The former--the picturesque old-world capital of the State of Massachusetts, with its population of over a million--is familiarised to every schoolboy who knows anything of history and the War of Independence, with the city where the tea was thrown into the harbour by Colonials disguised as Mohawks, an incident that indirectly brought about the creation of the United States. It is a city also sacred to literati as being the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is so old-fashioned--or so excessively up-to-date, whichever you please--that, until recently, neither cabs, omnibuses, tubes, or underground railways were to be found within its boundaries. What with the uneven surface and the labyrinth of the streets, Boston is picturesque in spite of itself, and its old buildings emphasize this. There are the two New England meeting-houses. The “Old South” has been proudly preserved in its ancient state, although the ground on which it stands is almost as valuable as that in the City of London. Architecturally, it is a brick barn, with a pretentiously ugly steeple. “Old North” has an equally plain body, but from its steeple, as a tablet affixed to it sets forth, “the signal lantern of Paul Revere warned the country of the march of the British troops to Lexington and Concord.” King’s Chapel, another ecclesiastical antiquity of Boston, was, for a quarter of a century after 1749, the place of worship of the official British colony, and accordingly became an eyesore to the earnest puritanical Bostonians. But Boston cannot, like Charlestown, South Carolina, boast of a St. Michael’s Church, famous for its beautiful steeple, so greatly resembling that of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields as to suggest that probably they were both designed by the same architect, Gibbs, one of Wren’s pupils. In the Act passed by the State Legislature authorising the construction of the Boston subway, it was stipulated that its length should be some five miles, and its total cost not more than one and a half million pounds sterling.