BEACON STREET WITHOUT A FLAME

The time was when Boston was the Hub of the Universe and ruled with an oriental omnipotence the intellectual life of a continent. Then the Bulfinch drawing-rooms of Beacon Street were more English than Victoria, and the scrubbed and shining faces of the matrons who presided in them were the embodiment of polite and proper learning. And then Harvard was Boston's.

But Mary Baker Eddy was the last of the philosophers. The intellectual flood departed, leaving behind it a rich and fruitful earth, but sweeping away the preeminence of the Brahmins. The God-fearing Bostonians who had listened piously to the great Unitarians and had contributed to the worthy from the stores laid up by their slave-trading, rum-running, bundling ancestors, were losing their grip. The day of the Copley-Plaza arrived, and with it cosmetics, and the knowledge that the world is large. Entertainment was a bit gayer, a bit grander, though never ostentatious. And every Back Bay Lass chosen for the Vincent Club looked a bit closer for the right undergraduate from Cambridge. For then Boston was Harvard's.

Filled with the hurry of the evening traffic Beacon Street runs on, past the Hill invaded by the Celtic horde, over its same worn brick way. In the twilight comes a glimpse, through the drawn shades, of the Bulfinch drawing rooms, and of the scrubbed and shining faces of the matrons, filled with the light of the Boston Transcript. Closed to the Boston, which is now Greater, is a world, a complete world, sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and -- sans End. Turn down an empty Glass! Or so we read in the magazines.