- suaded to sing- several ballads to her own ac- companiment on the harpsichord. " Even Mrs. Shirley and the Collector, who were aware of her vocal powers, were astonished at the per- formance ; while as for Captain Frankland, who shared his brother's musical taste, it was noted that for the rest of the evening he did not quit the singer's side, and on 350 S O £0 CO — ,vi c r -o 35i IN AND ABOUT BOSTON breaking up was a long time in making his adieux." Thou eh Kingfshaven in Eliza Orne White's Miss Brooks, is not intended to be Roxbury, yet here is the beautiful old-fashioned garden described as the Brookses where the family spent so much time, Janet particularly. And there, one beautiful moonlight night, Graham found her sobbing her heart out. " The garden had an aspect of romance and mystery in this half light in striking contrast to its appearance under a midday sun. The carnations and the late roses were etherealized, and a tall bush with a feathery white flower made a delicate frost-work with its graceful branches. There was a touch of foe in the air which broueht out a mixture of sweet odours." Beyond Roxbury is Jamaica Plain, where Mrs. Sam Wyndham (Crawford's American Politician) gave her skating party on Jamaica Pond. " The water was covered with a broad sheet of ice that would bear any weight. . . . Two and two, in a certain grace of order, the 353 FICTIONAL RAMBLES little party came out from the shore into the moonlight. A very pretty sight is a moonlight skating party, and Vancouver knew what he was saying when he hinted at the mysterious and romantic influences that are likely to be »h^>: ^"fliBT r ' Ty *&# * JAMAICA POND " — the water was covered with a broad sheet of ice that would bear any weight.'' — Crawford' s "An American Politician." abroad on such occasions." Mr. Crawford comments on the fact that skating- was not at that time fashionable in Boston, so that the Wyndham party had the pond practically to themselves. This would not be their expe- rience to-day, when all during the skating sea- son it is crowded to its utmost capacity, day and evening. 354 355 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Keeping on toward the Blue Hills we come to Wallaston, a part of Ouincyand of fictional interest because here is Mount Wallaston, the scene of the revels of Hawthorne's Maypole of Merrymount and of Motley's Merry mount, the latter story being one of the two novels written by the historian. About 1628 one Captain Wallaston had planted himself in the neighbourhood of the hill, which still perpetuates his name. Thomas Morton, the wily, overthrew him and made himself Lord of Merry-Mount, as he named the place. Says the novelist : " The crepuscu- lar period which immediately preceded the rise of the Massachusetts Colony possesses more of the elements of romance than any sub- sequent epoch. After the arrival of Winthrop with the charter, the history of the province is as clear as daylight, but during the few previ- ous years there are several characters flitting like phantoms through the chronicles of the time the singularity of whose appearance gives them a certain romantic interest." Such 357 FICTIONAL RAMBLES a character is Motley's hero, Morton, the Lord of Misrule and Sachem of Merrymount, who is also the hero of Hawthorne's story, The May- pole of Merry Mount. In this tale, written before Motley's novel, but which, the novelist - historian tells us, he took pains never to read, Hawthorne has painted for us fantastic facts without need to draw upon his wealth of imagery. The masques, mummeries and festive customs which made the revels of the nuptials of the Lord and Lady of the May as he describes them, were in accordance with the manners of the aee. "All the hereditary pastimes of old England were transplanted hither," he tells us. " The King of Christmas was duly crowned, and the Lord of Misrule bore potent sway. On the eve of St. John they felled whole acres of the forest to make bonfires, and danced by the blaze all night, crowned with garlands and throwing flowers into the flame. At harvest- time, though their crop was of the smallest, they made an image with the sheaves of 353 359 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Indian corn and wreathed it with autumnal garlands, and bore it home triumphantly. But what chiefly characterized the colonists of Merry Mount was their veneration for the Maypole. It has made their true history a poet's tale. Spring decked the hallowed em- blem with young blossoms and fresh green boughs; summer brought roses of the deepest blush, and the perfected foliage of the forest ; autumn enriched it with that red and yellow gorgeousness, which converts each wildwood leaf into a painted flower ; and winter silvered it with sleet, and hung it round with icicles till it flashed in the cold sunshine, itself a frozen sunbeam. Thus each alternate season did homage to the maypole, and paid it a tribute of its own richest splendour. Its votaries danced round it, once, at least, in every month ; some- times they called it their religion, or their altar ; but always, it was the banner staff of Merry Mount " In Ouincy, of which Wallaston is a part, is a pleasure-ground called Merrymount, after the 361 FICTIONAL RAMBLES home of the Lord of Misrule; but to the fictional rambler Ouincy's most interesting landmark is the historic Ouincy-Butler man- sion, haunted by memories of the bewitching Agnes Surriage, one of the gayest of the guests in a " country excursion to Mr. Ouincy's, where the whole party with much merriment took part in catching eels they were to have cooked for supper from the brook at the bot- tom of the garden." Like the house the brook is still there, and beside it many times, no doubt, sat the celebrated " Dorothy Q.," who was born in the mansion. She, as all the world knows, was the great-grandmother of the Auto- crat who, justly proud of her, has added to her laurels by this poem dedicated to her portrait : Dorothy Q. was a lady bom I Ay ! since the galloping Normans came England 's annals have known her name ; And still to the three-hilled rebel town Dear is that ancient name's renown ; For many a civic wreath they won, The youthful sire and the grey-haired son. 362 3^3 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Farther on toward the Blue Hills we find Dedham. "And this (Stimson's King Noa~ nett) was the settlement they called Content- ment, for the Bay people were fond of fine names, taken from the Bible or their books of Psalms." Most of this country (about 1670) was then a wilderness and the adventures of Carew and Courtenay, in their endeavour to make a home, and their encounters with the Indians, make a stirring and romantic picture of times little known to the fiction reader until Mr. Stimson created King Noanett. V. NAHANT AND NANTASKET" OF the many shore places about Boston one of the most beautiful and exclu- sive is Nahant, on the north shore, an island but for the narrow strip of land that connects it with Lynn. " Cold roast Boston," it was named by " Tom " Appleton, celebrated as a wit of the Hub. "Tom" Appleton has been gathered to his fathers, but his nickname still clings. In Truth Dexter, the novelist 365 FICTIONAL RAMBLES tells us that Craighead was most anxious to send his wife down there when the warm weather came on, but " Truth feared the pen- insular resort, having heard it spoken of by epicures as 'cold roast Boston.'" In this aristocratic atmosphere it is natural " At the foot of the lawn was the cliff ; and below, a lovely little pebble beach covered with the most wonderful shells." — Stimsons "Pirate Gold," to find old Mr. Bowdoin (Stimson's Pirate Gold) spending his summers, and it is interest- ing to learn that these summers and all the happy days in them he made for the children are described in the novel as they actually oc- curred in the life of Mr. Bowdoin's prototype, Mr. Josiah Bradlee. Mercedes, "who came from the sea," never forgot those visits to 366 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON Nahant, when, as the steamer readied the wharf, Mr. Bowdoin could be seen usually ** run- ning down the hill as if too late, his blue dress coat tails streaming in the wind, his Panama hat in one hand, and a large brown paper bag, bursting with oranges, in the other." In his capacious pockets the children were sure to find Salem " Gibraltars," hard and mouth-filling dainties calculated to fill in- fantile mouths even as they did the hearts with joy. When the little visitors arrived at the house they were sent out to play on "a fascinating rocky island in the sea, connected by a neck of twenty yards of pebbles " where they made the most wonderful discoveries. Real candy crystals, pink and white, had been washed into the rocky crevices ! Real bunches of hot house grapes grew on the low juniper bushes ! Real peg tops and beautiful, rare shells were to be found among the seaweed on the tiny beach ! Verily a good fairy was that old gentleman, stretched in a roomy cane chair up on the 367 FICTIONAL RAMBLES piazza, in his hand a spy glass with which he pretended to scan the horizon. The house on the outer cliff hieh above the sea where the lovable and eccentric old Mr. Bowdoin passed his summer days, is still stand- ing, and remains in the possession of the Brad- lee family. The Coreys (Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham) always had a house at Nahant, but after letting it for a season or two they found they could get on without it. The people of Mr. Howells's A Days Pleasure had in mind an excursion to Nahant, but they gave the preference to Nantasket because they thought it much better to see the ocean from a long beach, than from the Nahant rocks. Of all these splendid rocks which make the shore so picturesque, the most imposing is Pulpit at the extreme point of the estate of Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, whom many persons persist in proclaiming the author of that recent and much discussed anonymous Boston novel Truth Lexter. Another Boston literateur who 368 H rt 5 '^ 369 IN AND ABOUT HO S T O N makes Nahant his summer home is Judge Robert Grant, as a novelist most widely known through his Unleavened Bread. The poet Longfellow was for many years a picturesque figure in the summer life of Nahant, where his sunset reveries were made a " re- quiem of the dying day " by the ringing of the bells in Lynn. Borne on the evening wind across the crimson twilight O'er land and sea they rise and fall, bells of Lynn. In a social sense as widely separated from Nahant as are the poles is Nantasket, only a few miles away, and a part of summer Boston. In Mr. Howells's A Days Pleasure the party went on one of the steamers down the harbour to this Mecca of tourists, but gave up their ex- pedition to the beach owing to the sudden ap- pearance of an east wind. " While you are saying how lovely it is, a subtle change is wrought, and under skies still blue and a sun still warm the keen spirit of the east wind pierces every nerve, and all the fine weather within you is chilled and extinguished." 371 FICTIONAL RAMBLES The Silas Laphams spent many summers at Nantasket, and Mr. Howells has given us vivid pictures of their surroundings and the trip down to the beach on the boat — a trip fami- liar to Bostonians and the summer tourist in the Hub. The fiction reader will find it immensely diverting to make this little water journey down the harbour in the society of Colonel Lapham as young Corey so often did. " He had time," says the author, " to buy two news- papers on the wharf before he jumped on board the steamboat with Corey. 'Just made it,' he said ; ' and that's what I like to do. I can't stand it to be aboard much more than a min- ute before she shoves out.' He gave one of the newspapers to Corey as he spoke, and set him the example of catching up a camp stool on their way to that point on the boat which his experience had taught him was the best. He opened his paper at once and began to run over the news, while the young man watched the spectacular recession of the city, and was vaguely conscious of the people about him, 372 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON and of the gay life of the water around the boat. The air freshened ; the craft thinned in number; they met larger sail, lagging slowly inward in the afternoon light ; the islands of the bay waxed and waned as the steamer ap- proached and left them behind." It was al- ways a matter of astonishment to the Colonel where the great crowd of people on the boat came from. " I've been riding up and down on these boats for six or seven years," he said to Corey, " and I don't know but very few of the faces I see on board. Seems to be a per- fectly fresh lot every time. Well, of course ! Town's full of strangers in the summer season, anyway, and folks keep coming down from the country. They think it's a great thing to get down to the beach, and they've all heard of the electric light on the water, and they want to see it." The author goes on to tell us that there was little style and no distinction among the crowd. " They were people who were going down to the beach for the fun or the re- lief of it, and were able to afford it. In face 373 FICTIONAL RAMBLES they were commonplace, with nothing but the American poetry of vivid purpose to light them up, where they did not wholly lack fire. But the were nearly all shrewd and friendly-look- ing, with an apparent readiness for the humour- ous intimacy native to us all. The women were dandified in dress, according to their means and taste, and the men differed from each other in degrees of indifference to it. To a straw-hatted population, such as ours is in summer, no sort of dignity is possible. We have not even the power over observers which comes from the fantasticality of an English- man when he discards the conventional dress. In our straw hats and our serge or flannel sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd of boys." From the pier, where the boat lands, it is but a short drive up the sandy road past the hotels and restaurants to the colony of summer houses, one of which was occupied by the Laphams — "a brown cottage with a vermilion roof and a group of geraniums clutching the 374 pff ' 'J ' 1 >'.. . 1 i i K * ' M E I CO 2 5 375 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON rock that cropped up in the loop formed by the road. It was treeless and bare all round, and the ocean, unnecessarily vast, weltered away a little more than a stone's cast from the cottage." Here at the Colonel's solicitation young Corey came frequently to see " the girls," with whom he spent delightful evenings on the veranda in the moonlight, on the rocks, and on the beach which they were much given to frequenting, though Penelope confided to him that they had about exhausted its possi- bilities. " We have been here so often that we know it all by heart — just how it looks at high tide, and how it looks at low tide, and how it looks after a storm. We're as well acquainted with the crabs and stranded jelly- fish as we are with the children digging in the sand and the people sitting under umbrellas. I think they're always the same, all of them." It was the winsome Penelope, it will be re- membered, who captivated Corey, while the family — and Irene, alas ! — thought it was the younger girl's beauty that attracted him. 377 FICTIONAL RAMBLES Nantasket forms part of the setting of Mr. Stimson's Pirate Gold, At the period of which this novelist writes it was semi-fashion- able and our old friend Jamie McMurtagh, the hero of the novel, socially ambitious for his little Mercedes, felt that he had achieved great things when he rented a cottage at this gay watering-place. " To Jamie it was the next thing to Nahant, which was of course out of the question. But the queer old clerk was not fitted to shine in any society, and Merce- des found it hard to make her way alone. They wandered about the beach, and occa- sionally to the great hotel where there was a hop, of evenings, and listened to the bands ; but Mercedes' beauty was too striking and her manners were too independent to inspire quick confidence in the Nantasket matrons ; while Jamie missed his pipe and shirt-sleeves after supper." Jamie's only other experience of Nantasket was once years before when he had gone there on a week's vacation, but the outing could scarcely have enlightened him as 378 IN AND ABOUT BOSTON to the attractions of the place, for " his princi- pal diversion had been to take the morning steamboat thence to the city, and gaze into the office windows from the wharf." Mercedes' isolation, however, finally came to an end and her and Jamie's real troubles began when she met at the Rockland House Mr. David St. Clair who " wore kid gloves and a high silk hat — a white waistcoat and a very black moustache. . . His career was shadowy, like his hair. In those days still a moustache bore with it some audacity, and gave a man who frankly lived outside the reputable call- ings something of the buccaneer. St. Clair called himself a gentleman, but did not pre- tend to be a clerk, and frankly avowed that he was not in trade. Jamie could not make him out at all. He hoped, indeed, he was a gen- tleman. Had he been in the old country, he could have credited it better ; but gentlemen without visible means of support were, in those days, unusual in Boston." To end our rambles here is to leave the so- 379 FICTIONAL RAMBLES ciety of a number of interesting characters, among whom are old and valued friends for whose creation we owe the novelist much ; the more that they do ^iot seem to us fictitious, but persons of flesh and blood who live and move and have their being in the Hub and, to the imaginative, people the streets of the Bos- ton of yesterday, and the Boston of to-day. THE END 380 f £3 i BOSTON COLLEGE 3 9031 01565693 7 5398? 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