Tough but softening a bit in Boston

Mark Twain at age 31

“Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4,000 critics”

— Mark Twain (1835-1910), in a Nov. 9, 1869 letter to his sister Pamela Clemens Moffat

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“Boston’s upper zones

Are changing social habits

And I hear the Cohns

Are taking up the Cabots’’

— From Ira Gershwin’s lyrics for the 1931 song “Love Is Sweeping the Country,’’ with music by his brother George.