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 expressed their delight at this old Lincolnshire town, and Longfellow and other American poets have sung its praises in verse, the average Englishman appears to regard it hardly at all, and scarcely ever to visit it except under compulsion, and has even sung its dispraises in doggerel thus:—

Boston! Boston! Thou hast naught to boast on But a grand sluice and a high steeple, A proud, conceited, ignorant people, And a coast where souls are lost on.

But the charm of Boston, as indeed that of most places, depends upon sentiment and seeing, whether you look upon it with poetic or prosaic eyes. A famous English engineer once told me that he considered a modern express locomotive a most beautiful thing, and it was so in his eyes! "Unless a thing be strong it cannot be beautiful," was his axiom. Weakness, or even the idea of weakness, was an abomination to him, so that the tumble-down cottage, with its uneven roof bent into graceful curves that an artist so delights in, was simple ugliness to him.

It was meet that here we should "take our ease" in an ancient hostelry, and that we should have our breakfast served in a pleasant low-ceilinged parlour, whose panelled walls had an aroma of other days and other ways about them, and suggested to our imaginative minds many a bit of unrecorded romance. With a romancer's license we pictured that old-fashioned chamber peopled by past-time travellers who had come by coach or had posted by private chaise, and mingled with these was a bluff ship