--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: _The Warning_. Travellers tell us that in some parts of the ocean, when the waves are still and the water is perfectly quiet, the curious eye may look down through the clear depths and see, rising out of the ocean's bed, the gnarled and broken trunks of forest trees. Once this ocean-bed was above the water-line, and these trees grew in the sunshine and stretched their branches upward to the blue sky of heaven. But, as the result of some strange convulsion of the earth, the coast-line has sunk down and down, until the incoming tide of the salt sea has swept over it, and schools of porpoises and fishes swim among the branches of old forest trees that in the former time were accustomed to the chatter of squirrels and songs of birds. Any one studying the older and more historic sections of Boston will see many relics of a past civilization by which he will be impressed in very much the same way as is the sailor who looks on the remains of an ancient forest in the ocean's bed. Standing in the North End, in front of the "Copp's Hill Burying-ground," and looking up at the tower of Christ Church where the famous signal lanterns were hung, one can almost hear the old church appropriating the words of the poet:-- "By time's highway--a milestone gray-- I watch the world march by; An endless stream of moving men Rolls on beneath mine eye. Still, still they go; where, none can know; And when one wave is gone, Another and another yet Come ever surging on." It seems strange indeed to go up and down some of these old historic streets, and yet never in the course of one's walk hear spoken the language of the country. In the course of my investigations during the past few months, I have found it impossible to do anything practical without an interpreter, sometimes in one language, and again in another. Often in entering an old rear tenement house, where filth and misery held riot, I have been astonished at the splendidly carved ornaments over the doorways, and the still-to-be-traced carving on the balustrade. Once these old rear tenements were the abodes of Boston's wealthiest and most cultivated citizens; but the Old World tide has come in, and house after house, block after block, and street upon street, have been overwhelmed by the waves of people who speak other languages, and whose habits of life are more foreign than their speech. [Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH TOWER.]