t underlie the Kaatskills--your
welcome you value none the less that you see volumes of old numbers in
the book-case, and the number of the month already laid on the table in
the hall; and you think of the hot noons they will help to wile away,
after the morning's sport, and before the evening drive. In homes like
these, I have usually found _Blackwood_ a favourite with the fairer
portion of American society. You shall find it lurking amongst worsteds
and flower-patterns, and very often preferred to the pretty work that
tasks a far prettier eye: or, stepping into the verandah to see a
steamer go by, you shall pick it up from a tabouret, where it lies with
a pearl-knife in its uncut pages, and the breezes playing with its
parted leaves--evidently the immediate relic of some startled and
disappearing fair one. Going south or west, you meet it on railways, and
in steamers. It is usually the companion of such travellers as are
accustomed to decline the repeated attempts of fellow-passengers to
engage them in conversation or political debate, and seems to afford
peculiar refreshment to those who have effected a retreat from the
philanthropic assaults of travelling temperance agents, and of other
affectionate inquirers as to the condition of their bodies and souls.
When you reach the Carolinas, where, in default of taverns, you may
always venture to make yourself the guest of a planter, and will be
thanked for your visit--if you would bait at noon, and turn from the
road to a hospitable-looking mansion among the pines, I'll wager that a
basking Negro, without a shirt, will start up, and take charge of your
horse, while the master of a thousand slaves gives you one open hand,
but holds in the other the ubiquitous pages, which he has been reading
in the cool of his piazza. I say then, had the Shepherd been blest with
such universal experiences as mine, with what a flow of metaphor and
illustrative wit would he have enlarged upon the proposition--Maga is an
ubiquity. Beginning with a broadside at the literary corsairs of New
York, I can fancy him bursting with indignant virtue into luxurious
comparisons between the rape of the Sabines, and that of the inimitable
Noctes--and then between Maga bodily, and her who in the field of Enna
gathering flowers, experienced a fate most gloomy; and so on till his
exuberant good-humour expands at last into an apology, as he expatiates
on the tempting character of the booty, and declares, that l