them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels's
name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was
obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it.
He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the
title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many
masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except
from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably
it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found
that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better
pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on
rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little
of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think
it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that
is all; but "it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign." He
said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections,
for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of
type.

He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew
him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to
suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He
asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told
him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and
to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all
its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in
many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of
Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire's time.

I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it
with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it