John Smith writes (1624): “Of all the four parts of the world that I have yet seen not inhabited, could I but have means to transplant a colony, I would rather live here than anywhere; and if it did not maintain itself, were we but once indifferently well fitted, let us starve. Here are many isles planted with corn, groves, mulberries, salvage gardens and good harbours. The sea-coast as you pass shows you all along large corn-fields and great troops of well-proportioned people.” Massachusetts in particular, he calls “the paradise of these parts,” notices its high mountain, and its river, “which doth pierce many days’ journey into the entrails of that country.” Morton arrived in 1622, in June, beheld the country, and “the more he looked, the more he liked it.” In sixty-eight years after the foundation of Boston, Dr. Mather writes of it, “The town hath indeed three elder Sisters in this colony, but it hath wonderfully outgrown them all, and her mother, Old Boston in England, also; yea, within a few years after the first settlement it grew to be the metropolis of the whole English America.” How easy it is, after the city is built, to see where it ought to stand. In our beautiful bay, with its broad and deep waters covered with sails from every port; with its islands hospitably shining in the sun; with its waters bounded and marked by light-houses, buoys and sea-marks; every foot sounded and charted; with its shores trending steadily from the two arms which the capes of Massachusetts stretch out to sea, down to the bottom of the bay where the city domes and spires sparkle through the haze,—a good boatman can easily find his way for the first time to the State House, and wonder that Governor Carver had not better eyes than to stop on the Plymouth Sands. But it took ten years to find this out. The colony of 1620 had landed at Plymouth. It was December, and the ground was covered with snow. Snow and moonlight make all places alike; and the weariness of the sea, the shrinking from cold weather and the pangs of hunger must justify them. But the next colony planted itself at Salem, and the next at Weymouth; another at Medford; before these men, instead of jumping on to the first land that offered, wisely judged that the best point for a city was at the bottom of a deep and islanded bay, where a copious river entered it, and where a bold shore was bounded by a country of rich undulating woodland. * * * * *