It would be much for the advantage of the
country that they should be good of their kind; but, if I am able to
form any judgment on the matter, they are not good.
CHAPTER XVI.
CONCLUSION.
In one of the earlier chapters of this volume - now some seven or
eight chapters past - I brought myself on my travels back to Boston.
It was not that my way homeward lay by that route, seeing that my
fate required me to sail from New York; but I could not leave the
country without revisiting my friends in Massachusetts. I have told
how I was there in the sleighing time, and how pleasant were the
mingled slush and frost of the snowy winter. In the morning the
streets would be hard and crisp and the stranger would surely fall
if he were not prepared to walk on glaciers. In the afternoon he
would be wading through rivers, and, if properly armed at all points
with India-rubber, would enjoy the rivers as he waded. But the air
would be always kindly, and the east wind there, if it was east as I
was told, had none of that power of dominion which makes us all so
submissive to its behests in London. For myself, I do not believe
that the real east wind blows elsewhere.
And when the snow went in Boston I went with it. The evening before
I left I watched them as they carted away the dirty uncouth blocks
which had been broken up with pickaxes in Washington Street, and was
melancholy as I reflected that I too should no longer be known in
the streets. My weeks in Boston had not been very many, but
nevertheless there were haunts there which I knew as though my feet
had trodden them for years. There were houses to which I could have
gone with my eyes blindfold; doors of which the latches were
familiar to my hands; faces which I knew so well that they had
ceased to put on for me the fictitious smiles of courtesy. Faces,
houses, doors, and haunts, - where are they now? For me they are as
though they had never been. They are among the things which one
would fain remember as one remembers a dream. Look back on it as a
vision and it is all pleasant; but if you realize your vision and
believe your dream to be a fact, all your pleasure is obliterated by
regret.
I know that I shall never again be at Boston, and that I have said
that about the Americans which would make me unwelcome as a guest if
I were there. It is in this that my regret consists; for this
reason that I would wish to remember so many social hours as though
they had been passed in sleep.
