s but the guinea's stamp"--but the stamp makes it currency, and it
is prized as it passes from hand to hand.

We have histories of States, we have histories of Tennessee--and they
are too solemnly stupid, it is said, for consultation. The consultations
are so rare that moth, mold, and mildew eat in and destroy them
unmolested. We are erecting at an immense expense a huge building at
Washington to hold the bound commonplaces of authors. How much better it
would be to have a commission of good fellows go through and consign to
the flames, or to the Young Men's Christian Association, or the
common-school libraries, all the unreadable books! What a bonfire we
should have of histories alone! The dry theological husks of learning
would give Satan material for his furnaces for some days.

To return to our mutton--and it is tender, appetizing, digestible
mutton. We have had histories of States and histories of Tennessee. They
are all full of solid facts. Yet if a man can be found who will make
affidavit that he has read any one of them with comfort to himself, we
shall doubt his sanity or his truthfulness. Here is a young man, and a
Member of Congress at that, who takes the same dry bones of fact, and
through the magic touch of his pen, lo! the old skeletons take on flesh,
drink in life, and through the roseate atmosphere of romance the records
are fascinating, and one closes the book with the feeling that pervades
our being at the close of a grand opera well rendered, when in the
silence the feelings yet vibrate like the waves of the sea when the
winds that have vexed them are still.

For the first time we waken to the fact that the earlier settlers of
Tennessee were not common people. As a well-painted landscape is more
prized than the real view, because of the art, so Mr. Phelan has given
us a local coloring that makes these hardy pioneers picturesque and
poetic. They make a charming background for such men as John Sevier,
Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Daniel Boone, Sam Houston, and other
noted characters who toiled and wrought, killed and got killed, while
the State was forming.

Mr. Phelan tells us in his charming way of the struggles and hardships,
the wanton wrongs and wars, until the forests were felled, the swamps
drained, fields opened, highways and railroads built, and the wilderness
changed in less than three generations to farms and villages, where the
busy hum of human life took the hearing from the cry of wil