crosses in the most familiar objects.  There is scarcely a panelled door, twenty years old, in all America, that does not bear this evidence of the zeal, and, if you will, the superstition of those distant ages!  The form of the door is made by the exterior stile; a cross is then built within it, and the open spaces are filled with panels, as, in the case of the window, it is filled with the sash.  The exactitude of the form, the antiquity of the practice, its obvious connexion with the common feeling, and the inability to account for the usage in any other way, leave no doubt, in my mind, of its origin, though I do not remember to have ever met with such an account of it, in any author.  If this conjecture be true, we Protestants, while fastidiously, not to say foolishly, abstaining from the use of a symbol that prejudice has led us to think peculiarly unsuited to our faith, have been unconsciously living with it constantly before our eyes.  But the days of puritan folly and puritan vice (there is nothing more vicious than self-righteousness, and the want of charity it engenders) are numbered, and men are beginning to distinguish between the exaggerations of fanaticism and the meek toleration of pure Christianity.  I can safely say that the lowest, the most degraded, and the most vulgar wickedness, both as to tone and deed, and the most disordered imaginations, that it has ever been my evil fortune to witness, or to associate with, was met with at school, among the sons of those pious forefathers, who fancied they were not only saints themselves, but that they also were to be the progenitors of long lines of saints.  It is a melancholy truth, that a gentleman-like training does more for the suppression of those abominations than all the dogmas that the pilgrims have imported into the country.

We reached Senlis in time for dinner, and while the repast was getting ready, we strolled through the place, in order to revive the sensations with which we had visited it five years before.  But, alas! these are joys, which, like those of youth are not renewable at pleasure.  I could hardly persuade myself it was the same town.  The walls, that I had then fancied lined with the men-at-arms of the Charleses of France, and the English Henries and Edwards, had now lost all their peculiarities, appearing mean and common-place; and as to the gate, from which we had almost heard the trumpets of the heralds, and the haughty answer to a bold summons of surrender, we absolutely had difficulty in persuading ourselves that we had found it at all.  Half Europe had been roamed over since the time when, fresh from America, we made the former visit, predisposed to gaze with enthusiasm at every relic of a former age and a different state of society.