Perhaps there is no place in America where the people continued to cling so long, and so fondly, to the relics and traditions of the olden time, as in Boston—their first era being that of the early settlers, their second that of the revolution. At the commencement of my acquaintance with Boston and Bostonians, I was particularly struck with the prevalence of this feeling, having found so little of it in my native city, Philadelphia. Yet I was sorry to hear from my eastern friends, that comparatively it was fast subsiding, and that a fancy for modern improvements (blended with the powerful incentive of pecuniary interest) was rapidly superseding that veneration so long cherished for the places and things connected with the history of their “ancient and honorable town,” and the founders of their country’s freedom. On my second visit to Boston I missed much that on my first I had found still undesecrated. On my third, but few vestiges remained of the poetry, the romance, and the quaintness that, with regard to external objects, had so interested and amused me in the year 1832. I looked in vain for the “old familiar faces” of certain antiquated and, perhaps, unsightly structures that I had delighted to contemplate as the time-honored habitations of men with undying names. They were gone, and new and more profitable buildings erected on their site. In many of these instances “I could have better spared a better house.” Fortunately the charter of the city specifies that Faneuil Hall is never to be sold, nor can the ground on which it stands be appropriated to any other purpose. Except that the market-place in the lower story is now occupied by shops, the whole edifice still remains nearly as it was when the walls of its chief apartment resounded with the acclamations of the people who discussed, at their town meetings, those principles that led to their self-emancipation from the sway of Britain. Acclamations elicited by the bold and overpowering eloquence of James Otis, the enthusiastic outbreakings of the impetuous spirit of Warren, the pure and self-sacrificing patriotism of Quincy, and the calm but energetic plain sense of Samuel Adams, backed by the generous liberality of that wealthy and noble-minded merchant whose name, as president of the first Congress, leads on the glorious array of signatures appended to the Declaration of Independence. Did no one think of preserving the pen with which those names were written?—the sacred quill “That wing’d the arrow, sure as fate, Which ascertain’d the rights of man.”