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 system,' and adds that 'you couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar,' the Autocrat accepts the 'satire of the remark,' and admits that the 'axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town and city.' But he does not pretend to conceal that the sentiment, outrageous if literally accepted, tickles his fancy agreeably. When we drink a man's health after dinner, we often express an estimate of his virtues which we might sometimes shrink from maintaining in cold blood. Yet our sentiment may be essentially genuine, though we have dropped some implied qualifications. Holmes as a man shares the young fellow's enthusiasm, though he wishes us to understand that he is aware in cold blood that it is not quite the whole truth. The little deformed gentleman in the Professor is a still more vigorous mouthpiece of the same sentiment. 'A new race, and a whole new world for the newborn human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it, and has been any time these hundred years! That's all I claim for Boston, that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet!'—in which respect its superiority to Philadelphia and New York is easily demonstrated.