their younger sisters.

Farther east, too, there had, of course, been growth, but it was slower.
In 1827 Hartford had but 6,900 inhabitants; New Haven, 7,100; Newark, N.
J., 6,500, and New Brunswick about the same. The State of New York paid
out, between 1815 and 1825, nearly $90,000 for the destruction of
wolves, showing that its rural population had attained little density.
The entire country had vastly improved in all the elements of
civilization. A national literature had sprung up, crowding out the
reprints of foreign works which had previously ruled the market. Bryant,
Cooper, Dana, Drake, Halleck, and Irving were now re-enforced by writers
like Bancroft, Emerson, Hawthorne, Holmes, Longfellow, Poe, Prescott,
and Whittier. Educational institutions were multiplied and their methods
bettered, The number of newspapers had become enormous. Several
religious journals were established previous to 1830, among them the New
York Observer, which dates from 1820, and the Christian Register, from
1821. Steam printing had been introduced in 1823. The year 1825 saw the
first Sunday paper; it was the New York Sunday Courier. Greeley began
his New York Tribune only in 1841.

Fresh news had begun to be prized, as shown by the competition between
the two great New York sheets, the Journal of Commerce and the Morning
Enquirer, each of which, in 1827, established for this purpose swift
schooner lines and pony expresses. The Journal oj Commerce in 1833 put
on a horse express between Philadelphia and New York, with relays of
horses, enabling it to publish congressional news a day earlier than any
of its New York contemporaries. Other papers soon imitated this example,
whereupon the Journal extended its relays to Washington. Mails came to
be more numerous and prompt. More letters were written, and, from 1839,
letters were sent in envelopes. Postage-stamps were not used till 1847.
Most of the principal cities in the country, including Rochester and
Cincinnati, published dailies before 1830. Baltimore and Louisville had
each a public school in 1829. This year witnessed in Boston the
beginning work of the first blind asylum in the country. In Hartford
instruction had already been given to the deaf and dumb since 1817.

[Illustration: Express rider changing horses.]
A Pony Express.

By the fourth decade of the century the American character had assumed a
good deal of definiteness and greatly interested foreign travellers.
There was,