suddenly as she has risen, the way to Mexico would be open to the Southrons, who might then and there add so tremendously to the dominions of King Cotton as to make him even more powerful than ever he has been in the imagination of his votaries,—and they have ranked him only one step below the Devil. Spanish revivals are so much like certain other revivals, that they are apt to be followed by reaction, leaving the unduly excited subject in a worse condition than ever. European affairs, too, may demand Spain's attention, and require her to leave Mexico to take care of herself. Europe is full of causes of war, occasion for waging which must soon arise. The American war has tended to the promotion of peace in Europe, but that cannot be much longer maintained. Let war break out in Europe, and Spain would probably feel herself called upon to assume a principal part in it, and then the Southern Confederacy would be at liberty to spread slavery over the finest cotton country on earth, under the patronage of England, which hates slavery, but worships its results. The future of Mexico it lies in the power of the American Union to decide, and our armies are contending as much for Mexican freedom as they are for American nationality.

I am a soldier: but my tale, this time, is not of war.

The man of whom the Muse talked to the blind bard of old had grown wise in wayfaring. He had seen such men and cities as the sun shines on, and the great wonders of land and sea; and he had visited the farther countries, whose indwellers, having been once at home in the green fields and under the sky and roofs of the cheery earth, were now gone forth and forward into a dim and shadowed land, from which they found no backward path to these old haunts, and their old loves:—

GREEK HERE GREEK HERE Od. xi.

At the Charter-House I learned the story of the King of Ithaca, and read it for something better than a task; and since, though I have never seen so many cities as the much-wandering man, nor grown so wise, yet have heard and seen and remembered, for myself, words and things from crowded streets and fairs and shows and wave-washed quays and murmurous market-places in many lands; and for his GREEK HERE,—his people wrapt in cloud and vapor, whom "no glad sun finds with his beams,"—have been borne along a perilous path through thick mists, among the crashing ice of the Upper Atlantic, as well as sweltered upon a Southern sea, and have learned something of men and something of God.

I was in Newfoundland, a lieutenant of Royal Engineers, in Major Gore's time, and went about a good deal among the people, in surveying for Government. One of my old friends there was Skipper Benjie Westham, of Brigus, a shortish, stout, bald man, with a cheerful, honest face and a kind voice; and he, mending a caplin-seine one day, told me this story, which I will try to tell after him.

We were upon the high ground, beyond where the church stands now, and Prudence, the fisher-man's daughter, and Ralph Barrows, her husband, were with Skipper Benjie when he began; and I had an hour by the watch to spend. The neighborhood, all about, was still; the only men who were in sight were so far off