I was well pleased to find that the little notes of acknowledgment which I despatched after the receipt of these leviathans seemed to be considered a sufficient representation of capital to justify the enormous rate of epistolary interest which the Colonel bestowed.  I liked the style of my correspondent.  It did me good to meet with the strong old expressions of our ancestors that were turning up in unexpected places.  If the dear old phrases were sometimes better or worse than the fact they expressed, they must have improved what was good, and gibbeted more effectually what to the times seemed evil.  Who would now think of designating a parcel of serious savages “the praying Indians of Natick”?  And yet there is a sound and a power about the words that would go far to convert the skeptical aborigines in their own despite.  Why, there was something rich and nervous in the talk of the very lawmakers.  “The accursed sect of the Quakers,”—­what a fine spirit such an accusative case gives to the dry formula of a legal enactment! the beat of the drum by which the edict was proclaimed in the streets of Boston seems only an appropriate accompaniment to so stirring a denunciation.  Then to invite a brother to “exercise prophecy,”—­as Winthrop used to call the business of preaching,—­there is really something soul-invigorating in the very sound.  No wonder the people could stand a good two-hours’ discourse under so satisfactory a title!

I suppose, then, that much of my original relish for the communications of my Foxden correspondent came from his mastery over the antique glossary, and perhaps the rather ancient style of thought that fitted well the method of conveyance.  Indeed, a good course of Bishop Copleston’s “magic-lanthorn school” made me peculiarly susceptible to the refreshment of changing the gorgeous haze of modern philosophers for the sharpness and vitality with which old-fashioned people clothe such ideas as are vouchsafed to them.

I soon found that my friend had that passion for what may be called petty antiquarian research which is so puzzling to those who escape its contagion.  Also that a pride of family, that lingers persistently in some parts of New England, seemed to concentrate itself and envelop him as in a cloud.  He had attained the age of sixty a bachelor,—­perhaps from finding no person in Foxden of sufficiently clear lineage to be united with the Squire’s family,—­or perhaps because he had a sister, five years older than himself, who fulfilled the duties of companion and housekeeper.

How strange a sensation it is to feel a real friendship and familiarity with one we have never seen!  Yet if people are drawn together by those mysterious affinities which, like the daughters of the horse-leech, are ever crying, “Give, give,” a few bits of paper bridge over space well enough, and enable us to recognize abroad the scattered fragments that complete ourselves.