tion towards the solution
of this question: What in the world--or rather, what in the United
States--is a man to do who accumulates sufficient property to relieve
him from the necessities of active business? The answers offered to this
inquiry of the Democratic Sphinx are, as we all know, various enough.
Some men, of ready assurance and fluent speech, go into politics; some
doze in libraries; some get up trotting-matches and yacht-races; while
others dodge the difficulty altogether by going to disport themselves
among the arts and letters of a foreign land. Colonel Prowley,
with considerable originality, was moved to find employment in
_letter-writing_, pursuing it with the same daily relish which many
people find for gossip or small-talk. And this is the way in which I
came to be favored with the good gentleman's communications. About three
years ago a friend in England procured for me a book that I had long
coveted,--Morton's "New English Canaan," printed at Amsterdam in the
year 1637. This little volume, after the novelty of a fresh perusal was
past, I happened to lend to a young gentleman of our boarding-house, who
prepared short notices of books for one of the evening papers. He, it
would appear, thought that some account of my acquisition might supply
the matter for his diurnal paragraph. At all events, I received, some
days after, a letter dated from Foxden, and bearing the signature of
Elijah Prowley. It was couched in the old-fashioned style of compliment
and excuses for the liberty taken,--which liberty consisted in
requesting to have a fac-simile made of a certain page of a work that he
had traced through a newspaper-article to my possession. The object, he
said, was to supply the deficiency in a copy of the "Canaan" that had a
place in his own library. Of course the request was complied with, and
the correspondence begun.

The Colonel, to do him justice, wrote very entertaining letters, despite
the somewhat antiquated phraseology in which his sentiments were
clothed. Indeed, I soon found in his epistles all the variety of the
_grab-bag_ at a country-fair, in which the purchaser of the right of
_grab_ fumbles with pleasing uncertainty as to whether he is to draw
forth a hymn-book or a shaving-brush, a packet of note-paper or a box
of patent polish for stoves. At one time he would communicate the
particulars of some antiquarian discovery at Foxden; at another he would
copy for me the weekly bill of the town mo