bury and Boston, and called by everybody The
Neck.
At what is now Dover Street, the narrowest part of the isthmus, a mud wall had been thrown up, with a pair of strong gates in the centre, and this fortification, with various improvements, remained for nearly two hundred years, until 1832, as a line of demarcation between city and country.
In good time to pass the gates, closed at sundown, Samuel Cheeseboro drove his weary cattle through, and, once within the city limits, looked curiously about him. I wish we could pause to tell just what he saw, and what are the changes two hundred years have made at the South End of the city some of us love so well. But space and time forbid, and we hasten on, until we find our hero penning his cattle just behind the Town House, a building then about forty years old, standing on the site of the Old State House of our day. Some fifty years later, the Town House was burned, and with it many valuable records never to be replaced. But, rising again and yet again from its ashes, the Town House held its original place, with King Street running past it at either hand, until the one became the State House, and the other State Street. The cattle pens lying just behind it have disappeared, however, and Thursday is no longer market day for all Boston. Between the Town House and the sea lay what might be called the South End of the Boston of that day, while the mass of the citizens lived at the North End, around Copp's Hill.
