Thy nimble pencil paints the landscape as thou goest." (1)

Adieu, my kind nurse and sweet foster-mother,--a long and a last adieu!
Never had I left thee but for that louder voice of Nature which calls the
child to the parent, and wooes us from the labors we love the best by the
chime in the sabbath-bells of Home.

No one can tell how dear the memory of that wild Bush life becomes to him
who has tried it with a fitting spirit. How often it haunts him in the
commonplace of more civilized scenes! Its dangers, its risks, its sense
of animal health, its bursts of adventure, its intervals of careless
repose,--the fierce gallop through a very sea of wide, rolling plains;
the still saunter, at night, through woods never changing their leaves,
with the moon, clear as sunshine, stealing slant through their clusters
of flowers. With what an effort we reconcile ourselves to the trite
cares and vexed pleasures, "the quotidian ague of frigid impertinences,"
to which we return! How strong and black stands my pencil-mark in this
passage of the poet from whom I have just quoted before!--

"We are here among the vast and noble scenes of Nature,--we are there
among the pitiful shifts of policy; we walk here in the light and open
ways of the Divine Bounty,--we grope there in the dark and confused
labyrinth of human malice." (2)

But I weary you, reader. The New World vanishes,--now a line, now a
speck; let us turn away, with the face to the Old. Amongst my fellow-
passengers how many there are returning home disgusted, disappointed,
impoverished, ruined, throwing themselves again on those unsuspecting
poor friends who thought they had done with the luckless good-for-noughts
forever. For don't let me deceive thee, reader, into supposing that