SISTERS:—The music I have just been writing about is not fashionable by any manner of means. Boston, the great central hub of all creation, can't bottle it up or engage it by the ton to astonish all creation with. She must have the manufactured article, and has sent all over the world to get it.

Every fiddler, flute-player, drummer, and curlecued horn-man in Europe has been brought over here to thunder-out and roll-off billows of sound for people to pay for and wonder at.

We have a Niagara of waters that astonishes the world. Now the people of Boston are determined to give us, in a great, wild, conglomeration of voices, a full Niagara of sound.

I am New England all over, from the top of my beehive-bonnet to the sole of my gaiter, but—confidentially, among ourselves—don't you think Boston takes a little too much on herself? That narrow-streeted, up-hilly city isn't all six of the New England States by a long shot.

My opinion is that Boston is putting on airs, and I for one don't mean to put up with it. I hate stuck-up people, and I despise stuck-up towns.

Of course it is my duty to see all things in behalf of the Society, and to do my best to lay them before you. I cannot say that my ideas of Boston have not toned down considerably since I came to New York. Still New England is New England, and Boston is Boston, if she does now and then make a tremendous old goose of herself, and sometimes threatens to cackle the hub all to pieces.

Cousin Dempster hasn't much to do in summer-time, so he was on hand for the Great High Jubilee; and E. E. was just crazy to go; for she is what you call musical, and goes right off the handle whenever a fellow that can't speak English plays on the piano or sings to her in some language that she don't know a word of.

Well, we went, and found Boston just running over with people. Every house along the crooked streets had one or two flags a-streaming from the roof, or out of the windows—star-spangled banners tangled-up with red and yellow and all sorts of colors; some with eagles, some without, but making every street gorgeous, as if the Fourth of July had burst out before its time.

The Coliseum is a tremendous building, big enough to roof-in forty thousand people, and leave room for the whole swarm of drummers, toot-horners, piano-thrashers, blacksmiths, anvils, and swivel-guns, with a thousand people to blow, thrash, and blast them off, and twenty thousand singers behind, ready to pile in the thunder of their voices.

The Coliseum is grand, barny in its structure, and all outdoorish when you get into it; but there is a good deal to see before you do get into it. The streets were just jammed-up with people when we came in sight of the great building, which stands out in a bare piece of ground, without a tree near it, and the hottest sun you ever wilted under beating down on everything around it, till I felt as if approaching the mouth of a great New England brisk oven, heated to bake a thousand tons of beans in. The streets were blocked with people.

The little wooden bridges built over the railroads were creaking under the tramp of a never-ending crowd. The street cars were crowded like beehives till the horses could not move, and some of the cars broke down, choking up the track.

Female women, with red books in their hands, scrambled through the crowd. Little tents and shanties were scattered all about, everybody talked fast and loud—some in one language, some in another. It was like going into the Tower of Babel, with all the languages in full blast.

From one of the shanties we heard the sound of a loud, eager, wild voice, as of some fellow going to be hung, and wrestling for his life.

"What is that?" says I to Dempster. "What on earth are they doing in there?"

"Oh, it's a prayer-meeting," says he; "some man is wrestling with the Lord in behalf of sinful souls."

"Oh, that's it," says I, just disgusted: "Well, I hope he'll get through with his wrestling before we come this way again. To haul religion and force prayers into such a crowd as this, is making a farce of Christianity. We have churches for such things, and the calm of a holy Sabbath set aside for the service of God. Who has time to think of such things here?"

"Oh, it takes all sorts of men to make a world," says Dempster, pushing his way through the crowd, while E. E. and I followed, with that child a-dragging after us.

We went at the rate of three feet in as many minutes, and that wrestler's voice was wrangling over us all the time. If the angels caught one sentence, I'm sure they must have clapped their wings to their ears and left the hub to take care of itself.