in that glorious
city, with its homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces. Around
me were again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility, by envy or greed, by
anxious care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of men and women who had
never known fear of a fellow man or depended on his favor, but always, in the
words of that sermon which still rang in my ears, had »stood up straight before
God.«
    With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less poignant
that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused at last from my
reverie, and soon after left the house.
    A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop and pull
myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston of the future
to make the real Boston strange. The squalor and malodorousness of the town
struck me, from the moment I stood upon the street, as facts I had never before
observed. But yesterday, moreover, it had seemed quite a matter of course that
some of my fellow-citizens should wear silks, and others rags, that some should
look well fed, and others hungry. Now on the contrary the glaring disparities in
the dress and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on the
sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entire indifference which
the prosperous showed to the plight of the unfortunate. Were these human beings,
who could behold the wretchedness of their fellows without so much as a change
of countenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who had
changed, and not my contemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whose people fared
all alike as children of one family and were one another's keepers in all
things.
    Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary effect
of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light, was the
prevalence of advertising. There had been no personal advertising in the Boston
of the twentieth century, because there was no need of any, but here the walls
of the buildings, the windows, the broadsides of the newspapers in every hand,
the very pavements, everything in fact in sight, save the sky, were covered with
the appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, to attract
the contributions of others to their support. However the wording might vary,
the tenor of all these appeals was the same: -
    »Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones, am
the