ed me the three birds, plucked featherless as
Plato's man. The two roasters we planted carefully on spits before a
sultry spot of the fire. From a horizontal stick, supported on forked
stakes, we suspended by a twig over each roaster an automatic baster, an
inverted cone of pork, ordained to yield its spicy juices to the wooing
flame, and drip bedewing on each bosom beneath. The roasters ripened
deliberately, while keen and quick fire told upon the frier, the first
course of our feast. Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea, blessing Confucius
for that restorative weed, as I had blessed Moses for his abstinence
from porkers.

"Need I say that the grouse were admirable, that everything was
delicious, and the Confucian weed first chop? Even a scouse of mouldy
biscuit met the approval of Loolowcan. Feasts cooked under the greenwood
tree, and eaten by their cooks after a triumphant day of progress, are
sweeter than the conventional banquets of languid Christendom."

"Life in the Open Air"--containing sketches of travel among the
mountains and lakes of Maine, as well as the story of "Love and Skates,"
which has been spoken of, "The March of the Seventh Regiment,"
"Washington as a Camp," an essay descriptive of Church's great picture,
"The Heart of the Andes," and two fragments, one of them the charming
commencement of a story which promised to be one of his best and most
enjoyable efforts in this direction--is the concluding volume of
Winthrop's collected writings. I speak of it in this place, because it
is in some part a companion-book to the volumes we have been discussing.
It is as full of buoyant life, of fresh and noble thought, of graceful
wit and humor, as those; in parts it contains the most finished of his
literary work. Few Americans who read it at the time will ever forget
that stirring description of the march of the New-York Seventh; it is a
piece of the history of our war which will live and be read as long as
Americans read their history. It moved my blood, in the reading,
tonight, as it did in those days--which seem already some centuries old,
so do events crowd the retrospect--when we were all reading it in the
pages of the "Atlantic." In the unfinished story of "Brightly's Orphan"
there is a Jew boy from Chatham Street, an original of the first water,
who, though scarce fairly introduced, will, I am sure, make a place for
himself and for his author in the memories of all who relish humor of
the best kind.

"Cec