I tried sometimes to make out why it is that five hundred miles by railway in America do not fatigue one so much as fifty in this country. More than once in America I travelled upwards of a thousand miles at a single stretch, but never on any occasion, in a tour of eight thousand miles by railway, did I feel, either during a journey or after it, anything like fatigue or discomfort, or have any sensation to remind me that I had travelled a single mile. The only explanation I could hit upon was that on English and European railways you are shut up in a little box, in which you cannot move about, and in which there are incessant draughts from a door and window on each side of you. The result is, that your feet instantly get cold, and cold feet affect the whole system disagreeably. In American cars, however, from the way in which the floors are fastened, and from there being no side doors at all, one’s feet, with rare exceptions, even when the thermometer outside is below zero, are as far from being chilled as they would be in one’s own house. Of course the American cars have also a stove at each end. CHAPTER XXI. BOSTON IS THE HUB OF AMERICA—MR. TICKNOR—PROFESSOR ROGERS AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL—MR. NORTON—PROFESSOR AGASSIZ—MR. APPLETON AND MR. LONGFELLOW—MR. PHILBRICK—A GRAMMAR SCHOOL COMMEMORATION—HUMILITY OF THE BETTER LITERARY MEN OF BOSTON—REGRET AT LEAVING BOSTON. [Sidenote: _Boston the Hub of America._] Boston is the hub of the world. So say those who, not being Massachusetts men themselves, are disposed to impute extravagant pretensions to the good old Puritan city. The hub, in the language of America, is the nave, or centre-piece of the wheel, from which the spokes radiate, and on which the wheel turns. As the Americans make with their hickory wood the best wheels in the world, they have some right to give to one of the pieces a name of their own. But, however, Boston need not quarrel with the saying. Nations, like individuals, are generally governed by ideas, and no people to such a degree as the Americans: and the ideas which have governed them hitherto, have been supplied from New England. But Massachusetts has been the wheel within New England, and Boston the wheel within Massachusetts. It has therefore been the first source and fountain of the ideas that have moved and made America, and is, in a high and honourable sense, the hub of the New World. Among the celebrities of Boston with whom I was so fortunate as to become acquainted, and to see in their own houses, I will name first Mr. Ticknor, the author of the well-known ‘History of Spanish Literature,’ himself now the father of American literature. His reminiscences of the history and society of his own country, and largely too of English literary society, for the last fifty years, contribute very much to enrich his conversation. I have a grateful sense of his hospitality, and of the other ways in which he assisted in making my visit to Boston most agreeable.