Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/120

 He encountered by chance in Holland a young American with whom he fell for a time into a tacit travellers' partnership. They were men of different enough temper, but each in his way so true to his type that each might seem to have something of value to contribute to the association. Newman's comrade, whose name was Babcock, was a young Unitarian minister; a small, spare, neatly-attired man, with a strikingly candid countenance. He was a native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in another suburb of the New England capital. His digestion was weak and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy—a regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found these delicacies fail to flourish under the table d'hôte system. In Paris he had purchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itself an American Agency and at which the New York illustrated papers were also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him and shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position of having his hominy prepared for him and served on odd occasions at the hotels he successively visited. Newman had once spent a morning, in the course of business, at Mr. Babcock's birthplace, and, for reasons too recondite to unfold, the memory of his visit always pressed the spring of mirth. To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so long as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as "Dorchester." Fellow-aliens cling 90