compass some twenty letters in that time, and make out
perhaps two hundred and fifty words in an hour.
Haliburton thought that, with some improvements, he could
send one of Mr. Buchanan's messages up in thirty-seven
working-nights.


IV

INDEPENDENCE

I own to a certain mortification in confessing that
after this interregnum, forced upon us by so long a
period of non-intercourse, we never resumed precisely
the same constancy of communication as that which I
have tried to describe at the beginning. The apology
for this benumbment, if I may so call it, will suggest
itself to the thoughtful reader.

It is indeed astonishing to think that we so readily
accept a position when we once understand it. You buy a
new house. You are fool enough to take out a staircase
that you may put in a bathing-room. This will be done in
a fortnight, everybody tells you, and then everybody
begins. Plumbers, masons, carpenters, plasterers,
skimmers, bell-hangers, speaking-tube men, men who make
furnace-pipe, paper-hangers, men who scrape off the old
paper, and other men who take off the old paint with
alkali, gas men, city-water men, and painters begin. To
them are joined a considerable number of furnace-men's