it had 448,477, and was then the sixth in population among American cities, being surpassed by New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and St. Louis; and the union of New York and Brooklyn probably making it now the fifth. In 1880 it ranked fifth, St. Louis having since outstripped it. In 1870 it was only seventh, both St. Louis and Baltimore then preceding it. As with most American cities, this growth has been partly due to the annexing of suburbs; but during the last fifteen years there has been no such annexation, showing the increase to be genuine and intrinsic. The transformation in other ways has, however, been more astonishing than the growth. Of the original three hills, one only is now noticeable by the stranger. I myself can remember Boston, in my college days, as a pear-shaped peninsula, two miles by one, attached to the mainland by a neck a mile long and only a few yards wide, sometimes actually covered by the meeting of the tide-waters from both sides. The water also almost touched Charles Street, where the Public Garden now is, and it rolled over the flats and inlets called the Back Bay, where the costliest houses of the city now stand. The changes of population and occupation have been almost as great as of surface. The blue-jacketed sailor was then a figure as familiar in the streets as is now the Italian or the Chinese; and the long wharves, then lined with great vessels, two or three deep, and fragrant with spicy Oriental odors, are now shortened, reduced, and given over to tugs and coasters. Boston is still the second commercial port in the country; but its commerce is mainly coast-wise or European only, and the picturesque fascination of the India trade has passed away. Even on our Northwest Pacific coast the early white traders, no matter whence they came, were known by the natives as “Boston men.” The wealth of the city, now vastly greater than in those days, flows into other channels--railways, factories, and vast land investments in the far West--enterprises as useful, perhaps more lucrative, but less picturesque. It is a proof of the vigor and vitality of Boston, and partly, also, of its favorable situation, that it has held its own through such transformations. Smaller cities, once powerful, such as Salem, Newburyport, and Portsmouth, have been ruined as to business by the withdrawal of foreign trade. [Illustration: BOSTON IN 1757. FROM A DRAWING BY GOVERNOR POWNALL.]