to me that in this speech he intended no personal allusion, but had found
it necessary to check the ill-timed mirth in the stage. In spite of his
presumption and pedantry, he never lost an opportunity of showing
kindness. I saw him last in the very extremity of terror, during a violent
gale off the coast of Maine.

For the first fifty miles after leaving the Bend, our road lay through
country as solitary and wild as could be conceived--high hills, covered
with endless forests of small growth. I looked in vain for the gigantic
trees so celebrated by travellers in America. If they ever grew in this
region, they now, in the shape of ships, are to be found on every sea
where England's flag waves. Occasionally the smoke of an Indian wigwam
would rise in a thin blue cloud from among the dark foliage of the
hemlock; and by the primitive habitation one of the aboriginal possessors
of the soil might be seen, in tattered habiliments, cleaning a gun or
repairing a bark canoe, scarcely deigning an apathetic glance at those
whom the appliances of civilisation and science had placed so immeasurably
above him. Then a squaw, with a papoose strapped upon her back, would peep
at us from behind a tree; or a half-clothed urchin would pursue us for
coppers, contrasting strangely with the majesty of _Uncas_, or the
sublimity of _Chingachgook_; portraits which it is very doubtful if Cooper
ever took from life.

In the few places where the land had been cleared the cultivation was
tolerable and the houses comfortable, surrounded generally by cattle-sheds
and rich crops of Tartarian oats. The potatoes appeared to be free from
disease, and the pumpkin crop was evidently abundant and in good
condition. Sussex Valley, along which we passed for thirty miles, is
green, wooded, and smilingly fertile, being watered by a clear rapid
river. The numerous hay-meadows, and the neat appearance of the arable