So we have come in this second decade of the twentieth century to speak of the inner cult of the Boston folk as Brahmins. The term is not new. But in the whole land there is not one better applied. For almost as the high caste of mystic India hold themselves aloof from even the mere sight of less favored humans, do these great, somber houses of Beacon street and the rest of the Back Bay close their doors tightly to the stranger. Make no mistake as to this very thing. You rarely read of Boston society--her Brahmin caste--in the columns of her newspapers. There are, of course, distinguished Boston folk whose names ring there many times--a young girl who through her athletic triumphs and her sane fashion of looking at life forms a good example for her sisters across the land; a brilliant broker, with an itching for printer's ink, who places small red devils upon his stationery; a society matron who must always sit in the same balcony seat at the Symphony concerts, and who houses in her eccentric Back Bay home perhaps the finest private art gallery in America. These folk and many others of their sort head the so-called "Society columns" of the Sunday newspapers. But the real Bostonese do not run to _outre_ stationery or other eccentricities. They live within the tight walls of their somber, simple, lovely old red-brick houses, and thank God that there were days that had the names of Winthrop or Cabot or Adams or Peabody spelled in tinted letters along the horizon. A. M. Howe, who knows his Boston thoroughly, once told of two old ladies there who always quarreled as to which should have the first look at the _Transcript_ each evening. "I want to see if anybody nice has died in the _Transcript_ this evening," the older sister would say as she would hear the thud of the paper against the stout outer door,--and after that the battle was on. We always had suspected Mr. Howe of going rather far in this, until we came to the facts. It seems that there were two old ladies in Cambridge, which--as every one ought to know, is a sort of scholastic annex to Boston--and that they never quarreled--save on the matter of the first possession of the _Transcript_. On that vexed question they never failed to disagree. The matter was brought to the attention of the owners of the newspaper--and they settled it by sending an extra copy of the _Transcript_ each evening, with their compliments. And that could not have happened anywhere else in this land save on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.