I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we came opposite the head of this path on that morning.  I think I tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible.  At last I got out the question,——­Will you take the long path with me?—­ Certainly,—­said the schoolmistress,—­with much pleasure.——­Think,—­I said,—­before you answer; if you take the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more!——­The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow had struck her.  One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by,—­the one you may still see close by the Gingko-tree.——­Pray, sit down,—­I said.——­No, no,—­she answered, softly,—­I will walk the long path with you!

——­The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm, about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly,—­“Good morning, my dears!”

LITERARY NOTICES.

The Life of John Fitch, the Inventor of the Steamboat.  By THOMPSON WESTCOTT.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co.

What would not honest Sancho have given for a good biography of the man who invented sleep?  And will not the adventurous pleasure-tourist, who has been jarred, jammed, roasted, coddled, and suffocated in a railroad-car for a whole night, with two days to sandwich it, on being deposited in an airy stateroom for the last two hundred miles of his journey, think the man who invented the steamboat deserving of a “first-rate” life?  We well remember the time when nobody suspected that person, whoever he might be,—­and nobody much cared who he was,—­of any relationship to the individual whose memory Sancho blessed, so great was the churning in the palaces that then floated.  But in our present boats this unpalace-like operation has been so localized and mollified as to escape the notice of all but the greenest and most inquisitive passengers.  And now that we find the luxury of travelling by water actually superior to that of staying at home on land, we begin to feel a budding veneration for the man who first found out that steam could be substituted, with such marvellous advantage, for helpless dependence on the wind and miserable tugging at oars and setting-poles.  Who was he?  What circumstances conspired to shape his life and project it with so notable an aim?  How did he look, act, think, on all matters of human concernment?  Here comes a book, assuming in its title that one John Fitch, of whom his generation seems not to have thought enough to paint his portrait, was the inventor of the steamboat.  It professes to be “The Life of John Fitch”; but we are sorry to say it is rather a documentary argument to prove that he was “the inventor of the steamboat.”  As an argument, it is both needless and needlessly strong.  We already knew to a certainty that nobody could present a better claim to that honor than John Fitch.  True, the idea did not wait for