State Street has been the scene of most of the events of a very public nature, which are recorded in the annals of Boston. The balcony of the State House is the popular pulpit, and hence was read the Declaration of Independence, and from hence declaimed Colonel David Crockett, who “could lick his weight in wild-cats.” In 1770 the “Boston massacre” took place in State Street. For several days preceding the event, there had been disturbances between the king’s soldiers and the townspeople, which had put the officers on the alert. The soldiers were collected into the barracks before night, and sentinels were placed around them at all hours to prevent difficulty. One of these sentinels was stationed in a narrow alley, and was striking fire against the walls with his sword, for amusement, when two or three young men attempted to pass him. Having orders to let no one pass, a struggle ensued, and one of the young men received a wound on the head. The noise of the rencontre drew together a considerable crowd, and as but few could enter the narrow scene of action, the remainder listened to an inflammatory speech from “a tall man, with a red cloak, and a white wig,” in the adjacent square. At the close of the oration there was a general cry “To the main guard!” and the crowd rushed tumultuously toward its station in State Street. On their way they passed the Custom House, before the door of which stood a single sentinel. Alarmed at their approach, he retreated up the steps, and, the people collecting around, he sent word to the barracks, near by, that he was attacked, and a company in a few moments arrived to his assistance, and formed a half circle round the steps. The captain of the day, named Preston, followed immediately, and the Custom House, which stood at the corner of State and Exchange Streets, was soon thronged by a considerable multitude. The soldiers were soon pressed upon very closely by the mob, who were mostly armed with clubs; and those at a distance soon began to throw snowballs, followed by fragments of ice, stones and sticks, while from every side came the cry, “Fire, if you dare!” The soldiers soon heard, or thought they heard, the order, and they fired in quick succession from right to left. Two or three of the guns flashed, but the rest were fatal. Three persons were killed on the spot, two received wounds of which they died next day, and others were more slightly injured. The people immediately dispersed, leaving the dead bodies in the street, but returned in a few minutes; when the soldiers aimed once more at them, but the commanding officer struck up the guns with his sword. The drum was beat to arms, and several of the officers, on their way to join the guard, were knocked down, and their swords taken from them. Order was soon restored, and Captain Preston delivered himself up for trial. The dead were buried with some pomp, and when the excitement had subsided a little, Preston was tried and acquitted.
State Street is at present a street of banks, insurance offices, and similar institutions; and its side walk serves for the merchants’ exchange. The buildings are of granite, and some of them, particularly a new bank, lately erected near Kilby Street, present very creditable specimens of city architecture.
NIAGARA FALLS, FROM CLIFTON HOUSE.
The most comprehensive view of Niagara is, no doubt, that from the galleries of this hotel; but it is, at the same time, for a first view, one of the most unfavourable. Clifton House stands nearly opposite the centre of the irregular crescent formed by the Falls; but it is so far back from the line of the arc, that the height and grandeur of the two cataracts, to an eye unacquainted with the scene, are deceptively diminished. After once making the tour of the points of view, however, the distance and elevation of the hotel are allowed for by the eye, and the situation seems most advantageous. This is the only house at Niagara where a traveller, on his second visit, would be content to live.
Clifton House is kept in the best style of hotels in this country; but the usual routine of such places, going on in the very eye of Niagara, weaves in very whimsically with the eternal presence and power of the cataract. We must eat, drink, and sleep, it is true, at Niagara as elsewhere; and indeed, what with the exhaustion of mind and fatigue of body, we require at the Falls perhaps more than usual of these three “blessed inventions.” The leaf that is caught away by the Rapids, however, is not more entirely possessed by this wonder of nature, than is the mind and imagination of the traveller; and the arrest of that leaf by the touch of the overhanging tree, or the point of a rock amid the breakers, is scarce more momentary than the interruption to the traveller’s enchantment by the circumstances of daily life. He falls asleep with its surging thunders in his ear, and wakes—to wonder, for an instant, if his yesterday’s astonishment was a dream. With the succeeding thought, his mind refills, like a mountain channel, whose torrent has been suspended by the frost, and he is overwhelmed with sensations that are almost painful, from the suddenness of their return. He rises and throws up his window, and there it flashes, and thunders, and agonizes—the same almighty miracle of grandeur for ever going on; and he turns and wonders—What the deuce can have become of his stockings! He slips on his dressing-gown, and commences his toilet. The glass stands in the window, and with his beard half achieved, he gets a glimpse of the foam-cloud rising majestically over the top of the mahogany frame. Almost persuaded, like Queen Christina at the fountains of St. Peter’s, that a spectacle of such splendour is not intended to last, he drops his razor, and with the soap drying unheeded on his chin, he leans on his elbows, and watches the yeasty writhe in the abysm, and the solemn pillars of crystal eternally falling, like the fragments of some palace-crested star, descending through interminable space. The white field of the iris forms over the brow of the cataract, exhibits its radiant bow, and sails away in a vanishing cloud of vapour upon the wind; the tortured and convulsed surface of the caldron below shoots out its frothy and seething circles in perpetual torment; the thunders are heaped upon each other, the earth trembles, and—the bell rings for breakfast! A vision of cold rolls, clammy omelettes, and tepid tea, succeeds these sublime images, and the traveller completes his toilet. Breakfast over, he resorts to the colonnade, to contemplate untiringly the scene before him, and in the midst of a calculation of the progress of the Fall towards Lake Erie,—with the perspiration standing on his forehead, while he struggles to conceive the junction of its waters with Lake Ontario,—the rocks rent, the hills swept away, forests prostrated, and the islands uprooted in the mighty conflux,—some one’s child escapes from its nurse, and seizing him by the legs, cries out “Da-da.”
The ennui attendant upon public-houses can never be felt at Clifton House. The most common mind finds the spectacle from its balconies a sufficient and untiring occupation. The loneliness of uninhabited parlours, the discord of baby-thrummed pianos, the dreariness of great staircases, long entries, and bar-rooms filled with strangers, are pains and penalties of travel never felt at Niagara. If there is a vacant half-hour to dinner, or if indisposition to sleep create that sickening yearning for society, which sometimes comes upon a stranger in a strange land, like the calenture of a fever,—the eternal marvel going on without is more engrossing than friend or conversation, more beguiling from sad thought than the Corso in carnival-time. To lean over the balustrade and watch the flying of the ferry-boat below, with its terrified freight of adventurers, one moment gliding swiftly down the stream in the round of an eddy, the next, lifted up by a boiling wave, as if it were tossed up from the scoop of a giant’s hand beneath the water; to gaze hour after hour into the face of the cataract, to trace the rainbows, delight like a child in the shooting spray-clouds, and calculate fruitlessly and endlessly by the force, weight, speed, and change of the tremendous waters,—is amusement and occupation enough to draw the mind from any thing,—to cure madness or create it.