fortunately unable to emigrate with the tories by whom, or by whose fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the college, the square, brown tower of the church, and the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable characteristic of New England religious architecture. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple salt-meadows, darkened, here and there, with the blossoming black-grass as with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as water, but without its glare, and with softer and more soothing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. To your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial time, all comfortably fronting southward. If it were spring-time, the rows of horse-chesnuts along the fronts of these houses showed, through every crevice of their dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the hill behind was white or rosy with the crowding blooms of various fruit trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman clatters over the loose planks of the bridge, while his antipodal shadow glides silently over the mirrored bridge below, or unless "Oh, winged rapture, feathered soul of spring, Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds, Such was the charmingly rural picture which he who, thirty years ago, went eastward over Symonds' Hill, had given him for nothing to hang in the Gallery of Memory. But we are a city now, and Common Councils have yet no notion of the truth (learned long ago by many a European hamlet) that picturesqueness adds to the actual money-value of a town. To save a few dollars in gravel, they have cut a kind of dry ditch through the hill, where you suffocate with dust in summer, or flounder through waist-deep snowdrifts in winter, with no prospect but the crumbling earth-walls on each side. The landscape was carried away, cartload by cartload, and, deposited on the roads, forms a part of that unfathomable pudding, which has, I fear, driven many a teamster and pedestrian to the use of phrases not commonly found in English dictionaries. " then (I We called it "the Village speak of Old Cambridge), and it was essentially an English village, quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only showing such differences from the original type as the public school and the system of town government might superinduce. A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old women, capped and spectacled, still peered through the same windows from which they had watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the handsome Virginia General who had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People were still living who regretted the late unhappy separation from the Mother Island, who had seen no gentry since the Vassals went, and who thought that Boston had ill kept the day of her patron saint, Botolph, on the 17th June, 1775. The hooks were to be seen from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive red-coats. If memory does not deceive me, women still washed clothes in the town-spring, clear as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel to the metropolis. Commencement had not ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan Commonwealth, and a fitting one it was-the festival of Santa Scolastica, whose triumphal path one may conceive strewn with leaves of spelling-book instead of bay. The students (scholars they were called then) wore their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive nor capable of rousing democratic envy, and the old lines of caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened into beneficiary. The Spanish king was sure that the gesticulating student was either mad or reading Don Quixotte, and if, in those days, you met a youth swinging his arms and talking to himself, you might conclude that he was either a lunatic or one who was to appear in a "part" at the next Commencement. A favorite place for the rehearsal of these orations was the retired amphitheatre of the Gravelpit, perched unregarded on whose dizzy edge, I have heard many a burst of plus-quam-Ciceronian eloquence, and (often repeated) the regular saluto vos praestantissimas, &c., which every year (with a glance at the gallery) causes a flutter among the fans innocent of Latin, and delights to applauses of conscious superiority the youth almost as innocent as they. It is curious, by the way, to note how plainly one can feel the pulse of self in the plaudits of an audience. At a political meeting, if the enthusiasm of the lieges hang fire, it may be exploded at once by an allusion to their intelligence or patriotism, and at a literary festival, the first Latin quotation draws the first applause, the clapping of hands being intended as a tribute to our own familiarity with that sonorous tongue, and not at all as an approval of the particular sentiment conveyed in it. For if the orator should say, "Well has Tacitus remarked, Americani omnes sunt naturaliter fures et stulti," it would be all the same. But the Gravelpit was patient, if irresponsive, nor did the declaimer always fail to bring down the house, bits of loosened earth falling now and then from the precipitous walls, their cohesion perhaps overcome by the vibrations of the voice, and happily satirizing the effect of most popular discourses, which prevail rather with the clay than with the spiritual part of the hearer. Was it possible for us in those days to conceive of a greater potentate than the President of the University, in his square doctor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and Cambridge? If there were a doubt, it was suggested only by the Governor, and even by him on artillery election days alone, superbly martial with epaulets and buckskin breeches, and bestriding the war-horse, promoted to that solemn duty for his tameness and steady habits. Thirty years ago, the Town had indeed a character. Railways and omnibuses had not rolled flat all little social prominences and peculiarities, making every man as much a citizen every where as at home. No Charlestown boy could come to our annual festival, without fighting to avenge a certain traditional porcine imputation against the inhabitants of that historic locality, and to which our youth gave vent, in fanciful imitations of the dialect of the sty, or derisive shouts of "Charlestown hogs!" The penny newspaper had not yet silenced the tripod of the barber, oracle of news. Every body knew every body, and all about every body, and village wit, whose high 'change was around the little market-house in the town-square, had labelled every more marked individuality with nick-names that clung like burrs. Things were established then, and men did not run through all the figures on the dial of society so swiftly as now, when hurry and competition seem to have quite unhung the modulating pendulum of steady thrift, and competent training. Some slow-minded persons, even followed their father's trade, an humiliating spectacle rarer every day. We had our established loafers, topers, proverb-mongers, barber, parson, nay, postmaster, whose tenure was for life. The great political engine did not then come down at regular quadrennial intervals, like a nail-cutting machine, to make all official lives of a standard length, and to generate lazy and intriguing expectancy. Life flowed in recognized channels, narrower, perhaps, but with all the more individuality and force. There was but one white-and-yellowwasher, whose own cottage, fresh-gleaming every June through grape-vine and creeper, was his only sign and advertisement. He was said to possess a secret, which died with him like that of Luca della Robbia, and certainly conceived all colors but white and yellow, to savor of savagery, civilizing the stems of his trees annually with liquid lime, and meditating how to extend that candid baptism even to the leaves. His pie-plants (the best in town), compulsory monastics, blanched under barrels, each in his little hermitage, a vegetable Certosa. His fowls, his ducks, his geese could not show so much as a gray feather among them, and he would have given a year's earnings for a white peacock. The flowers which decked his little door-yard, were whitest China-asters and goldenest sun-flowers, which last, backsliding from their traditional Parsee faith, used to puzzle us urchins not a little, by staring brazenly every way except toward the sun. Celery, too, he raised, whose virtue is its paleness, and the silvery onion, and turnip, which, though outwardly conforming to the green heresies of summer, nourish a purer faith subterraneously, like early Christians in the catacombs. In an obscure corner grew the sanguine beet, tolerated only for its usefulness in allaying the asperities of Saturday's salt fish. He loved winter better than summer, because nature then played the whitewasher, and challenged with her snows the scarce inferior purity of his over-alls and neckcloth. I fancy that he never rightly liked Commencement, for bringing so many black coats together. He founded no school. Others might essay his art, and were allowed to try their 'prentice hands on fences and the like coarse subjects, but the ceiling of every housewife waited on the leisure of Newman (ichneumon the students called him for his diminutiveness) nor would consent to other brush than his. There was also but one brewer,Lewis, who made the village beer, both spruce and ginger, a grave and amiable Ethiopian making a discount always to the boys, and wisely, for they were his chiefest patrons. He wheeled his whole stock in a white-roofed handcart, on whose front a signboard presented at either end an insurrectionary bottle, yet insurgent after no mad Gallic fashion, but soberly and Saxonly discharging itself into the restraining formulary of a tumbler, symbolic of orderly prescription. The artist had struggled manfully with the difficulties of his subject, but had not succeeded so well that we did not often debate in which of the twin bottles Spruce was typified, and in which Ginger. We always believed that Lewis mentally distinguished between them, but by some peculiarity occult to exoteric eyes. This ambulatory chapel of the Bacchus that gives the colic, but not inebriates, only appeared at the Commencement holidays. And the lad who bought of Lewis, laid out his money well, getting respect as well as beer, three sirs to every glass-" beer, sir? yes, sir: spruce or ginger. sir?" İ can yet recall the innocent pride with which I walked away after that somewhat risky ceremony (for a bottle sometimes blew up), dilated not alone with carbonic-acid gas, but with the more ethereal fixed air of that titular flattery. Nor was Lewis proud. When he tried his fortunes in the capital on Election days, and stood amid a row of rival vendors in the very flood of custom, he never forgot his small fellow-citizens, but welcomed them with an assuring smile, and served them with the first. The barber's shop was a museum, scarce second to the larger one of Greenwoods in the metropolis. The boy who was to be clipped there, was always accompanied to the sacrifice by troops of friends, who thus inspected the curiosities gratis. While the watchful eye of R. wandered to keep in check these rather unscrupulous explorers, the unpausing shears would sometimes overstep the boundaries of strict tonsorial prescription, and make a notch through which the phrenological developments could be distinctly seen. As Michael Angelo's design was modified by the shape of his block, so R., rigid in artistic proprieties, would contrive to give an appearance of design to this aberration, by making it the keynote of his work, and reducing the whole head to an appearance of premature bald ness. What a charming place it was, how full of wonder and delight! The sunny little room, fronting southwest upon the common, rang with canaries and java-sparrows, nor were the familiar notes of robin, thrush, and bobolink wanting. A huge white cockatoo harangued vaguely, at in tervals, in what we believed (on R.'s authority) to be the Hottentot language. He had an unveracious air, but what inventions of former grandeur he was indulging in, what sweet South-African Argos he was remembering, what tropical heats and giant trees by unconjectured rivers, known only to the wallowing hippopotamus, we could only guess at. The walls were covered with curious old Dutch prints, beaks of albatross and penguin, and whale's teeth fantastically engraved. There was Frederick the Great, with head drooped plottingly and keen side-long glance from under the three-cornered hat. There hung Bonaparte, too, the long-haired, haggard General of Italy, his eyes sombre with prefigured destiny; and there was his island grave; the dream and the fulfilment. Good store of sea-fights there was also; above all, Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard; the smoke rolling courteously to leeward, that we might see him dealing thunderous wreck to the two hostile vessels, each twice as large as his own, and the reality of the scene corroborated by streaks of red paint leaping from the mouth of every gun. Suspended over the fireplace with the curling-tongs, were an Indian bow and arrows, and in the corners of the room stood New-Zealand paddles and war-clubs quaintly carved. The model of a ship in glass we variously estimated to be worth from a hundred to a thousand dollars, R. rather favoring the higher valuation, though never distinctly committing himself. Among these wonders, the only suspicious one was an Indian tomahawk, which had too much the peaceful look of a shingling-hatchet. Did any rarity enter the town, it gravitated naturally to these walls, to the very nail that waited to receive it, and where, the day after its accession, it seemed to have hung a lifetime. We always had a theory that R. was immensely rich, how could he possess so much and be otherwise?) and that his pursuing his calling was an amiable eccentricity. He was a conscientious artist and never submitted it to the choice of his victim whether he would be perfumed or not. Faithfully was the bottle shaken and the odoriferous mixture rubbed in, a fact redolent to the whole school-room in the afternoon. Sometimes the persuasive tonsor would impress one of the attendant volunteers and reduce his poll to shoe-brush crispness, at cost of the reluctant ninepence hoarded for Fresh Pond and the next half-holiday. Shall the two groceries want their rates sacer, where E. & W. I. goods and country prodooce were sold with an energy mitigated by the quiet genius of the place, and where strings of urchins waited, each with cent in hand, for the unweighed dates (thus giving an ordinary business transaction all the excitement of a lottery), and buying, not only that cloying sweetness, but a dream also of Egypt, and palmtrees, and Arabs, in which vision a print of the pyramids in our geography tyrannized like that taller thought of Cowper's? At one of these the unwearied students used to ply a joke handed down from class to class. Enter A. and asks gravely, "Have you any sour apples, Deacon?" "Well, no, I haven't any just now that are exactly sour; but there's the bellflower apple, and folks that like a sour apple generally like that." (Exit A.) Enter B. "Have you got any sweet apples, Deacon?" "Well, no, I haven't any just now that are exactly sweet; but there's the bellflower apple, and folks that like a sweet apple generally like that." (Exit B.) There is not even a tradition of any one's ever having turned the wary deacon's flank, and his Laodicean apples persisted to the end, neither one thing nor another. Or shall the two town-constables be forgotten, in whom the law stood worthily and amply embodied, fit either of them to fill the uniform of an English beadle? Grim and silent as Ninevite statues they stood on each side of the meeting-house door at Commencement, propped by long staves of blue and red, on which the Indian with bow and arrow, and the mailed arm with the sword, hinted at the invisible sovereignty of the state ready to reinforce them, as "For Achilles' portrait stood a spear Grasped in an arméd hand." Stalwart and rubicund men they were, second only, if second, to S., champion of the county, and not incapable of genial unbendings when the fasces were laid aside. One of them still survives in octogenarian vigor, the Herodotus of village and college legend, and may it be long ere he depart, to carry with him the pattern of a courtesy, now, alas! old-fashioned, but which might profitably make part of the instruction of our youth among the other humanities! In those days the population was almost wholly without foreign admixture. Two Scotch gardeners there were,-Rule, whose daughter (glimpsed perhaps at church, or possibly the mere Miss Harris of fancy) the students nicknamed Anarchy or Miss Rule, and later Fraser, whom whiskey sublimed into a poet, full of bloody his tories of the Forty-twa, and showing an imaginary French bullet, sometimes in one leg and sometimes in the other. With this claim to military distinction he adroitly contrived to mingle another to a natural one, asserting double teeth all round his jaws, and having thus created two sets of doubts, silenced both at once by a single demonstration, displaying the grinders to the confusion of the infidel. The old court-house stood then upon the square. It has shrunk back out of sight now, and students box and fence where Parsons once laid down the law, and Ames and Dexter showed their skill in the fence of argument. Times have changed. and manners, since Chief Justice Dana (father of Richard the First, and grandfather of Richard the Second) caused to be arrested for contempt of court a butcher who had come in without a coat to witness the administration of his country's laws, and who thus had his curiosity exemplarily gratified. Times have changed also since the cellar beneath it was tenanted by the twin brothers Snow. Oyster-men were they indeed, silent in their subterranean burrow, and taking the ebbs and floods of custom with bivalvian serenity. Careless of the months with an R in them, the maxim of Snow (for we knew them but as a unit) was, "when 'ysters are good, they are good; and when they ain't, they isn't." Grecian F. (may his shadow never be less!) tells this, his great laugh expected all the while from deep vaults of chest, and then coming in at the close, hearty, contagious, mounting with the measured tread of a jovial but stately butler who brings ancientest good fellowship from exhaustless bins, and enough, without other sauce, to give a flavor of stalled ox to a dinner of herbs. Let me preserve here an anticipatory elegy upon the Snows, written years ago by some nameless college rhymer. DIFFUGERE NIVES. "Here lies, or lie,-decide the question, you, Still like fair Leda's sons, to whom 'twas given If e'er he laughed, 'twas with no loud guffaw, When floundering cod beslimed the deck's wet planks, The humorous specie of Newfoundland banks. But Snow is gone, and, let us hope, sleeps well (Concluded next month.) THE GREAT PARIS CAFÉS. IF the cafés and the restaurants owe their origin to the storms of 1789, when, in the raging fever which then maddened the French nation, every one was anxious both in the morning and the evening, to learn the news (news such as the world had never read the like before), and to read the different exponents of the several public men; and to discuss the politics of the day, and to indulge in literary debates; if they owe their origin, we say, to the storms of '89, it was especially under the Empire and the Restoration, that these establishments multiplied, and appeared in the brilliancy and the luxury for which they are now celebrated. The most of them were founded by the chefs de cuisine, or the head cooks (to use our more homely phrase), of the great aristocratic houses, whose names had become extinct in the prison massacres, or on the guillotine, or whose fortunes had been melted in the agrarian crucible of the revolutionary decrees: Beauvilliers had been the chef de cuisine of the Prince de Condé, and his restaurant was chiefly patronized by distinguished persons; the Duke d'Angoulême and M. de Chateaubriand dined there together, more than once, and in the public room. Robert had been the chef de cuisine of M. de Chalandray, an ex-farmer-general: on his return from exile, M. de Chalandray, without more than the shadows of his former fortune, went into Robert's restaurant and recognized his old cook; Robert served his old master a most exquisite dinner and placed before him his finest wines, and when the bill came, its total was only six francs: the rich cook treated the poor farmer-general. But the cafés and the restaurants of the Empire shared the common grossness of that epoch; drunkenness and gluttony were common vices to all of them, until the Restoration introduced more courtesy, and more of the arts of peace. Our reader is aware that cafés and restaurants are, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of French life; there is nothing which an absent Frenchman more regrets while wandering from home, than the cafés and the restaurants, where his meals were taken, and his idle hours passed away, and his friends encountered, and himself seeing and seen. Besides, being the Temples of Fame of the town, they are the chapels of ease to limited fortunes: their ample porcelain stoves, piled high with plates, their brilliant gas chandeliers, the numerous newspapers, their well-stuffed seats, their excellent attendance, enable those of straitened circumstances to efface from their account-books many sources of expense, without in the least suppressing (so blunted are the French people to the sense of the observation of others) any of their comforts. We are persuaded, that our reader will find the same sustained interest which we took in reading M. Veron's account of the celebrated cafés and restaurants of Paris, where he enables us to form a quite clear conception of those stages, where, more than any |