er, that
they make the Atlantic Ocean for a connecting link, year after year, and
correspond tenderly in bills of exchange.

Our poor, dead pedler from Vermont wasn't the only man in New York who
lived and loved by steam and telegraph.

XXVII.

MORE ABOUT FISK.

When the New England mind, which is a little apt to be troubled about
the marriage relations of its emigrants, asks you about my report, you
can say that this New England couple were only following the upper-crust
fashion with married people in our great cities, where men and their
wives find the Atlantic Ocean more convenient than a divorce court.
Being imbued with morality from the Hub, they only set an example of
easy distances.

It takes a good, solid foundation of religion for even a born Vermonter
to stand against a sudden rush of money. This man seemed to start fair.
He began his life with _us_. Next he went to Boston, the very spring and
fountain of high moral ideas, where every law has a higher law to
nullify it. He left his better half in the salubrious atmosphere, where
she performed her domestic duties alone, while he was toiling down Erie
railroad stock, and promulgating sweet sounds from the Grand Opera
House. Bound together in conjugal sympathy, by ever-vibrating telegraph
wires, what could have been more satisfactory and highly fashionable
than these hymeneal relations?

This is what Cousin Dempster has been saying to me with a queer smile on
his lips, and something that seems almost sarcastic in his voice.

Says he, "If this way of life is persisted in, and is held respectable
in social circles, who has a right to find fault when sin and sorrow
spring out of it? Who among the thousands who abandon honorable homes
for personal pleasures shall dare to condemn him?

"Look over the list of outgoing steamers any month in the year, and see
how large a proportion of husbands and wives travel together. Society,
so slanderous in other things, is wickedly tolerant here, and makes a
thousand excuses for the separation of married people.

"Children must be educated. Just as if a free-born American boy or girl
can't learn all he or she is capable of knowing in his own native land!
Just as if any woman, who loves her husband and means to be a good
mother, would listen for a moment to the idea of taking her family into
foreign parts while her husband is tied down to business at home.

"Married people, who love each other, live together--tem