New England Manners And Customs.

""Sister ______, do you expect to have all this and heaven
too?"
"To-day, Boston is sometimes jestingly styled the "Hub of the Universe," but at the beginning of the present century it was, soberly speaking, the Hub of New England, for from it spokes projected into every part, however distant, of that region.
"As in past ages all roads led to Rome, so seventy-five or eighty years ago all roads led to or from Boston. In an old Farmer's Almanac, printed in 1817, I find, among other things quaint and curious, four closely-printed pages devoted to "Roads to the Principal Towns of the Continent from Boston, with the distances and names of Innkeepers." Beginning with: "From Boston to Newport, over Seekonk, through Rehoboth, 69 miles," and ending with "Down the Ohio, to the mouth of the Muskinqum, 524 miles," —a tolerably long ride in those days of the old-fashioned stage coach.
"Naturally, this Umbilicus of the Western World set the fashions in theology, literature, dress, and manners for all New England, and any one who had made a trip to Boston was venerated as a kind of travelled wonder, and forever after regarded as an authority upon all mooted points of general interest.
"It has been said, on what authority I am unable to state, that "all good Americans go to Paris when they die." But in those days of Boston's supremacy an aspiring dame in one of our Maine villages, finding herself upon her death bed, expressed as her one last wish, that she "might be permitted to go to heaven by the way o' Boston."
"Evidently the poor soul had pined in vain all her life for a sight of its splendors, and could think of nothing so near akin to heaven as a peep at this earthly Paradise on her way there.
"I might go on indefinitely to call up pictures, heroic, quaint, or pathetic, of these earnest-hearted men and women, who toiled, suffered, and planned, for the future, that we, their children, have entered into the fulness of. But time forbids, and I can only say, in closing this paper, that it will be well for us, if, in these days of national prosperity and power, when Liberty, proudly triumphant, stands like

"A bearded man
Armed to the teeth,"

-- page 9 --