ruined!" Even so it befell me, in after years, to be the
first person to announce in the United States, far in advance of any
others, the news of the French Revolution of 1848, as I shall fully prove
in the sequence.

It may be here remarked, that, though not "professionals," all of our
family, without a break in the record, have successively taken turns at
fighting, and earned our pay as soldiers, since time lost in oblivion;
for I and my brother tried it on during the Rebellion, wherein he indeed,
standing by my side, got the wound from a shell of which he eventually
died; while there were none who were not in the old Indian wars or the
English troubles of Charles the Second and First, and so on back, I dare
say, to the days of Bussli de Leland, who laid all Yorkshire waste.

My grandfather, though not wealthy, owned a great deal of land, and I can
remember that he one afternoon showed me a road, saying that he owned the
land on each side for a mile. I myself, in after years, however, came to
own in fee-simple a square mile of extremely rich land in Kansas, which I
sold for sixteen hundred dollars, while my grandfather's was rather of
that kind by which men's poverty was measured in Virginia--that is to
say, the more land a man had the poorer he was considered to be. It is
related of one of these that he once held great rejoicing at having got
rid of a vast property by the ingenious process of giving some person one
half of it to induce him to take the other. However, as there is now a
large town or small city on my grandfather's whilom estate, I wish that
it could have been kept. _Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan_, or the
ducats of Panurge?

There was a "home-pasture," a great field behind my grandfather's house,
where I loved to sit alone, and which has left a deep impression on my
memory, as though it were a fairy-haunted or imagined place. It was very
rocky, the stones being covered with clean, crisp, dry lichens, and in
one spot there was the gurgling deep down in some crevice of a mysterious
unseen spring or rivulet. Young as I was, I had met with a line which
bore on it--

"Deep from their vaults the Loxian murmurs flow."

And there was something very voice-like or human in this murmur or
chattering of the unseen brook. This I distinctly remember, that the
place gave me not only a feeling, but a faith that it was haunted by
something gentle and merry. I went there many a time for company, being