Boston Harbor, with its waters lying in azure placidity over the buried boxes of tea which the hasty hands of the angered patriots hurled to a watery grave; Boston Common, whose turf grows velvet-green over ground once blackened by the fires of the grim colonial days of witch-burning, and again trampled down by innumerable soldierly feet in Revolutionary times; the Old State House, from whose east window the governor's haughty command, "Disperse, ye rebels!" sounded on the occasion of the "Boston Massacre," the first shedding of American blood by the British military; and the monument of Bunker Hill--these, with a thousand and one other reminders of the city's brilliant historical record, compose the Old Boston which I was prepared to see. The first vision, however, of that many-sided city was almost bewilderingly different from the mental picture. Where was the quaint Puritan town of the colonial romances? Where were its crooked, winding streets, its plain uncompromising meeting-houses, darkened with time, its curious gabled houses, stooping with age? Around me everything was shining with newness--the smooth wide streets, beautifully paved, the splendid examples of _fin de siècle_ architecture in churches, public buildings, school houses and dwellings. Afterwards I realized that there was a New Boston, risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of its many conflagrations, and an Old Boston, whose "outward and visible signs" are best studied in that picturesque, shabby stronghold of ancient story, now rapidly degenerating into a "slum" district--the North End.