limbs and action, betrayed that he was not an
American. So much the better.

V.

I said he looked sharply at us two. He seemed to have a habit of
investigating, at least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once,
evidently. A country-parson and his wife. If I say his pretty wife, I
will promise faithfully that it shall be the last time I will refer to
myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be absolutely
necessary; and it isn't every woman who will do as much. For with this
man and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the
next five years. Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with
my husband, and nodding from time to time gravely at me, as If to take
me into the conversation,--little thought I of the shadow he would one
day cast over both of our lives!

He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten
minutes, toasting bread, and boiling eggs. It was like a doll's
cooking-stove six inches square, a curious invention, new then, and a
wonderful convenience.

"With my tea and this," said he, "I can go over the United States. Good
bread and sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often
walk fifty miles together."

We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment. In our part of the
world nobody walked anywhere. Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if
not a chaise; and he must be miserable indeed who did not own at least
one horse. Nobody in his sober senses demeaned himself to walking.
Perhaps it was the climate. Perhaps our fathers instituted the custom,
to be as unlike the British as possible,--as they did of making their
houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.

This man's hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with
fresh air, jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We
looked at his six feet of height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit
limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained supernatural vigor from natural
contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free step, as a child
approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the topics
he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always
connected with him: of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops,
of great walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath;
never of the solemn hush of pines, or twilight, or anything "sough"-ing
or whispering: no, all about him sounded like t