Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/804

798 self. He gave as well as received, no man more willingly. He accepted praise less as a mark of respect from others than as a delight of which all are entitled to partake, such as spring weather, the scent of flowers, or the flavor of wine. It is difficult to explain this; it was like an absorbing property in the surface of the skin. Its possessor enjoys pleasure almost involuntarily, whilst another of colder or harder temperament is insensible to it."

When Mr. Procter spoke of pleasure, he spoke of what he knew. He had said long ago, "If life itself were not a pleasure, the utility even of its necessaries might very well be questioned." He is almost an unique example of one who without a touch of baseness deliberately and consistently preferred enjoyment to activity.

 

 From Blackwood's Magazine.

N.,—If you can tear yourself away from the Washington belles, I shall be very glad if you will pay me a long visit at Burnlands, and I will try and put you in the way to become a real fisherman.—

Yours truly,

Now, was an offer of this kind acceptable or not?

To consider the question mathematically, let the three following postulates be granted, as mankind's old enemy Euclid would have said:—

Let it be granted that the place of my temporary sojourn was Washington, U.S.

Let it be granted that the thermometer stood at 100° in the sun, for there was no shade for it to stand in, and that the air had become so thoroughly baked through that the nights were hotter than the days: further, that the Washington belles alluded to by S. had ceded their places to half-a-dozen perspiring Beckys and Dinahs of an undoubted age, who were the sole representatives of Mother Eve in the American metropolis; and last and pleasantest assumption, let it be granted that I, spoilt child of fortune, happened to have £50 loose at my bankers.

The veriest dolt that ever blundered across the pons asinorum can divine the nature of the reply I returned to my Montreal friend's kind invitation, and can picture to himself the glee with which on July 1st I embarked on the New York and Washington Air Line on my way to the country of the Canucks. The humors (?) of American travel have been so often described by abler pens than mine, that I shall not attempt to reproduce their details—more especially as a residence in the States of some years has stripped the gloss of romance off the main features of "voyaging," viz., candy-eating and expectoration. I will therefore draw a veil—a very necessary precaution during summer travelling in America—over the incidents of the journey northwards; and, merely raising it from time to time, to decline "dime" novels, veteran oysters, and cheap sucrerie, will beg the reader to rejoin me in the hospitable mansion of a Canadian friend, washed, clothed, and in my right mind. Here my host and I discuss cigars and claret punch, salmon and sherry cobblers; and the upshot of our deliberations is the purchase by myself of a ticket on one of the steamers that run daily between Montreal and Quebec. On the following morning I accordingly embark thereon, and have the luck to fall in with the usual agrémens of American travel—viz., several pretty young ladies, without incumbrances; by which term I mean parents, bien entendu, not children. I have the additional good fortune—for it is, alas! daily becoming rarer, even on the Mississippi—to witness an explosion. Another steamer has presumed to race with the City of, and our boiler has entered its protest against such audacity. Canadians being a slower-going race than their neighbors of the U.S., none of our party are killed or even injured, with the exception of a young English tourist recently imported—to judge from his toilet, regardless of expense—who leaps overboard promptly to shun the scalding water, and comes in in consequence for a disagreeable amount of cold. However, he is fished out, "not dead, but very wet," the ladies cease praying and the gentlemen swearing—or, by the way, was the reverse the case?—and we await in patience the arrival of a tow-boat. Whilst so doing I have leisure to moralize over the philosophy of the river habitués. When the explosion occurred, a young bride, quitting her husband's arm, rushed up to an old priest with whom I had been chatting, and exclaimed, "Priez, mon père, mais priez done pour nous—nous mourons tous!" The good padre evinced no inclination to comply with this request, and merely replied, "Courage, mon enfant! ça arrive tous les jours; il n'y a pas de dangers." Thus speaking, he would have 