whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange
indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox
Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to
one Congregational Church in Columbus.

Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such
lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of
Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather
than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I
dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more
than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather
heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though
Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had
practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we
rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would
eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit
of fire-eating.

I rent myself away from the Autocrat's presence as early as I could, and
as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I
spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the
streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a
youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different
traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely
regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and
self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the
delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise