who were present for the profit they were making out of me.”  He was agreeably surprised by the merchant princes of New York.  “There is absolutely no vulgarity about them.  They are immensely rich, but simple, and rather elaborately ‘religious’ in the forms of their lives.  A very long grace is always said before dinner.  In this and many ways they are totally unlike what I expected.”  Again, after a description of Cornell’s University, he says, “There is Mr. Cornell, who has made all this, living in a little poky house in a street with a couple of maids, his wife and daughters dressed in the homeliest manner.  His name will be remembered for centuries as having spent his wealth in the very best institutions on which a country’s prosperity depends.  Our people spend their fortunes in buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own family.  I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell’s or Lord Overstone’s.”  “There is no such thing,” he says elsewhere, “as founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put them to.”

With sincerely religious people, especially if they were Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy.  Patronage of religion he detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for other people.  An American philosopher called, and told him that, having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superstitions had better be kept up, Popery for choice.  “This,” remarks Froude, “is what I call want of faith.  If you can believe that what you are convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with, you are to all practical purposes an atheist.”

While he was at Boston Froude saw a great fire, and his description of it is hardly inferior to the best things in his best books.  He was staying with George Peabody, equally well known in England and the United States as a philanthropist, “one of the sweetest and gentlest of beings.”  “As we were sitting after dinner, the children said there was a fire somewhere.  They heard the alarm bell, and saw a red light in the sky.  Presently we saw flames.  Mr. Peabody was uneasy, and I walked out with him to see.  Between the house here and the town lies the Common or City Park.  As we crossed this, the signs became more ominous.  We made our way into the principal street through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames.  The streets were full of steam fire-engines, all roaring and playing, but the houses were so high and large, and the volumes of fire so prodigious, that their water-jets looked like so many squirts.  As we stood, we saw the fire grow.  Block caught after block.  I myself saw one magnificent store catch at the lower windows.  In a few seconds the flame