le who
ought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and
the mountains.

The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side
not, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer
resort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of
it as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for
that place. By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time,
but I saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew
away all the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting,
and I long meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that
settled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now
throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come in
anywhere. I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next
morning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep
me against the undertow. In this rite I had the company of a young
New-Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the
light, hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the
city, and which has always attracted me. He told me much about his life,
and how he lived, and what it cost him to live. He had a large room at a
fashionable boardinghouse, and he paid fourteen dollars a week. In
Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and paid three and a half,
and I thought it a good deal. But those were the days before the war,
when America was the cheapest country in the world, and the West was
incredibly inexpensive.

After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety, I
went back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home. I
noted that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature
which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to myself
that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and
impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if
the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should
scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I
was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found it
seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the
limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.

IV.

I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
invi