File:Days and ways in old Boston (1915) (14596542888).jpg

Identifier: dayswaysinoldbos00ross_0 (find matches)
Title: Days and ways in old Boston
Year: 1915 (1910s)
Authors: Rossiter, William Sidney, 1861-1929
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Publisher: Boston : R. H. Stearns and company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Public Library

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d, which, I regret to say, still lingers in my na-tive town. At the time of Charles Dickens firstvisit to the States in 1842, one of my boyish play- * Written in February, 1911. 27 Days and Ways in Old Boston mates, reporting a walk he had taken in Cam-bridge, said, the soil clung to me like the womento Boz. However, it was very common forBoston and Cambridge ladies to walk back andforth to visit their friends and do their shopping.My mother often walked in and out of town.Indeed, from the shopping center, then locatedon Washington street, it was not too long a walkto Cambridge village or what is now called Har-vard Square. It was in the forties that I sometimes attendedevening lectures in Boston. The walk betweenthe two towns was to my boyish notions delight-ful, though it was a plunge into darkness. Hereand there, in the distance, sputtered a dim oillamp. But there was much more craft on theriver, and I can remember being hailed, whencrossing the bridge, and offered money to pilot a
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coasting schooner to Wat-ertown. My old friendand schoolmate, JamesRussell Lowell, sometimeswalked out with me fromthese lectures. On one ofthese walks with Lowell,I remember that we sawtwo men leaning over thebridge watching, what wasnot uncommon in thosedays, two seals playing inthe water. As we ap-proached we heard one of28 Jauku Russell Lowell In Boston and Cambridge the men say to the other, Wal, now, do youspose them critters are common up this way!Be they, or be they? Wal\ said the other,I dunnos they be, and I dunno as they be!As we walked on, we speculated on the peculiar-ities of the New England rural dialect. Before my birth my father had built a house,which is still standing, at the head of what wasthen called Professors Row, but is now knownas Kirkland Street. This led directly to EastCambridge which formed a separate village, andI remember once driving there with my father inthe family chaise. My elder brother, who was in college at thesame time that Wendell Phillips was

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