“Here Loolowcan presented me the three birds, plucked featherless as Plato’s man.  The two roasters we planted carefully on spits before a sultry spot of the fire.  From a horizontal stick, supported on forked stakes, we suspended by a twig over each roaster an automatic baster, an inverted cone of pork, ordained to yield its spicy juices to the wooing flame, and drip bedewing on each bosom beneath.  The roasters ripened deliberately, while keen and quick fire told upon the frier, the first course of our feast.  Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea, blessing Confucius for that restorative weed, as I had blessed Moses for his abstinence from porkers.

“Need I say that the grouse were admirable, that everything was delicious, and the Confucian weed first chop?  Even a scouse of mouldy biscuit met the approval of Loolowcan.  Feasts cooked under the greenwood tree, and eaten by their cooks after a triumphant day of progress, are sweeter than the conventional banquets of languid Christendom.”

“Life in the Open Air”—­containing sketches of travel among the mountains and lakes of Maine, as well as the story of “Love and Skates,” which has been spoken of, “The March of the Seventh Regiment,” “Washington as a Camp,” an essay descriptive of Church’s great picture, “The Heart of the Andes,” and two fragments, one of them the charming commencement of a story which promised to be one of his best and most enjoyable efforts in this direction—­is the concluding volume of Winthrop’s collected writings.  I speak of it in this place, because it is in some part a companion-book to the volumes we have been discussing.  It is as full of buoyant life, of fresh and noble thought, of graceful wit and humor, as those; in parts it contains the most finished of his literary work.  Few Americans who read it at the time will ever forget that stirring description of the march of the New-York Seventh; it is a piece of the history of our war which will live and be read as long as Americans read their history.  It moved my blood, in the reading, tonight, as it did in those days—­which seem already some centuries old, so do events crowd the retrospect—­when we were all reading it in the pages of the “Atlantic.”  In the unfinished story of “Brightly’s Orphan” there is a Jew boy from Chatham Street, an original of the first water, who, though scarce fairly introduced, will, I am sure, make a place for himself and for his author in the memories of all who relish humor of the best kind.

“Cecil Dreeme” and “Edwin Brothertoft” are quite other books than these we have spoken of.  Here Winthrop tried a different vein,—­two different veins, perhaps.  Both are stories of suffering and crime, stories of the world and society.  In one it is a woman, in the other a man, who is wronged.  One deals with New York city-life of the very present day; the other is a story of the Revolutionary War, and of Tories and Patriots.  The popular verdict has declared him successful, even here.  “Cecil Dreeme” has run through no less than fifteen editions.