The Sane Men of Satan

Charles Justin paused briefly in the encroaching darkness to look at the north front of the Old State House in Boston. He was engaged in the process of walking home from his office on State Street to his house in Louisburg Square.

The ancient building, he thought, with its palladian windows and gilded lion and unicorn, still looked much as it must have when Paul Revere engraved his crude but effective print of the Boston Massacre, back in 1773.

One of the things Justin loved most about Boston was the fact that so much of the old town still breathed. Faneuil Hall, a few blocks behind him, where James Otis and Sam Adams had roused the Commonwealth against the crown, still did duty as a major market. Worshippers still paraded on Sunday mornings to King's Chapel, Christ Church, the Old North Church. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of twentieth-century Bostonians still lived and worked upon the same broad planks of old T-Wharf that had felt the measured tread of Gage's grenadiers.

Justin, born and bred in rawer if no more bustling Midwestern surroundings, had felt a powerful tie with the old thus standing alongside the new, a strong déjà vu, from his first glimpse, more than twenty years before as a Harvard freshman. This, he had known instinctively, was home for him. He had made it his home ever since.

The sense of the past was strong upon him this evening—perhaps, he thought wryly, more strong than was proper for an executive vice-president of the Ninth National Bank. As he scaled the slope of Park Street on Beacon Hill he felt like a man born out of his proper time.

Life and color and revolt had been strong in the little city of two centuries ago. Men had thought and dreamed—and then had talked and acted. Unlike their descendants, who seemed to have relapsed into an everlasting featherbed of trustfundism.

Passing the gold-domed balustraded beauty of Bullfinch's classic New State House, he wondered how the crest of the hill had looked when John Hancock had lived there, in his magnificent Georgian mansion, with its landscaped gardens and carriage house containing the merchant-governor's gilded English coach.

Old Boston held Justin tightly in its grip even after he turned the key in his own lock and entered his house on Louisburg Square. For the house, if not quite Federalist, dated back to the early era of Clipper Ship affluence. Fine white paneling, graceful mahogany banisters, blue-and-gold silk wall covering of heavy Chinese silk, Sheraton furniture, Revere silverware—all combined to retain illusion of a past still alive.