I never made a more unsatisfactory investment in my life than the one I made in that restaurant. I felt as if I had been swindled, and I said so to Halicarnassus. He remarked that there was plenty of cream and sugar. I answered curtly, that the cream was chiefly water, and the sugar chiefly flour; but if they had been Simon Pure himself, was it anything but an aggravation of the offence to have them with nothing to eat them on? "You might do as they do in France,--carry away what you don't eat, seeing you pay for it." "A pocketful of milk and water would be both delightful and serviceable; but I might take the sugar," I added, with a sudden thought, upsetting the sugar-bowl into a "Boston Journal" which we had bought in the train. "I can never use it, but it will be a consolation to reflect on." Halicarnassus, who, though fertile in evil conceptions, lacks nerve to put them into execution, was somewhat startled at this sudden change of base. He had no idea that I should really act upon his suggestion, but I did. I bundled the sugar into my pocket with a grim satisfaction; and Halicarnassus paid his thirty cents, looking--and feeling, as he afterwards told me--as if a policeman's grip were on his shoulders. If any restaurant in Boston recollects having been astonished at any time during the summer of 1862 by an unaccountably empty sugar-bowl, I take this occasion to explain the phenomenon. I gave the sugar afterwards to a little beggar-girl, with a dime for a brace of lemons, and shook off the dust of my feet against Boston at the "B. & W. R. R. D." Boston is a beautiful city, situated on a peninsula at the head of Massachusetts Bay. It has three streets: Cornhill, Washington, and Beacon Streets. It has a Common and a Frog-pond, and many sprightly squirrels. Its streets are straight, and cross each other like lines on a chess-board. It has a state-house, which is the finest edifice in the world or out of it. It has one church, the Old South, which was built, as its name indicates, before the Proclamation of Emancipation was issued. It has one bookstore, a lofty and imposing pile, of the Egyptian style (and date) of architecture, on the corner of Washington and School Streets. It has one magazine, the "Atlantic Monthly," one daily newspaper, the "Boston Journal," one religious weekly, the "Congregationalist," and one orator, whose name is Train, a model of chaste, compact, and classic elegance. In politics, it was a Webster Whig, till Whig and Webster both went down, when it fell apart waited for something to turn up,--which proved to be drafting. Boston is called the Athens of America. Its men are solid. Its women wear their bonnets to bed, their nightcaps to breakfast, and talk Greek at dinner. I spent two hours and half in Boston, and I know.