ABSTRACT
Parrington’s journey to Cambridge took him through Chicago, where he revisited his McClellan relatives. He had his photograph taken again at Brand’s Studio. At Detroit, the train was ferried across Lake Michigan into Ontario, and he was outside the United States for the first time. On September 30, he reached Boston and spent several hours wandering among its “narrow, crazy streets, with small poor buildings,” finding only Beacon Street “notable.” Then he took the cars for Harvard and located his room (“very pleasant, tho’ not elegant”) at 13 Mt. Auburn Street. That evening he inscribed in his diary: “Well, I am here in Cambridge, the place of which I have heard since I was old enough to know aught of it. How I will like it I can’t tell, but I propose to make myself.”
