CHAPTER XXI.
THE CONFEDERATE CAPITAL The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
-- OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
Richmond is the Boston of Virginia; Norfolk its New York.

The comparison does not, of course, hold in all particulars, Richmond being, for instance, larger than Norfolk, and not a seaport.

Yet, on the other hand, Boston manages, more than any seaport that I know of, to conceal from the visitor the signs of its maritime life; wherefore Richmond looks about as much like a port as does the familiar part of Boston.
The houses on the principal residence streets of Richmond are not built in such close ranks as Boston houses; they have more elbow-room; numbers of them have yards and gardens; and there is not about Richmond houses the Bostonian insistence upon red brick; nevertheless many houses of both cities give off the same suggestion of having long been lived in by the descendants of their builders.

So, too, though the Capitol at Richmond has little architectural resemblance to Boston's gold-domed State House--the former having been copied by Thomas Jefferson from the Maison Carree at Nimes, and being a better building than the Massachusetts State House, and better placed--the two do, nevertheless, suggest each other in their gray granite solidity.
It is perhaps in the quality of solidity--architectural, commercial, social, even spiritual--that Richmond and Boston are most alike.
Substantialness, conservatism, tradition, and prosperity rest like gray mantles over both.
Broad Street in Richmond is two or three times as wide as Granby Street, Norfolk's chief shopping street, and for this reason, doubtless, its traffic seems less, though I believe it is in fact greater.

A fine street to look upon at night, with its long, even rows of clustered boulevard lights, and its bright windows, Broad Street in the daytime is a disappointment, because, for all its fine spaciousness, it lacks good buildings.