Who toil at hemming the Southern shirt;
Little they'll care, as they shout aloud,
If the Southern shirt prove a Southern shroud.
Hurrah for the needles sharp and thin!
Cotton is saved by hemming it in.'

* * * * *

ONE OF MY PREDECESSORS.


No books have quite the same fascination for me as the narratives of old
travelers. Give me a rainy day, a state of affairs which renders the
performance of a more serious task impossible, and a volume of Hakluyt
or Purchas, or even of Pinkerton's agreeable collection, and I
experience a condition of felicity which leaves Gray and his new novel
far in the background. For I thus not only behold again the familiar
scenery of the earth,--never forgetting a landscape that I have once
seen,--but I am also a living participant in the adventures of those who
have wandered the same paths, hundreds of years before. I visit
Constantinople while the Porphyrogenite emperors still sit upon the
throne of the East; I look upon the barbaric court of Muscovy before the
name of Russia is known in the world; I make acquaintance with Genghis
Khan at Karakorum, and with Aurungzebe at Delhi; I invade Japan with
Kampfer, penetrate the Arctic Seas with Barentz, or view the gardens of
Ispahan in the company of the gallant Sir John Chardin.

This taste was not the cause, but is the result, of my own experience.
My far-off, unknown Arab progenitor says, in one of his poems: 'Fly thy
home, and journey, if thou strivest for great deeds. Five advantages