led-horse, I shall penetrate still further into the old forests of this
New World. I long to be alone with "Nature's full, free
heart"--perchance, there, my own may beat as of yore.

Farewell, dear Edward. You may hear of me next among the Sacs and
Foxes;--at present address H. Danforth, care of G---- & D----,
Merchants, ---- ---- street, Boston.

Yours ever, H. DANFORTH.

A new external life had indeed opened upon this child of luxury and
conventional refinement. He whose movements had been chronicled as
matter of interest to the public, for whose presence the "world" had
postponed its fetes, might now travel hundreds of miles without
observation or inquiry. He upon whose steps had waited a crowd of
obsequious attendants, now found himself with one follower, whose tone
of independence hardly permitted him to call him servant. In cities,
where he would still have been surrounded by those conventional
distinctions of which he had himself been deprived, the sense of a great
loss would have been ever present with him, and the contrast with the
past would have made the fairest present to which he could now attain,
desolate. But there could be no comparison, and therefore no painful
contrast, between the wild life of the prairies and the
ultra-civilization of English aristocratic society. In the excitement
and adventure of the one, he hoped to forget the other. He sought to
forget--not to be resigned, to acquiesce. His inner life was unchanged.
He had been a dreamer--a pleasure-seeker--and a dreamer and
pleasure-seeker he continued, though the dreams and the pleasures must
be wrought from new materials. To sketch the progress of such a
character through the shifting scenes of his new existence--to observe
him in his association with the strong, daring, acute, but uncultivated
denizens of our frontier States--to stand with sympathizing heart beside
him as he first entered upon those unpeopled solitudes in whose silence
God speaks to the soul, is not permitted us at present. This may be the
work of another day; but now we must pass at once with him from Boston
to a scene within the confines of Iowa. His carriage had been left
behind, and for two days he had been riding over a rolling country,
whose grassy knolls, dotted here and there with clumps of trees, brought
occasionally to his mind the park scenery of his own land. Early in this
day he had passed a farm with a comfortable house and substantial
out-buildings, but n