“There are many things,” I replied. “I have found a little corner down by the East Boston wharf where often I sit on cold days. The sun shines bright and warm on a narrow wooden platform between two great barrels, and I can be hidden there, but I can watch the madding crowd as it goes. The crowd is very madding down around East Boston. And I do not lack company--sometimes brave, sharp-toothed rats venture out on the ground below me. They can not see the madding crowd, but they can enjoy the sunshine and hunt mice among the rubbish. “The dwellers in East Boston--they are the poor we have always with us. They are not the meek, the worthy, the deserving poor. They are the devilish, the ill-conditioned--one with the wharf rats that hunt for mice. Except that the rats do occasionally try to clean their soft, gray coats by licking them with their little red tongues; whereas, the poor--But why should the poor wash? Are they not the poor? “As I rest me between my two great barrels and watch this grewsome pageant, I think: It seems a quite desperate thing to be poor in Boston, for Boston is said to be of the best-seasoned knowledge and to carry a lump of ice in its heart. From between my two barrels in East Boston I have seen humanity, oh, so brutal, oh, so barbarous as ever it could have been in merrie England in the reign of good old Harry the Eighth.---- “And so then that is very interesting.” “In truth it is so,” said my friend Annabel Lee. “Boston is fair, and very fair.--Tell me more.” “And times,” I said, “I sit in one of the window-seats on the stairway of the Public Library. And I look at the walls. A Frenchman with a marvelous fancy and great skill in his finger-ends has worked on those walls. He painted there the emblems of all the world’s great material things of all ages. And over them he painted a thin gray veil of those things that are not material, that come from no age, that are with us, around us, above us--as they were with the children of Israel, with the dwellers in Pompeii, with the fair cities of Greece and the inhabitants thereof. “I have looked at the paintings and I have been dazzled and transported. What is there not upon those walls! “I have seen, in truth, ‘the vision of the world and all the wonder that shall be.’