At 9 A. M. took the Hingham boat and was landed at Hull. There was a pleasure party on board, apparently boys and girls belonging to the South End, going to Hingham. There was a large proportion of ill-dressed and ill-mannered boys of Irish extraction. A sad sight to behold! Little boys of twelve years, prematurely old, sucking cigars! I felt that if I were their mothers I should whip them and send them to bed. Such children should be dealt with as for stealing or impurity. The opening of this valve for the safety of the city! Oh, what a wretched resource! What right have parents to beget, to bring up, and attempt to _educate_ children in a city? I thought of infanticide among the Orientals with complacency. I seemed to hear infant voices lisp, “Give us a fair chance, parents.” There is no such squalidness in the country. You would have said that they must all have come from the house of correction and the farm-school, but such a company do the boys in Boston streets make. The birds have more care for their young,—where they place their nests. What are a city’s charities? She cannot be charitable any more than the old philosopher could move the earth, unless she has a resting-place without herself. A true culture is more possible to the savage than to the boy of average intellect, born of average parents, in a great city. I believe that they perish miserably. How can they be kept clean, physically or morally? It is folly to attempt to educate children within a city; the first step must be to remove them out of it. It seemed a groping and helpless philanthropy that I heard of. I heard a boy telling the story of Nix’s Mate to some girls, as we passed that spot, how “he said, ‘If I am guilty, this island will remain; but if I am innocent, it will be washed away,’ and now it is all washed away.”[253] This was a simple and strong expression of feeling suitable to the occasion, by which he committed the evidence of his innocence to the dumb isle, such as the boy could appreciate, a proper sailor’s legend; and I was reminded that it is the illiterate and unimaginative class that seizes on and transmits the legends in which the more cultivated delight. No fastidious poet dwelling in Boston had tampered with it,—no narrow poet, but broad mankind, sailors from all ports sailing by. They, sitting on the deck, were the literary academy that sat upon its periods. On the beach at Hull, and afterwards all along the shore to Plymouth, I saw the datura, the variety (red-stemmed), methinks, which some call _Tatula_ instead of _Stramonium_. I felt as if I was on the highway of the world, at sight of this cosmopolite and veteran traveller. It told of commerce and sailors’ yarns without end. It grows luxuriantly in sand and gravel. This Captain Cook among plants, this Norseman or sea pirate, viking or king of the bays, the beaches. It is not an innocent plant; it suggests commerce, with its attendant vices.[254]