I fancy, my
dear, and what suits them is rather too tame for you. But what do you
propose to do with yourself now that you are beginning to live?"

"Now you are laughing at me, Uncle, and you will laugh more when I
tell you that I mean to study and to make Kate study with me."

"Poor Kate!--if you should fancy swimming, shooting, or any other
unheard-of pursuit, Kate would be obliged to swim and shoot with
you. But I will not laugh any more. Study, if you will, Alice; you
will learn fast enough, and, in this age of fast-advancing
civilization, when the chances of eligible matrimony for young ladies
in your station are yearly becoming less and less,--oh, you need not
put up your lip and peep into my bachelor's shaving-glass!--let me
tell you that a literary taste is a recourse not to be despised. Of
course you will study now to astonish me, or to surprise your young
friends, or for some other equally wise reason; but the time may come
when literature will be its own exceeding great reward."

"Uncle, answer me one thing,--are you as happy here in your quiet
study as you were in your exciting life among the Indians? Do you not
tire of this everyday sameness?"

"Close questioning, Alice, but I will answer you truly. Other things
being equal, I confess to you that the Indian life was the more
monotonous of the two. I look back now on my twenty years of savage
life and see nothing to vary its dreary sameness; the dangers were
always alike, the excitements always the same, and the rest was a dead
blank. The whole twenty years might be comprised in four words,--we
fought, we hunted, we eat, we slept. No, there is no monotony like
that,--no life so stupid as that of the savage, with his low wants and
his narrow hopes and fears. My life here among my books, which seems
to you so tame, is excitement itself compared with that. Your
stupidest party is full of life, intelligence, wit, when put beside an
Indian powwow. There is but one charm in that wandering life,
Alice,--the free intercourse with Nature; _that_ never tires; but
then you must remember that to enjoy it you must be cultivated up to
it. There needs all the teaching of civilization, nay, the education
of life, to enjoy Nature truly. These quiet hills, these beech
forests, are more to me now than Niagara was at eighteen; and Niagara
itself, which raises the poet above the earth, falls tame on the mind
of the savage. Believe one who knows,--the man of civilization who