The view of Boston from these heights is very commanding. The bay, with its fortified islands, stretches away to the right, beautiful from its shape and from the brightness of its water; the city, clustering upon its heights, rises in graceful lines to the pinnacled State House; and the country to the left is all that is lovely in cultivation, sprinkled here and there with gay and thrifty-looking villages. The calenture of speculation is just now at its height in America; and Dorchester, like other places, is laid out in lots, and busy with the builders of fancy cottages and hotels. If calculation has not overreached itself, the suburbs of Boston will soon sparkle with villas on every hill side within the horizon. [Illustration] VIEW OF FANEUIL HALL, AND ADJACENT BUILDINGS, BOSTON. * * * * * There are very few remaining of the many covered, gable-ended, top-heavy, old houses which constituted the compact centre of Boston in the days of English governors. The finest specimens long stood in the neighbourhood of Faneuiel Hall; but, with one exception, we believe, their picturesque heaps of triangles have dropped beneath the merciless hand of speculation and improvement. Boston has not grown so thriftily, or rather so miraculously, as the capitols of other States, through which the flood of emigration rolls more directly; but it is certainly the handsomest town in the United States, and probably its prosperity is more permanent and solid. Its granite houses and fine public buildings are in strong contrast with the description given of it by John Josselyn, Gent. who visited it in 1638, and afterwards favoured the world with his observations under the title of “New England Rarities.” “Having refreshed myself for a day or two on an island in the bay,” he says, “I crossed the harbour in a small boat to Boston, which was then rather a village than a town, there not being more than above twenty or thirty houses: and presented my respects to Mr. Muthrop the governor, and to Mr. Cotton the teacher of Boston Church, to whom I delivered from Mr. Francis Quarles, the poet, the translation of several Psalms in English metre for his approbation.” A facetious bookseller, John Dunton, visited Boston some fifty years afterwards; and, in a book upon his “Life and Errors,” gives a humorous account of its inhabitants in his time. The passage, which is now commonly made in from sixteen to twenty-five or thirty days, occupied the unfortunate bibliopole four months; and he was reduced, at the latter part of it, to one bottle of water for four days.