Even Boston does not change rapidly. Thank God for that! She keeps well to the old customs and the old traditions, holds tightly to her ideals. Only in the folk who walk her awkward streets can the discerning man see the new Boston. The old types of Brahmins are outclassed. Some of them still do amazingly well in the professions but these are few. Long ago the steady press of immigration at the port of Boston took political power away from them. Yet the old guard stands resolute. And the impress of its manners is not lost upon the Boston of to-day.
For instance, take the vernacular of the town. Boston has a rather old-fashioned habit of speaking the English language. It came upon us rather suddenly one day as we journeyed out Huntington avenue to the smart new gray and red opera house. The very colorings of the _foyer_ of that house--soft and simple--bespoke the refinement of the Boston to-day.
In the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in every other one of the big opera houses that are springing up mushroom-fashion across the land, our ears would have been assailed by "Librettos! Get your librettos!" Not so in Boston. At the Boston Opera House the young woman back of the _foyer_ stand calmly announced at clock-like intervals:
And the head usher, whom the older Bostonians grasped by the hand and seemed to regard as a long-lost friend, did not sip out, "Checks, please."
"Locations," he requested, as he condescended to the hand-grasps of the socially elect.
"The nearer door for those stepping out," announces the guard upon the elevated train and as for the surface trolley-cars, those wonderful green perambulators laden down with more signs than nine ordinary trolley-cars would carry at one time, they do not speak of the newest type in Boston as "Pay-as-you-enter cars," after the fashion of less cultured communities. In the Hub they are known as Prepayment cars--its precision is unrelenting.
All of these things make for the furthering of the charm of Boston. They are tangible assets and even folk from the newer parts of the land are not slow to realize them as such--remember that man from the Middle West who makes a journey once or twice each year to be in the very heart of civilization. There was another Westerner--this man a resident of Omaha, who sent his boy--already a graduate of a pretty well-known university near Chicago--to do some post-graduate work at Harvard. A few weeks later he had a letter from his son. It read something after this fashion: