For many years there has been in Boston a strong interest in physical education--an interest which has passed through various phases, but is now manifested in such strong institutions as the Athletic Club and the Country Club--the latter for rural recreation. There is at Charlesbank, beside the Charles River, a public open-air gymnasium which attracts a large constituency; and there is, what is especially desirable, a class for women and children, with private grounds and buildings. It is under most efficient supervision, and is accomplishing great good. There are some ten playgrounds kept open at unused schoolhouses during the summer vacations, these being fitted up with swings, sand-pens, and sometimes flower-beds, and properly superintended. A great system of parks has now been planned, and partly established, around Boston, the largest of these being Franklin Park, near Egleston Square; while the system includes also the Arnold Arboretum, the grounds around Chestnut Hill Reservoir and Jamaica Pond, with a Marine Park at South Boston. Most of these are easily accessible by steam or electric cars, which are now reached from the heart of the city, in many cases through subways, and will soon be supplemented or superseded, on the more important routes, by elevated roads. The steam railways of the city are also to have their stations combined into a Northern and a Southern Union Station, of which the former is already in use and the latter in process of construction. This paper is not designed to be a catalogue of the public institutions and philanthropies of Boston, but aims merely to suggest a few of the characteristic forms which such activities have taken. Nor is it written with the desire to praise Boston above her sisters among American cities; for it is a characteristic of American society that, in spite of the outward uniformity attributed to the nation, each city has nevertheless its own characteristics; and each may often learn from the others. This is simply one of a series of papers, each with a specific subject and each confined to its own theme. The inns, the theatres, the club-houses of a city, strangers are likely to discover for themselves; but there are further objects of interest not always so accessible. For want of a friendly guide, they may miss what would most interest them. It is now nearly two hundred years since an English traveller named Edward Ward thus described the Boston of 1699: [Illustration: Copyright by H. G. Smith, Boston, 1893. PHILLIPS BROOKS.] “On the southwest side of Massachusetts Bay is Boston, whose name is taken from a town in Lincolnshire, and is the metropolis of all New England. The houses in some parts joyn, as in London. The buildings, like their women, being neat and handsome. And their streets, like the hearts of the male inhabitants, being paved with pebble.”