He encountered by chance in Holland a young American, with whom, for a time, he formed a sort of traveler’s partnership.  They were men of a very different cast, but each, in his way, was so good a fellow that, for a few weeks at least, it seemed something of a pleasure to share the chances of the road.  Newman’s comrade, whose name was Babcock, was a young Unitarian minister, a small, spare neatly-attired man, with a strikingly candid physiognomy.  He was a native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in another suburb of the New England metropolis.  His digestion was weak and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy—­a regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies did not flourish under the table d’hote system.  In Paris he had purchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itself an American Agency, and at which the New York illustrated papers were also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him, and shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position of having his hominy prepared for him and served at anomalous hours, at the hotels he successively visited.  Newman had once spent a morning, in the course of business, at Mr. Babcock’s birthplace, and, for reasons too recondite to unfold, his visit there always assumed in his mind a jocular cast.  To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so long as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as “Dorchester.”  Fellow-travelers very soon grow intimate but it is highly improbable that at home these extremely dissimilar characters would have found any very convenient points of contact.  They were, indeed, as different as possible.  Newman, who never reflected on such matters, accepted the situation with great equanimity, but Babcock used to meditate over it privately; used often, indeed, to retire to his room early in the evening for the express purpose of considering it conscientiously and impartially.  He was not sure that it was a good thing for him to associate with our hero, whose way of taking life was so little his own.  Newman was an excellent, generous fellow; Mr. Babcock sometimes said to himself that he was a noble fellow, and, certainly, it was impossible not to like him.  But would it not be desirable to try to exert an influence upon him, to try to quicken his moral life and sharpen his sense of duty?  He liked everything, he accepted everything, he found amusement in everything; he was not discriminating, he had not a high tone.  The young man from Dorchester accused Newman of a fault which he considered very grave, and which he did his best to avoid:  what he would have called a want of “moral reaction.”  Poor Mr. Babcock was extremely fond of pictures and churches, and carried Mrs. Jameson’s works about in his trunk; he delighted in aesthetic analysis, and received peculiar