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ODD-FELLOWS' HALL.

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street is Odd-Fellows' Hall, a great Gothic building with three façades, in white granite, and enshrining a variety of occult symbolry, large and handsome halls, and lodge-rooms. The passion of Americans for singular secret societies is manifested in Boston by hundreds of lodges, tents, encampments, and groves (so-called) of Templars, Harugari, Foresters, Druids, Alfredians, Knights of Pythias, Red Men, Elks, Knights of Honor, and other strange orders, whose homespun citizen-officers bear titles magniloquent enough to overawe even a Neapolitan noble or a German princeling.

Near the Masonic Temple there are two institutions whose philanthropies wear no medieval masks. The Young Men's Christian Union owns a new and beautiful Gothic building of Ohio sandstone, centrally located, and adorned with a high clock-tower.

Within are halls, parlours, a library of 6,000 volumes, a museum, a gymnasium, a coffeeroom, chess-rooms, and other comforts. The Young Men's Christian Association owns and occupies a large four-storey building close by, and its 3,000 members have the use of rooms similar in purpose to those of the Union. It is the oldest society of the kind in the United States; and during the Civil War, when 500 of its members were in the army, the army relief - committee raised £66,647 to be applied

for the comfort of the troops in the field. Both these buildings are for the provision of attractive resorts and Christian influences for young men coming to the city as strangers; for whom they also prepare a great variety of free lectures and concerts, dramatic entertainments, talks on science and art, evening classes in practical studies, suburban excursions, social receptions, and other delightful pastimes. There are employment committees, to secure work for deserving applicants; and boarding-house committees, to find good homes for strangers. The Association is composed of Evangelical men alone; the Union includes also many Unitarians, Universalists, and others outside the ancient pale.

The station of the Providence Railway, the route to Providence, in Rhode Island

(a city of 120,000 inhabitants), and New York, fronts on Park Square, and cost £200,000. It is 800 feet long and 150 feet wide, of brick and stone, in picturesque Gothic architecture, and with a tall detached clock-tower in front. The waiting-rooms are arranged on each side of a noble hall, 80 feet high and 180 feet long, paved with marble, and over-arched by a pointed roof of richly carved timber-work. In other parts of this district are the termini of the railways to Plymouth and Cape Cod, and the routes through southern New England.

The Emancipation Group stands in Park Square, facing the Common, and was presented to Boston by a public-spirited citizen in 1880. It is of bronze, with colossal figures representing President Lincoln bidding a negro slave to rise and be free; and stands on an immense pedestal of polished red granite. The bronze was cast at the Munich Royal Foundry.

Columbus Avenue, the finest residence-street in this quarter, is a mile and a half long, straight and level, and paved with asphalte, making a smooth, hard flooring, over which military and civic processions delight to march. The sides are lined with long blocks of marble, stone, and brick houses, and occasionally open off into triangular plazas, where other streets cross diagonally. Near its end are the spacious grounds devoted to the national game of base-ball, where eight or ten thousand people sometimes assemble, to see contests between the local champions and clubs from other cities.

The Hollis Street Church was built in 1732, on land given by Jonathan Belcher, a wealthy Boston merchant, whom King George I. liked well enough to make Governor of Massachusetts. His son, a United Empire loyalist, received the commissions of Chief Justice and Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. The church became a barrack for British troops during the siege of Boston; and its successor, on the same site, was moved away, hauled down the hill, placed on an immense raft, and towed down the harbour to a distant village, where it still serves the purpose of a church. The building now occupying the site, a quaint old edifice of brick, with a tall wooden spire, has been the scene of the labours of John Pierpont, Thomas Starr King, and other famous Unitarian divines. Mather Byles, the first pastor, was the Sydney Smith of the old province. He paid his addresses unsuccessfully to a lady who afterwards married Mr. Quincy; and when he met her, the witty divine remarked: "So, madam, you prefer a Quincy to Byles, it seems." The quick-witted damsel replied: "Yes; for if there had been anything worse than biles, Job would have been afflicted with it."

Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin, M.P., and his brother, General John Coffin, of the British army, were born in Harrison Avenue; Sir Thomas Aston Coffin, Commissary-General of the royal forces, was also born here, and educated at Harvard; in Essex Street was the birthplace of Lieutenant-General Sir Roger Sheaffe, who fought under the British flag in Canada, Denmark, and Holland. One of the most beneficent of the Unitarian societies is the Church of the Disciples, whose pastor is James Freeman Clarke, and whose temple is a spacious octagonal building at the South End. Its members unite "as learners in the school of Jesus Christ, with Christ for their Teacher. with faith in Jesus, as the Christ, the

Son of God, and for the purpose of co-operating together as His disciples in the study and practice of Christianity." In the same vicinity is the Church of the Unity, a handsome

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THE CATHEDRAL OF THE HOLY CROSS.

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classic building, occupied by a society of Unitarians of the most radical type; and the South Church, whereof Edward Everett Hale is the pastor.

The Cathedral of the Holy Cross towers over the buildings of the South End like a vast mountain of stone, and is the seat of the Archbishop of Boston, the Metropolitan of New England. The early English Gothic, in its simplest form, is the style of the architecture, and the ponderous walls are of dark Roxbury stone. The nave is 320 feet long and 120 feet high, with chapels and a crypt below, and at the eastern end a chantry and the beautiful Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. The nave is bordered by tall clustered columns of bronzed iron, upholding a high clerestory and rich ceiling of wood, in mosaics of religious emblems. The chancel-windows, over the great marble altar, show forth the Crucifixion, Nativity, and Ascension; and the transept-windows, each 800 square feet in area, illustrate the Finding of the True Cross by the Empress Helena, and the Exaltation of the Cross by the Emperor Heraclius; while the aisles also are bordered by immense and brilliant windows, defended by heavy plate-glass, which also aids in equalising the temperature within the building. The great organ is built round the rose-window on the west, and has 5,292 pipes and nearly 100 stops. The cathedral is larger than many of the most famous temples of Europe-St. Denis, Vienna, Pisa, Rheims, Antwerp, Strasbourg, and others—and has been built within fifteen years, by voluntary contributions, mainly of the labouring classes of Irish extraction. The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in Boston has been very remarkable, and may be attributed altogether to the steady immigration of the Irish. In 1617 a law was passed prohibiting any ecclesiastic ordained by the See of Rome from entering the colony; but there is no evidence that any one ever suffered arrest in Boston on account of his Romanism-although the other sects which dissented from the Puritan Establishment were grievously persecuted. Cheverus, the first bishop, and afterwards Cardinal and Archbishop of Bordeaux, was a personal friend of Otis, Quincy, and other patriots; but his people were a feeble folk, scarce filling one small chapel. Now, the Catholic population of Boston numbers more than a hundred thousand, with immense churches, convents, colleges, and all the complicated and costly ecclesiastical machinery of a great European metropolis. The Pilot, edited by John Boyle O'Reilly, the Irish poet (an escaped political prisoner of the British Government), is a great weekly paper, with a circulation of 103,000 copies, the largest number of any Roman Catholic publication in the world. Quite recently, Mr. Horatio Seymour, a venerable statesman of New York, expressed his conviction that Massachusetts was destined to become an Irish State. This is wildly pessimistic, indeed, but if perchance it does come to pass, the new Hibernia will be an educated and a religious community.

The Church of the Immaculate Conception is a great granite building, in classic architecture, with some rather good painting and statuary, and is controlled by the Jesuits, who also conduct the adjoining Boston College. Opposite the church stands a long and picturesque Gothic building, where the Sisters of Charity take care of several hundred destitute Roman Catholic children. There are several other very large Roman Catholic churches within the city proper, attended by devout congregations. On a conspicuous suburban hill stands the Mission Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a new and very

spacious Romanesque basilica of stone, with interior colonnades of polished granite, and a high octagonal dome.

Sir Charles Dilke has said: "It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of New England is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England there is no city which has suburbs so grey and venerable as the elm-shaded towns around Boston-Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem; the people speak the English of Elizabeth, and joke about us—' He speaks good English for an Englishman.""

The suburbs of Boston, where bright streams wind between graceful hills, and ancient forests alternate with velvety lawns, are more beautiful than the city itself; and it is generally conceded that no other American environage is so attractive and diversified. The charming sites thus afforded for villas and mansions have been utilised by the old families, and thousands of pleasant homes are scattered through the rural wards. On the south, beyond the Neponset Valley, are the Blue Hills; on the north, over the Mystic Valley, are the Middlesex Fells, a wide area of low and abrupt rocky hills, covered with forests and abounding in flowers; and on the east is the harbour.

The harbour of Boston is very attractive in its scenery, and during the summer numerous steamboats carry hundreds of thousands of people down to Nantasket Beach, the long natural breakwater which shelters the anchorage. Here are several mammoth hotels, pavilions and cafés without number, and long lines of summer cottages. Islands of various shapes and sizes dot the surface of the waters; and on the south-west are the picturesque and rolling masses of the Blue Hills of Milton. Castle Island has been fortified ever since 1634, and upholds the long granite walls of Fort Independence, frowning on the harbour with hundreds of innocuous embrasures. Governor's Island, ceded to the United States by the Winthrop family, after 176 years of ownership, contains the modern works of Fort Winthrop, with their enormous grassy embankments and granite citadel. Fort Warren, the key to the harbour, is farther out, and contains a garrison of artillerists, and formidable batteries of heavy guns, bearing on the narrow and sinuous ship-channel. Other islands are occupied by redoubts, hospitals, prisons, farms, and colonies of Fayalese lobsterfishermen; and among these the trim vessels of the yacht-clubs flit in and out all the summer long; the numerous schooners of the coasting fleets move up and down in endless sequence; and the immense British steamships plough their way, giving wealth to America and comfort to England. At the mouth of the harbour is a cluster of rugged rocky islets, where stands the tall stone tower of Boston Light, whose welcoming gleam first flashed over the sea in the year 1715. Just in-shore is the bold hill over the village of Hull, crowned by the ruins of a fort erected by the French troops under Lafayette, a century ago. On the opposite shore is Point Shirley, a famous resort of the bon vivants of Boston, where such sumptuous fish and game dinners are served as even the old "Ship" at Greenwich could not excel. From the harbour headlands the coast trends away north and south, bending towards the promontories of Cape Cod and Cape Ann, and everywhere occupied by summer hotels and cottages, fishing hamlets, and ancient cities, the homes of a hardy and industrious population. On the one hand is the Jerusalem Road, high above the sea, lined

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BUNKER HILL.

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with villas, and reproducing the beauties of the Cornice on a small scale; on the other is Nahant, a rocky peninsula projecting far into the ocean, where Longfellow and other famous literati had their summer homes.

The celebrated Bunker Hill Monument stands on the summit of a populous hill in

the Charlestown District, and is surrounded by a pleasant little park of lawns and trees. It is an obelisk of Quincy granite, 30 feet square at the base, and narrowing slowly toward the pyramidal apex, 221 feet above. A flight of stone steps inside leads to a chamber at the top, containing two ancient cannon, veterans of the Revolutionary War, and commanding a very noble view of Boston and its northern suburbs, the harbour and islands, the western forests and the eastern sea. The corner-stone was laid by the Marquis