as to take away all their breath. Tights, now unwhisperable except in veracious histories, held their own with elderly gentlemen to the very close of the century, and were clasped with silver enough to bring a smile, in our day, all over the wrinkling face of the Secretary of the Treasury. The wide-tailed coats and broad-lapelled vests of the respectable citizens of the Washington and Adams periods would, if worn now upon the platform of an equal rights convention, make the fame of their wearers, and insure full-length portraitures of their inner selves by conversation-drawing correspondents. [Illustration: 1769. SCHOOL DAYS. 1869.] Another production of the eighteenth century was better material ways for translation over the surface of our rapidly augmenting areas. In 1732 enterprising stages took fourteen days from New York to Boston; but ere the cycle had rounded up to 1800, the time, by reason of better roads, was reduced one half. The hard earnings, trickling from the little heaps that labor had gathered up, began to flow out into turnpikes; and milestones chronicled spaces and pointed the fingers of Time to measures for ascertaining and so accelerating speed. The road-maker and the vehicle-propeller are the two Dioscuri of modern civilization. Whoever subtracts portions of the earth’s surface, be it solid or aqueous, from between separated States, communities, or individuals, multiplies the well-being and happiness of the human race. Could the tea raiser in China be placed alongside of the tea consumer in America, or the cotton manufacturer of Lowell within a half-hour’s delivery of his fabrics from their purchaser, the expenses of handling at either end, the long, costly, tedious voyages that now waste so much labor, time, and money, and the accumulated taxes upon the articles sold added by intermediate commissions, would be saved. The costs of translation are a necessary but onerous assessment upon productive industry. The greatest invention now needed is one which would so condense the earth’s bulk by improved and rapid communication, as to squeeze out the distances that separate nations and chill their natural outflow from themselves into others. In 1700 the population of Boston was 7,000; that of New York 5,250, of which latter one in seven was colored; a proportion which was augmented in 1711 in favor of the blacks, by the establishment of a regular and public slave-market. An English traveller describes Boston in 1700 as a place whose “buildings are, like its women, neat and pretty; the streets of pebble, like the hearts of the men.” From such flinty masculines no wonder that the population only reached to 24,937 in the next one hundred years.