great deal of paint; flocks of ducks quarreling in pools of muddy water; goats upon door - steps; women haggling at the rear of butcher-wagons; boys, black and white, playing base-ball in open lots; and clothes-lines with bits of red and white color here and there. It is only when the stroller along the banks nears Boston that the river assumes a romantic aspect. He who lingers on West Boston Bridge at twilight then sees a sight which few cities in America can equal; the spires of the churches rise across a beautiful inland bay, and seem like the notes of a bar of music. Giotto's tower is there. In the moonlight, with the long row of twinkling lights at the base of the shadowy pinnacles and turrets, one thinks of Venice.

Charles River, however, possesses a charm of its own, and the way to enjoy it is to take a boat and float from Watertown to Cambridge through the saltmarshes. The only conditions necessary for one's enjoyment are: it must be high tide, and if there is a fog, it must be thick enough to shut out the sight of the straggling tenements of Brighton, but not too dense to enable one to see a comparatively distant schooner, or catch an occasional glimpse of the towers of Cambridge. Charles Kingsley, in answer to the interrogatory what kind of scenery he liked best, replied, "Flats, or the sea." I confess to sympathizing with him. There is a peculiar charm in the salt-marshes seen beneath a light veil of fog, with here and there a rounded hay-rick which the full tide threatens to convey seaward. One feels that the swallows can cleave the air over these level saltmarshes and execute their aërial evolutions without the fear of entangling twigs. I suppose that you and I feel also that there is a breadth here in which we can stretch our arms without the fear of knocking over the modern bric-a-brac of our surroundings. One must float on the tide to enjoy these marshes-locomotion, indeed, would be difficult, if not impossible. At Brighton the river quickly loses its fresh-water aspect. The salt-grass grows ranker; the occasional reach of flowering grasses, the patches of golden-rod, if in autumn, are swept back by the waves of the dark olive-green grass of the salt-marsh, to the distant uplands, the waters of which are fringed with trees waiting for some artistic eye which shall catch their grouping and suppress the pronounced American villas which peep forth in new paint here and there. In a fog, however, one cannot see these villas. At Brighton there is a wooden bridge which crosses the stream obliquely. Beneath this bridge the freshman from yonder university is apt to get his first involuntary bath in the turbid water of the Charles-for one must know how to guide a wherry through the narrow opening between the piers. The tide flows under the bridge with considerable force, and sweeps light cockle - boats first against the plank sheathing on one side, then against the bare, oozing piles on the other. At this point, about five miles from Boston and from the sea, is the head of navigation. Here, at a neighboring wharf, one frequently sees coasting-schooners drawn up to be unladen of wood and

lumber. How they get so far inland is at first a mystery, for the river is very narrow and winding. I remember one moonlight evening to have seen a schooner, with only her main-sail set, flying through the salt-marshes, her hull concealed beneath the banks of the river. Her masts and rigging swiftly penetrated the light wreaths of fog which were gathered here and there. Not a sound was to be heard. Here, indeed, was a spectral ship worthy to be classed with those apparitions which once terrified the phlegmatic Dutchmen of New Amsterdam. The shrill whistle of a little tug soon dispelled the illusion. These coasting-vessels, on a near view, are unpoetical objects. An odor of cooking comes up from a dingy hatchway; a rusty smoke-pipe sends a faint wreath of smoke amid the tarred rigging; and a dog, saddened by his confined life, sits upon the cabin-roof. In the early evening the swarthy captain leans over the taffrail and smokes his pipe, and gazes with a cynical air at the half-nude figures of the Harvard students as they pass beneath the stern of the schooner in their shells. A conviction passes through the seaman's mind that the true test of strength would be to pull a ship's boat on a stormy sea until the ship's topmasts were sunk beneath the rim of the horizon. A little delay upon the Charles, however, convinces him that some strength and skill are required to manage even a cockle-boat like a racing-shell. While the first sight of the aquatic sports of the Harvard student is a keen surprise to the down-East captains, their wives, who often accompany them, must have poetical memories of the stretch of salt-moor, of the shadowy city towers, of the lights which rest like golden beads along the distant uplands at night, and of the nebulous gleam of the great metropolis at the mouth of the river. Many an Evangeline, doubtless, with a romantic lifehistory, has sailed up this creek unconscious that in yonder lordly mansion, beneath spreading elms, but a short distance from the river's bank, resides a poet who could glorify the rude incidents of her life. The faces of these women, as they gaze over the schooners' rails, have great possibilities. Sailing through salt-marshes under the safe convoy of a tug, with the distant song of birds, and an occasional waft of the fragrance of fresh fields and blossoming orchards, must appeal far more powerfully to feminine hearts than the rough and stormy seas over which they have come.

After leaving Brighton, one floats beneath the tower of Mount Auburn. Across a neighboring field the great cemetery begins, and the hill-side rising to the tower is thickly covered with marble monuments. One should float here at night in the moonlight, if he has a taste for the weird. Yet one does not like to look up that hill-side; it is better to gaze freely across the reach of marsh to the bright lights of the distant city, and to the suggestions of the wide sea beyond. The stars come down to the city's lights and seem to twinkle with them in gentle friendship. Our friends are not in that graveyard; they are there-over there, among those bright, cheerful lights.