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390 that traveling valet who convinced her that he was the Lord of Burleigh in disguise. I may have changed my views. I may have selected a very different type of female excellence; but time enough for that when we meet.

"The clock-vender's mill proved, as I have told you, a saw-mill. A pair of honest fellows were playing at draughts inside it, with pieces two inches broad hastily sawn off from sticks of brown and white timber; their table was a plank, rough from the mill, standing upon round and barky legs which had

doubtless been trimmed to make the chequers, and rudely chalked over the top in a large chessboard pattern. The mill was stopped for the moment, the hungry teeth of the saw resting fixed in the heart of a pine. I was not put out too much when I found what kind of a laboratory it was. Have I not somewhere confided to you my notion of writing a poem to match Goethe's, and to be called 'The Song of the Saw-mill'? have I not enlarged to you on the beautiful associations of flood

and forest that branch out from the theme? At least, I have included, among the lessons of American poetry I have dinned into your ears, Bryant's capital translation of Körner's little lyric on the 'Saw-mill.' I accepted the substitute, then, and took shelter under the substitute's roof of long and fresh-made boards. I am a bird upon whose age you are always insisting, but I am for ever being caught with some variety of sweet-flavored chaff; so I fluttered confidingly in to the lure of the two friendly peasants.

The lure was a bed filled with atoms of wood—as was also the coffee. I have postponed my poem.

"Risen with the sun, I am writing to you, my Hohenfels, upon the primitive