“Oh, no,” said I, hastily. “Butte in Montana is my first love. There are barren mountains there—they are with me always. Boston doesn’t go to my heart in the least, but I like it much. I like to live here.”
“I am fond of Boston—sometimes,” Annabel Lee observed. “Here by the sea it is not quite Boston. It is everything. This sea washes down by enchanted purple islands and touches at the coast of Spain. But if one can but turn one’s eyes from it for a moment, Boston is a fine and good thing, and interesting.”
“I think it is—from several points of view,” I agreed.
“Tell me what you find that interests you in Boston,” said my friend Annabel Lee.
“There are many things,” I replied. “I have found a little corner down by the East Boston wharf where often I sit on cold days. The sun shines bright and warm on a narrow wooden platform between two great barrels, and I can be hidden there, but I can watch the madding crowd as it goes. The crowd is very madding down around East Boston. And I do not lack company—sometimes brave, sharp-toothed rats venture out on the ground below me. They can not see the madding crowd, but they can enjoy the sunshine and hunt mice among the rubbish.
“The dwellers in East Boston—they are the poor we have always with us. They are not the meek, the worthy, the deserving poor. They are the devilish, the ill-conditioned—one with the wharf rats that hunt for mice. Except that the rats do occasionally try to clean their soft, gray coats by licking them with their little red tongues; whereas, the poor—But why should the poor wash? Are they not the poor?
“As I rest me between my two great barrels and watch this grewsome pageant, I think: It seems a quite desperate thing to be poor in Boston, for Boston is said to be of the best-seasoned knowledge and to carry a lump of ice in its heart. From between my two barrels in East Boston I have seen humanity, oh, so brutal, oh, so barbarous as ever it could have been in merrie England in the reign of good old Harry the Eighth.——
“And so then that is very interesting.”
“In truth it is so,” said my friend Annabel Lee.
“Boston is fair, and very fair.—Tell me more.”