If I were obliged to designate in one word the profession and calling of Colonel Prowley of Foxden, I should say he was a Correspondent.  Of course I do not mean a regular newspaper-correspondent, paid to concoct letters from Paris in the office of the “Foxden Regulator”; nor yet the amateur ditto, who is never tired of making family-tours to the White Mountains.  But rather was he a gentleman, with an immense epistolary acquaintance all over the country, whose main business in life consisted in writing letters to all sorts of persons in a great variety of places.  And this he did as his particular contribution towards the solution of this question:  What in the world—­or rather, what in the United States—­is a man to do who accumulates sufficient property to relieve him from the necessities of active business?  The answers offered to this inquiry of the Democratic Sphinx are, as we all know, various enough.  Some men, of ready assurance and fluent speech, go into politics; some doze in libraries; some get up trotting-matches and yacht-races; while others dodge the difficulty altogether by going to disport themselves among the arts and letters of a foreign land.  Colonel Prowley, with considerable originality, was moved to find employment in letter-writing, pursuing it with the same daily relish which many people find for gossip or small-talk.  And this is the way in which I came to be favored with the good gentleman’s communications.  About three years ago a friend in England procured for me a book that I had long coveted,—­Morton’s “New English Canaan,” printed at Amsterdam in the year 1637.  This little volume, after the novelty of a fresh perusal was past, I happened to lend to a young gentleman of our boarding-house, who prepared short notices of books for one of the evening papers.  He, it would appear, thought that some account of my acquisition might supply the matter for his diurnal paragraph.  At all events, I received, some days after, a letter dated from Foxden, and bearing the signature of Elijah Prowley.  It was couched in the old-fashioned style of compliment and excuses for the liberty taken,—­which liberty consisted in requesting to have a fac-simile made of a certain page of a work that he had traced through a newspaper-article to my possession.  The object, he said, was to supply the deficiency in a copy of the “Canaan” that had a place in his own library.  Of course the request was complied with, and the correspondence begun.

The Colonel, to do him justice, wrote very entertaining letters, despite the somewhat antiquated phraseology in which his sentiments were clothed.  Indeed, I soon found in his epistles all the variety of the grab-bag at a country-fair, in which the purchaser of the right of grab fumbles with pleasing uncertainty as to whether he is to draw forth a hymn-book or a shaving-brush, a packet of note-paper or a box of patent polish for stoves.  At one time he would communicate the particulars of some antiquarian discovery at Foxden; at another he would copy for me the weekly bill of the town mortality, or journalize the parish quarrels about the repairs of the stove-funnel in Mr. Clifton’s church.