But a metropolis can not be made at will, as many a new community has discovered. It had been arranged that all the "assistants" or ruling magistrates of Massachusetts should live within the palisades of Newtown, but Winthrop, after the frame of his house was erected, changed his mind and took down the timbers, setting them up again at Boston. This was the beginning of unhappiness at Newtown, and the discontent had to do, no doubt, with the rivalry between that place and Boston. It is probable that there was a rise in the value of Boston home lots about the time of the removal of the governor's house. Trade runs in the direction of the least resistance, and peninsular Boston was destined by its situation to be the metropolis of New England in spite of the forces that worked for Salem and Newtown. [Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxviii.] [Sidenote: Wood's N. E. Prospect, 1634. Young, 402.] [Sidenote: October, 1632.] Newtown, or Cambridge, to call it by its later name, was a long, narrow strip of land, "in forme like a list cut off from the Broad-cloath" of Watertown and Charlestown. The village was compactly built, as became an incipient metropolis, and the houses were unusually good for a new country. In one regard it was superior to Boston. No wooden chimneys or thatched roofs were allowed in it. To this town came Hooker, and if it had continued to be the capital, Hooker and not Cotton might have become the leading spirit of the colony. But a capital at a place to which only small vessels could come up, was not practical, and the magistrates in the year before Hooker's arrival decided by general consent that Boston was the fittest place in the bay for public meetings. [Sidenote: Hooker's arrival, 1633.] [Sidenote: Wood's N. E. Prospect.] [Sidenote: Young, 397, 398.] The hopes of Newtown were perhaps not wholly extinct for some time after. The arrival of Hooker must have been a great encouragement to the people. But Boston was on the alert. That town had neither forest nor meadow land. Hay, timber, and firewood were brought to its wharf in boats. From the absence of wood and marsh came some advantages--it was plagued with neither mosquitoes nor rattlesnakes, and what cattle there were on the bare peninsula were safe from wolves. Not to be behind in evangelical attractions it secured Cotton to balance Newtown's Hooker, when both arrived in the same ship. That Boston was now recognized as the natural metropolis was shown in the abortive movement to pay a part of Cotton's stipend by a levy on the whole colony. V. [Sidenote: Discontent at Newtown.] [Sidenote: Mass. Rec., _passim_.] [Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. xxxiii.] [Sidenote: Compare Holmes's History of Cambridge, 1 Mass. Hist. Coll., vii, pp. 1, 2.] [Sidenote: 2d Mass., vii, 127.]