Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/383

Rh could maintain eight or ten millions of inhabitants beyond its present number.

All within doors is good, peaceful, and charming. A new guest, a friend of the family, has enlivened the social circle for the last few days. He is a Mr. D., from New England, but not at all a Yankee in disposition; on the contrary, he seems quite refined, very dapper, and highly perfumed, as if he had just stepped out of Madame de Sevigné's drawing-room circle into ours. He interests himself principally in social life and literature, in his friends and acquaintance, in agreeable objects and the pleasures of the hour; he is an amateur of handsome ladies, bon-mots, and bonne chère; is acquainted with the minutest niceties of Shakespeare; and is able to see great things in a little billet of four lines written by a lady's hand; for the rest, he is an honourable man, a devoted friend, a good companion, and one who talks well on every-day subjects.

He has given a new turn to our observations of the great West, regarding it from a mythological point of view, and as a new Jothunhem with Thor and Loke, the Hrimthursar and Giants. And the comparisons which he makes between the Scandinavian Jothunhem, its heroes and their adventures, which he reads from a translation of Sturleson's Edda, by the poet Longfellow, and that of the New World's now existing Jothunhem and its giants, furnish occasion for many amusing narratives and relations. Thus the extreme West becomes the new Utgard, full of monsters and witches; the mammoth grotto is the glove of Skirnin; the divine hog, Schrimmer, lives here a thousandfold, and the achievements of Thor and Starkodder are renewed in those of the giants of the giant-river and the states of the Mississippi. Of these we have a great number of anecdotes, which season our meals, and our host, Mr. S., (whom Mr. D. and I call “the good Jothun,” and who