place where a printing press was set up in America? I didn't. It remained for my English Jack to inform me of the fact. This Cambridge expedition was in the afternoon I neglected to mention. Our morning (while Peter doubtless toiled) had been spent in the wonderful Public Library of Boston itself. We'd meant to do more and other things, but one could stay a week in that library, which I believe started with just _ten thousand_ books! Everything is beautiful about it, from the pale-pink granites and brown Spanish tiles without to the St. Gauden lions who guard the great marble staircase within. Sargent's "Religions of the World" is a noble decoration, and Abbey's frieze of the Holy Grail is beautiful, but the panel paintings of Puvis de Chavannes--"The Muses Greeting the Genius of Enlightenment"--are worth while coming from London or Paris to Boston to see. After we motored back from Cambridge we wandered about here and there, seeing the "Cradle of American Liberty," the "Sanctuary of Freedom," and the place "where Independence was born." Unless you have the key, you won't be able to unlock this saying, so I'll do it for you. Why, they call Faneuil Hall the "Cradle of Liberty" because they used to hold all the town meetings there to discuss whether they should revolt against British rule or no; so Liberty must have rocked to and fro a lot! The Old South Meeting House is the "Sanctuary of Freedom," for there it was prayed for and blessed. And of course Independence was born in the Old State House. I wonder if anything half as epoch-making will ever come to pass under the great gold dome of the new one? It's very fine, but it can never be quite so thrilling, I think. And _it_ wasn't built where the pillory and scaffold used to stand! Jack would see the Bunker Hill Monument, too, though I think monuments, even the finest, seem to chill your glorious visions of what really happened on the spot. Jack, and Pat, and Peter, and I then made a secret pact that we'd devote part of to-morrow to Hawthorne's Boston; that we'd _pretend_ to find the house of "The Blythedale Romance" in Tremont Street; that we'd poke about for the lost site of Hester Prynne's lonely hut on the Back Bay (huts there are neither cheap nor lonely now), and search for various other story landmarks. With this happy prospect before us, and having slyly shaken off all other companions, we went unsuspectingly back to the hotel, not dreaming of a _guet-apens_, as the French so expressively say. Peter doesn't live at our hotel, not being able to afford gorgeousness. Marble-walled, gilded-ceilinged rotundas and restaurants are not for humble secretaries, alas, even if they do look like banished princes! We invited him, however (also Pat), to have tea with us in our own sitting-room, and he accepted.