r curiosity might perhaps have been gratified by making
acquaintance with my various (to them) strange peculiarities, I
doubt even the amusement they might have derived from them being
accepted as any equivalent for what would have seemed the strangest
of them all--my visit.

A similar blessed exemption from the curse of pauperism existed in
the New England village of Lenox, where I owned a small property,
and passed part of many years. Being asked by my friends there to
give a public reading, it became a question to what purpose the
proceeds of the entertainment could best be applied. I suggested
"the poor of the village," but, "We have no poor," was the reply,
and the sum produced by the reading was added to a fund which
established an excellent public library; for though Lenox had no
paupers, it had numerous intelligent readers among its population.

I have spoken of the semi-disapprobation with which my Quaker farmer
declined the wine and beer offered him at my 4th of July festival.
Some years after, when I found the men employed in mowing a meadow
of mine at Lenox with no refreshment but "water from the well," I
sent in much distress a considerable distance for a barrel of beer,
which seemed to me an indispensable adjunct to such labor under the
fervid heat of that summer sky; and was most seriously expostulated
with by my admirable friend, Mr. Charles Sedgwick, as introducing
among the laborers of Lenox a mischievous need and deleterious
habit, till then utterly unknown there, and setting a pernicious
example to both employers and employed throughout the whole
neighborhood. In short, my poor barrel of beer was an offense to the
manners and morals of the community I lived in, and my meadow was
mowed upon cold "water from the well"; of which indeed the water was
so delicious, that I often longed for it as King David did for that
which, after all, he would not drink, because his mighty men had
risked their lives in procuring it for him.[1]

[1] In writing thus, I do not mean to imply that the abuse of
intoxicating liquors, or the vice of drunkenness were then
unknown in America. The national habits of the present day would
suggest that such a change (albeit in the space of fifty years)
would surpass the rapidity of movement of even that most rapidly