rafty thrift of Bryce Snailsfoot with the stern religious heroism
of Cameron; the blue-eyed, fair-haired German from the towered hills
which overlook the Rhine,--slow, heavy, and unpromising in his exterior,
yet of the same mould and mettle of the men who rallied for "fatherland"
at the Tyrtean call of Korner and beat back the chivalry of France from
the banks of the Katzback,--the countrymen of Richter, and Goethe, and
our own Follen. Here, too, are pedlers from Hamburg, and Bavaria, and
Poland, with their sharp Jewish faces, and black, keen eyes. At this
moment, beneath my window are two sturdy, sunbrowned Swiss maidens
grinding music for a livelihood, rehearsing in a strange Yankee land the
simple songs of their old mountain home, reminding me, by their foreign
garb and language, of

"Lauterbrunnen's peasant girl."

Poor wanderers, I cannot say that I love their music; but now, as the
notes die away, and, to use the words of Dr. Holmes, "silence comes like
a poultice to heal the wounded ear," I feel grateful for their
visitation. Away from crowded thoroughfares, from brick walls and dusty
avenues, at the sight of these poor peasants I have gone in thought to
the vale of Chamouny, and seen, with Coleridge, the morning star pausing
on the "bald, awful head of sovereign Blanc," and the sun rise and set
upon snowy-crested mountains, down in whose valleys the night still
lingers; and, following in the track of Byron and Rousseau, have watched
the lengthening shadows of the hills on the beautiful waters of the
Genevan lake. Blessings, then, upon these young wayfarers, for they
have "blessed me unawares." In an hour of sickness and lassitude they
have wrought for me the miracle of Loretto's Chapel, and, borne me away
from the scenes around me and the sense of personal suffering to that
wonderful land where Nature seems still uttering, from lake and valley,
and from mountains whose eternal snows lean on the hard, blue heaven,
the echoes of that mighty hymn of a new-created world, when "the morning
stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy."

But of all classes of foreigners the Irish are by far the most numerous.
Light-hearted, wrongheaded, impulsive, uncalculating, with an Oriental
love of hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water and of
that gem which the fable tells us rests at the bottom of the well, the
Celtic elements of their character do not readily accommoda