settlement to ascertain if by subscription a sufficient sum could be
raised to pay a weekly courier to assert our rights at the nearest
post-office. This was entered into with spirit, all feeling sensible of
the benefits which it would bring; they who could afford it giving
freely of their abundance, and those who could not pay their
subscription all in money, giving half a dollar cash, and a bushel or
half a bushel of buck wheat or potatoes to the cause; and thus the sum
necessary was soon raised--the courier himself subscribing a dollar
towards his own salary. The thing had gone on very well--communication
with the world seemed to have commenced all at once. Nearly every family
took a different newspaper, and these being exchanged with each other,
afforded plenty of food for the mind, and prevented it brooding too
deeply over the realities of life.

The newspapers in this country, especially those of the United States,
are not merely dull records of parliamentary doings, of bill and debate,
the rising of corn or falling of wheat, but contain besides reviews and
whole copies of the newest and best works of the day, both in science
and lighter literature. We dwellers of the forest had no guineas to give
for new books, and if we had, unless we freighted ships home on purpose,
we could not have procured them. But this was not felt, while for our
few yearly dollars the Albion's pearly paper and clear black type
brought for society around our hearths the laughter-loving "Lorrequer,"
the pathos of the portrait painter, or the soul-winning Christopher
North, whose every word seems written in letters of gold, incrusted with
precious jewels. In the "New World" Froissart gave his chronicles of the
olden time, and the mammoth sheets of "Era" and "The Notion" brought us
the peerless pages of "Zanoni," or led us away with "Dickens" and
"Little Nell," by the green glades and ancient churches of England.
Little did we think while we read with delight of this author's