to enter on pain of prosecution for trespassing.
There was nothing else to prevent our entering, and
we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing
but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van!
As if that were not the potentiality of all manner
of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to
Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving
their van in it, I shall now probably never know,
but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine whom
these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.
[Illustration: LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK
OF THE WITHAM]
There was no great token of genteel life in Boston,
so far as we saw it, but perhaps we did not look in
the right places. There were good shops, but
not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of
the intellectual status that there are three weekly
newspapers, but no dailies, which could not be the
case in any American town of fourteen thousand people.
Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings
we came at one point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated
garden, which looked as if it might have society beyond
it, but not being positively forbidden we did not
penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient
grammar-school, one of those foundations which in
England were meant originally for the poor deserving
of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to
the more deserving rich, careful of the contamination
of the lower classes. Being out of term the school
was closed to its pupils, but we found a contractor
there removing the old stoves and putting in a system
of hot-water heating, which he said was better fitted
to resist the cold of the Boston winters. He
was not a very conversable man, but so much we screwed
out of him, with the added fact that the tuition of
that school was no longer free. It came to some
five guineas a year, no great sum, but perhaps sufficient
to keep the school, with the other influences, select
enough for the patronage to which it had fallen.
It was a pleasant place, with a playground before it,
which in the course of generations there must have
been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out of.
V
There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit,
and we had left that to the last because it was the
thing that had mostly brought us to Boston. It
was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those
poor people of the region roundabout who were trying
to escape from their “dread lord,” James
the First, and were arrested for this crime, and brought
to answer for it before the magistrates of the town.
Their dread lord had then lately met some ministers
of their faith at Hampton Court, and there browbeaten,
if not beaten, them in argument, so that he was in
no humor to let, these people, who afterward became
the Pilgrim Fathers, get away to Holland, where there
was no dread lord, or at least none of King James’
thinking.
Copyrights
Seven English Cities from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
