at any of the public eating-houses, rigidly guarding myself from the
contamination of even a chance acquaintance. It was deemed as needless
to caution me against theatres or places of amusement, as to hint to
me that I should not commit a highway robbery or a murder; and so, in
sooth, I should myself have felt it. The patriarchal simplicity in which
I had lived for above a year had not been without its affect in subduing
exaggerated feeling, or controlling that passion for excitement so
common to youth. I felt a kind of dreamy, religious languor over me,
which I sincerely believed represented a pious and well-regulated
temperament. Perhaps in time it might have become such. Perhaps with
others, more happily constituted, the impression would have been
confirmed and fixed; but in my case it was a mere lacquer, that the
first rubbing in the world was sure to brush off.

I arrived safely at Albany, and having presented myself at the bank of
Gabriel Shultze, was desired to call the following morning, when all
the letters and papers of Gottfried Kroeller should be delivered to me. A
very cold invitation to supper was the only hospitality extended to
me. This I declined on pretext of weariness, and set out to explore the
town, to which my long residence in rural life imparted a high degree of
interest.

I don't know what it may now be--doubtless a great capital, like one of
the European cities; but at that time I speak of, Albany was a strange,
incongruous assemblage of stores and wooden houses, great buildings like
granaries, with whole streets of low sheds around them, where, open to
the passer-by, men worked at various trades, and people followed out
the various duties of domestic life in sight of the public: daughters
knitted and sewed; mothers cooked, and nursed their children; men ate,
and worked, and smoked, and sang, as if in all the privacy of closed
dwellings, while a thick current of population poured by, apparently too
much immersed in their own cares, or too much accustomed to the scene,
to give it more than passing notice.

It was curious how one bred and born in the great city of Paris, with
all its sights and sounds, and scenes of excitement and display,
could have been so rusticated by time as to feel a lively interest in
surveying the motley aspect of this quaint town. There were, it is
true, features in the picture very unlike the figures in 'Old-World'
landscape. A group of 'red men,' seated around a fi