Now the Boston press stands in the front rank of the world's journalism, and is commodiously accommodated; as the elegant buildings of the Transcript, Globe, Journal, Herald and other papers, testify. The Advertiser is the oldest daily paper in the city.
It is impossible to properly describe Boston within the limits of so short a chapter, and only a glance at a few other points of interest will therefore be given.
The City Hall, on School street, is on the site of the house of Isaac Johnson, who lived here in 1630, and who has been styled the founder of Boston. The corner-stone of the new building was laid December twenty-second, 1672. It is of Concord granite, and is in the finest style of modern architecture. Here, under the arching roof of the French dome, the fire-alarm telegraph centres, and the sentinel who stands guard at this important point never leaves his post, night or day. The mysterious signal, though touched in the city's remotest rim, is instantly obeyed, and in less time than it takes to tell it the brave firemen are rushing to the rescue. A fine bronze statue of Benjamin Franklin stands in the inclosure in front of the building.
The Custom House, on State street, is built of granite, even to the roof. It is constructed in the form of a Greek cross, and is surrounded by thirty-two granite columns, a little over five feet in diameter. The site was reclaimed from the tide waters, and the massive building rests upon about three thousand piles. Over a million dollars were expended in its erection.
The Old Granary Burying-ground, once a part of the Common, received its name from a public granary which formerly stood within its limits. Some of the most distinguished dust in history is consigned to its keeping. Paul Revere, Peter Faneuil, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, the victims of the Boston Massacre, the parents of Franklin, the first Mayor of Boston, and a long list of other names famed in their day and ours, lie buried within this ancient ground. Near by, between the Common and the Granary Cemetery, stands the celebrated Park Street Church, of which W. H. H. Murray, the brilliant writer and preacher, was, until lately, the pastor. It used to be known as "brimstone corner." This winter we attended Park Street Church on the same day with the brunette monarch, Kalakaua and suite.
One of the most commodious and elegant stations in New England, or this country, is that of the Boston and Providence Railroad. It is about eight hundred feet in length, and is built of brick, with two shades of sandstone. The track house is seven hundred feet long, covering five tracks, and has a span of one hundred and twenty-five feet. Its cost is somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred thousand dollars. The interior arrangement is quite novel in style. The waiting-rooms open out of an immense central apartment with a balcony reaching around the entire inner circumference. Theatre tickets, flower and cigar stands, a billiard room and a barber shop, are some of the special features of the station. Refreshment rooms and dressing rooms, in oak and crimson, are also an integral part of the building.
Hundreds of interesting places in this singular and devious city of Boston must go unnoticed in these pages. The beautiful Tremont Temple and its Sunday temperance lectures; Music Hall, with its big organ of six thousand pipes, through one of which Henry Ward Beecher is said to have crawled, before its erection; the Parker House, one of the crack hotels of the city; the Revere House, where all the distinguished people stop, with its special suite of rooms upholstered in blue satin, where King Kalakaua smoked his cigars in peace; the beneficent Public Library; the Boston Athenæum, home of art; the Boston Theatre, the new and elegant Globe Theatre, and the suburban limits, including Charlestown and famous Bunker Hill, Cambridge and Harvard University, Mt. Auburn, Dorchester Heights, Roxbury and East Boston, which was formerly known as Noddle's Island, and where now the Cunard line of steamers arrive and depart—all these tempt my pen to linger within their charmed localities. But it is a temptation to be resisted. When, after many weeks' sojourn in the intellectual "Hub," I was at last seated in the outward bound train, ticketed for the west, a regret, born of pleasant associations and a taste of Boston atmosphere, took possession of me. The farewells I uttered held an undertone of pain. But the train sped onward, unheeding, and the city of the harbor seemed to dissolve and disappear in the smoke of her thousand chimneys, like a dream of the night.