lesson, listened to it religiously, asked if there was nothing else to
be seen in the neighborhood, and drove back again at a rattling pace.
It is to be feared that his perception of the difference between good
architecture and bad was not acute, and that he might sometimes have
been seen gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions. Ugly
churches were a part of his pastime in Europe, as well as beautiful
ones, and his tour was altogether a pastime. But there is sometimes
nothing like the imagination of these people who have none, and Newman,
now and then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some
lonely, sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had
rendered civic service in an unknown past, had felt a singular inward
tremor. It was not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid,
fathomless sense of diversion.

He encountered by chance in Holland a young American, with whom, for
a time, he formed a sort of traveler's partnership. They were men of a
very different cast, but each, in his way, was so good a fellow that,
for a few weeks at least, it seemed something of a pleasure to share
the chances of the road. Newman's comrade, whose name was Babcock, was
a young Unitarian minister, a small, spare neatly-attired man, with
a strikingly candid physiognomy. He was a native of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in
another suburb of the New England metropolis. His digestion was weak and
he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy--a regimen to which he was
so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted
when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies did
not flourish under the table d'hote system. In Paris he had purchased
a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itself an American
Agency, and at which the New York illustrated papers were also to
be procured, and he had carried it about with him, and shown extreme