If he had any doubts of the sentiments of his countrymen toward him, his reception in New York dissipated them.  America greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love and admiration.  The public banquet in New York, that was long remembered for its brilliancy, was followed by the tender of the same tribute in other cities,—­an honor which his unconquerable shrinking from this kind of publicity compelled him to decline.  The “Dutch Herodotus, Diedrich Knickerbocker,” to use the phrase of a toast, having come out of one such encounter with fair credit, did not care to tempt Providence further.  The thought of making a dinner-table speech threw him into a sort of whimsical panic,—­a noble infirmity, which characterized also Hawthorne and Thackeray.

The enthusiasm manifested for the homesick author was equaled by his own for the land and the people he supremely loved.  Nor was his surprise at the progress made during seventeen years less than his delight in it.  His native place had become a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants; the accumulation of wealth and the activity of trade astonished him, and the literary stir was scarcely less unexpected.  The steamboat had come to be used, so that he seemed to be transported from place to place by magic; and on a near view the politics of America seemed not less interesting than those of Europe.  The nullification battle was set; the currency conflict still raged; it was a time of inflation and land speculation; the West, every day more explored and opened, was the land of promise for capital and energy.  Fortunes were made in a day by buying lots in “paper towns.”  Into some of these speculations Irving put his savings; the investments were as permanent as they were unremunerative.

Irving’s first desire, however, on his recovery from the state of astonishment into which these changes plunged him, was to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the entire country and its development.  To this end he made an extended tour in the South and West, which passed beyond the bounds of frontier settlement.  The fruit of his excursion into the Pawnee country, on the waters of the Arkansas, a region untraversed by white men, except solitary trappers, was “A Tour on the Prairies,” a sort of romance of reality, which remains to-day as good a description as we have of hunting adventure on the plains.  It led also to the composition of other books on the West, which were more or less mere pieces of book-making for the market.

Our author was far from idle.  Indeed, he could not afford to be.  Although he had received considerable sums from his books, and perhaps enough for his own simple wants, the responsibility of the support of his two brothers, Peter and Ebenezer, and several nieces, devolved upon him.  And, besides, he had a longing to make himself a home, where he could pursue his calling undisturbed, and indulge the sweets of domestic and rural life, which of all things lay nearest his