heard for half a century nearly, and in an instant the beauty,
the mystery, the holiness of nature came back to me just as it
came in childhood when sometimes my playmates left me alone in
the great orchard of my home in Cumberland.

He avows himself

--a pagan and a worshipper of Pan, loving the woods and waters,
and preferring to go to them (when my heart was stirred thereto
by that mysterious power which, as I conceive, cares little for
worship made stately and to order on certain recurring calendar
days) rather than to most of the brick and mortar pens that are
supposed to hold in some way that which the visible universe no
more contains than the works of his hands contain the sculptor
who makes them; for I take it that the glittering show revealed
by the mightiest telescope, or by the hope mightier even than the
imagination of the highest mind, is but as a parcel of motes
shining in a single thin beam of the great sun unseen and hidden
behind shutters never to be wide opened.

Our "Virginia Realist" needed not to call upon his imagination for
personalities with which to fill his free-hand sketches of nature, for
there was in his kindly humor and geniality a charm which drew forth
from all he met just the qualities necessary to fill in his world with
the characters he desired. A wide and deep sympathy enabled him to
make that world so real and true that his readers entered it at once
and found therein such entertaining companionship that they were fain
to abide there ever after.

In 1835, when a boy fresh from Parley's History of America, the future