first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or
than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to
the tree that stood

"Auf brennender Felsenwand."

Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
height, I am in doubt to this day.

I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest
publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical
of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and
factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the
effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of
their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell
the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions
of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found
me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or