There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary manner.  Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various modifications.  Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind which exercises it.  As the same patterns have very commonly been followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality.  We should find ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove that Anglo-Saxons can’t live here, but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons have maintained.  It may turn out the other way, as I have heard one of our literary celebrities argue,—­and though I took the other side, I liked his best,—­that the American is the Englishman reinforced.

—­Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?—­I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,—­as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry as that was for our boarding-house.  On the contrary, she turned a little pale,—­but smiled brightly and said,—­Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.—­She went for her bonnet.—­The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow.  Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a school-book in her hand.]

MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

This is the shortest way,—­she said, as we came to a corner.—­Then we won’t take it,—­said I.—­The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock’s row of English elms.  The gray squirrels were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial-ground.  He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a shrub growing on it.  The stone said this was the grave of a young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago and more.—­Oh, yes, died,—­with a small triangular mark in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man’s rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.