so necessary to the comfort of life, that next to a fine wife they are most essential, and their acquisition an object of prime importance.  O Bingham, how blessed it would be to retire with a decent, clever bag of Rixes to a pleasant country town, and follow one’s own inclination without being shackled by the duties of a profession!”

To the same friend, whom he now addresses as “dear Squire,” he announces joyfully a wondrous piece of luck: 

“My expenses [to Albany] were all amply paid, and on my return I put my hand in my pocket and found one hundred and twenty dear delightfuls!  Is not that good luck?  And these dear delightfuls were, ’pon honor, all my own; yes, every dog of them!”

To which we may add from another source, that they were straightway transferred to his father, to whom they were dear delightfuls indeed, for he was really getting to the end of his tether.

The schoolmaster lived, it appears, on the easiest terms with his pupils, some of whom were older than himself.  He tells a story of falling in with one of them on his journey to school, who was mounted “on the ugliest horse I ever saw or heard of, except Sancho Panza’s pacer.”  The schoolmaster having two good horses, the pupil mounted one of them, strapped his bag to his own forlorn animal and drove him before, where his odd gait and frequent stumblings kept them amused.  At length, arriving at a deep and rapid river,

“this satire on the animal creation, as if to revenge herself on us for our sarcasms, plunged into the river, then very high by the freshet, and was wafted down the current like a bag of oats!  I could hardly sit on my horse for laughter.  I am apt to laugh at the vexations of my friends.  The fellow, who was of my own age, and my room-mate, half checked the current by oaths as big as lobsters, and the old Rosinante, who was all the while much at her ease, floated up among the willows far below on the opposite side of the river.”

At the same time he was an innocent young man.  If he had any wild oats in his composition, they were not sown in the days of his youth.  Expecting to pass his life as a country lawyer, having scarcely a premonition of his coming renown, we find him enjoying the simple country sports and indulging in the simple village ambitions.  He tried once for the captaincy of a company of militia, and was not elected; he canvassed a whole regiment to get his brother the post of adjutant, and failed.  At one time he came near abandoning the law, as too high and perilous for him, and settling down as schoolmaster and clerk of a court.  The assurance of a certain six hundred dollars a year, a house, and a piece of land, with the prospect of the clerkship by and by, was so alluring to him that it required all the influence of his family and friends to make him reject the offer.  Even then, in the flush and vigor of his youth, he was led.  So was it always.  He was never a leader, but always a follower.  Nature made him very large, but so stinted him in propelling force, that it is doubtful if he had ever emerged from obscurity if his friends had not urged him on.  His modesty in these innocent days is most touching to witness.  After a long internal conflict, he resolved, in his twentieth year, to “make one more trial” at mastering the law.