RUBBERNECK

A gilded grasshopper, astride the top of the weather-vane, is about all that remains of the original Faneuil Hall in Boston. But Boston, unlike some other cities, retains a certain pride in its past, and the City has recently appropriated a sum of $150,000 to restore this "cradle of liberty" to something nearer its original countinence. The once-honored wells of the present structure are in large part to be torn down and carted away, and the old edifice that Samuel Adams knew will be reconstructed as accurately as possible.

Meanwhile, visitors may continue to see the old hall as it has been since 1805. "Is there a good citizen," the critic asks, "who has not stood upon its sawdusted floor in the old town-meeting style and heard the issues of the day discussed?" Unfortunately, there is. Faneuil Hall is not as popular a place as this writer supposes, or as the guidebook would wish to make it. Cantabrigians, who find Tremont and Boylston Streets, or Copley Square, or Coolidge Corner, conveniently near to Harvard Square, rarely penetrate a lesser distance on the other side of Park Street, to the Old South Church, or the old State House, or to the remoter regions of Copp's Hill and the Paul Revere district, the heart of Revolutionary Boston. Many hurry along Tremont a tombstone is inscribed "P. Funel" for Peter Faneuil, founder of the Hall. And how many as they step off the escalator, stop to notice the Park Street Church, staunch religious edifice whose basement once housed the store of a retail liquor-dealer, now metamorphosed into a tea-room?

There are innumerable rewards in Boston for the pilgrim in search of historic tid-bits. Those who live in a place for long are apt to settle into indifference to the curiosities that others come many miles to see. Laziness is a feeble excuse, for there is always the "rubber neck wagon". Although the megaphone would announce a few things that do not need to be pointed out: "on our right we see the habitat of the Harvard Lampoon"--yet it would say much more that the college man has not heard outside of History 32: Bunker Hill Monument, the Old North Church, the birthplace of Paul Revere. Nor need it go so far afield for novelties: the glass flowers in the Agassiz Museum, common topic of conversation, though they may be, are almost as little known as the Arboretum in remote Jamaica. A little browsing amongst out-of-the-way places in the vicinity has its own rewards; furthermore, it serves double duty in the General Examination of tea-table discourse.

There are innumerable rewards in Boston for the pilgrim in search of historic tid-bits. Those who live in a place for long are apt to settle into indifference to the curiosities that others come many miles to see. Laziness is a feeble excuse, for there is always the "rubber neck wagon". Although the megaphone would announce a few things that do not need to be pointed out: "on our right we see the habitat of the Harvard Lampoon"--yet it would say much more that the college man has not heard outside of History 32: Bunker Hill Monument, the Old North Church, the birthplace of Paul Revere. Nor need it go so far afield for novelties: the glass flowers in the Agassiz Museum, common topic of conversation, though they may be, are almost as little known as the Arboretum in remote Jamaica. A little browsing amongst out-of-the-way places in the vicinity has its own rewards; furthermore, it serves double duty in the General Examination of tea-table discourse.