and was son of an editor, so it was my good fortune to sit in their councils, and another person who sat in their councils was a man named Ralph Waldo Emerson. Well! pretty much every Connecticut man who was worth his salt was off with Hawley (observe H again) and the rest lugging a musket around Florida or somewhere else among our old masters. So the political canvass in Connecticut of that summer devolved on old gentlemen who were too old to lug muskets. And so it was that the literary bureau had its part to play, and so it was that Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote two little tracts for that canvass. One of them is a very good picture of what we gain in daily life because there is no custom-house at the frontier of every state. Look among your old pamphlets, my dear cousins, and find that tract without the author's name. It is by the "Buddha of the West," the "New England Plato."

CHAPTER VIII

NEW YORK

THIS series of papers began in the counsels of Mr. and Mrs. Gentle Reader. As it happens, they end in the same counsels.

At that house they go to bed at 9.30. It was now five minutes before nine. He had just been reading to her Mr. Hale's paper about Connecticut in The Outlook. She said, "The trouble about Mr. Hale is that he always supposes that other people can do what he does. He has been at the top of Katahdin and at the top of Mount Washington and at the top of Mansfield and at the top of Wachusett. He has been on Ingham Peak in Rhode Island and on West Rock in Connecticut, and so he writes as if I had been there or as if we could go there as easily as we can go to bed." "Well," said Mr. Reader in reply, "I do not see why he should not say so. You and I are younger

than he is, and we have this very summer before us. What do you want to do most?"

She said that she should forget everything that

she had been told about New England, and that

she wanted something like what her old schoolmistress called a "review." She would like to take that review, and at the same time she would. like to see something in her tarry at home travels

which had not been described or represented

in The Outlook.

"Very good," said he. "Mr. Hale begins by saying that New England is a peninsula with an isthmus not two miles wide at its western point.

How should you like to go round by Bar Harbor and the end of Nova Scotia, see the Bells at Baddeck, and then go down to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and make a call at one of Grenfell's hospitals at Newfoundland, take the steamer up to Montreal, and then go by rail to St. John's above the Lake;

there meet Ransom with our house-boat, and so go by the house-boat near Burgoyne's line to Saratoga? You shall arrive at Saratoga on the day of the anniversary of the battle of Bennington. I, meanwhile, will have my canoe painted. The day you start I will start, and I will go down the Connecticut and then paddle along the Sound from Saybrook to New York and put the canoe on the deck of the steamer which shall take me to Albany. Then I will paddle up to Cohoes and make a carry at the falls there, and so, on the sixteenth of August, I will get on the house-boat and I will find you all there. And at the spot where General Gates received General Burgoyne's sword, I will fold you in my arms and kiss you, and after that you will remember that New England is a peninsula and that you and I have stood on the neck which connects it with the mainland."

These words were spoken in their bungalow near Windsor in Vermont on the Connecticut River.

To all she agreed. Now you must know that they were at the omnipotent age. This age is