_May 1, '81._--Seems as if all the ways and means of American
travel to-day had been settled, not only with reference to speed and
directness, but for the comfort of women, children, invalids, and old
fellows like me. I went on by a through train that runs daily from
Washington to the Yankee metropolis without change. You get in a
sleeping-car soon after dark in Philadelphia, and after ruminating an
hour or two, have your bed made up if you like, draw the curtains,
and go to sleep in it--fly on through Jersey to New York--hear in your
half-slumbers a dull jolting and bumping sound or two--are unconsciously
toted from Jersey City by a midnight steamer around the Battery and
under the big bridge to the track of the New Haven road--resume your
flight eastward, and early the next morning you wake up in Boston. All
of which was my experience. I wanted to go to the Revere house. A tall
unknown gentleman, (a fellow-passenger on his way to Newport he told
me, I had just chatted a few moments before with him,) assisted me out
through the depot crowd, procured a hack, put me in it with my traveling
bag, saying smilingly and quietly, "Now I want you to let this be _my_
ride," paid the driver, and before I could remonstrate bow'd himself
off.
The occasion of my jaunt, I suppose I had better say here, was for a
public reading of "the death of Abraham Lincoln" essay, on the sixteenth
anniversary of that tragedy; which reading duly came off, night of
April 15. Then I linger'd a week in Boston--felt pretty well (the mood
propitious, my paralysis lull'd)--went around everywhere, and saw all
that was to be seen, especially human beings. Boston's immense material
growth--commerce, finance, commission stores, the plethora of goods, the
crowded streets and sidewalks--made of course the first surprising show.
In my trip out West, last year, I thought the wand of future prosperity,
future empire, must soon surely be wielded by St. Louis, Chicago,
beautiful Denver, perhaps San Francisco; but I see the said wand
stretch'd out just as decidedly in Boston, with just as much certainty
of staying; evidences of copious capital--indeed no centre of the New
World ahead of it, (half the big railroads in the West are built with
Yankees' money, and they take the dividends.) Old Boston with its zigzag
streets and multitudinous angles, (crush up a sheet of letter-paper
in your hand, throw it down, stamp it flat, and that is a map of old
Boston)--new Boston with its miles upon miles of large and costly
houses--Beacon street, Commonwealth avenue, and a hundred others. But
the best new departures and expansions of Boston, and of all the cities
of New England, are in another direction.