“And their holidays,” went on the foolish girl. “When I was here last spring, I went out to shop on the nineteenth of April, and would you believe it? the shops were closed. Patriots’ Day, if you please, when the farmers fired the shot heard round the world! I came in and said to Auntie, ‘Do you by any chance have a holiday in Boston on the fourth of July, Auntie?’ ‘Why, yes, dear,’ she said, ‘of course.’ I said, ‘But why? It isn’t Emerson’s birthday, is it?’ and she said, ‘Why, my dear, you must know it is Independence Day.’ ‘Oh, yes, Auntie,’ I said, ‘but why celebrate it in Boston? That little event was pulled off in Philadelphia. Hasn’t Boston enough?’” “Ha, ha!” laughed the young man. “That was a good one on Boston.” “But the greatest pleasure I’ve had is the baked beans,” she went on. “Pleasure!” echoed the young man. “No _pleasure_, surely.” “Oh, I mean _mental_ pleasure, to find they really _are_, you know, and not merely a myth. Of course, I believed before I came here that they existed here, but as an occasional article of diet. Why, they are a religious rite, an article of faith! Every Saturday night!” “Yes, and every Sunday morning breakfast at my boarding house,” groaned the young man. “Impossible! Inhuman!” said Virginia brightly. “Inhuman, but true,” moaned the young man. Wendell thought he had never heard such idiocy in his life. Delicious baked beans! “But they not only _eat_ them--they take them seriously,” Virginia’s silly little voice ran on. “I made a light and unworthy remark to one of Auntie’s friends about the sacred bean. She looked at me compassionately and then said gravely, ‘We always bake them with a small onion in the bottom of the pot.’ Yes, I don’t know who said it first, but it is absolutely true that Boston _is_ a state of mind.” Wendell, listening with the utmost scorn to these trivialities, was suddenly brought up short. _Boston is a state of mind._ Three rousing cheers for Cousin Virginia! He went to bed happy that night. Even the presence of the loathsome frog was endurable. To-morrow he would return the creature to the Kobold, and at the same time fling the answer to his riddle in his teeth--if he had any teeth. It would seem probable that a Kobold with so much white beard would be too old to have teeth. The Kobold was waiting for him on the slope of Flag Staff Hill next morning. So cleverly did his velvet suit take on the soft tone of the elm trunks, that no one of the busy passersby, hurrying on to business through the Common, discerned him there under the trees, though Wendell saw him clearly. Or was it that he made himself invisible to other eyes? “I’ve brought your frog,” said Wendell, drawing a long breath. He handed the stocking over to the Kobold, and the frog leaped out and vanished among the fallen leaves. “What _is_ Boston?” asked the Kobold mockingly. “Boston,” said Wendell with assurance, “is a state of mind.”