superior unto those people who _will_ read a letter
not meant for their eyes, or eavesdrop, or talk in any way about anybody
in a strain to which they would not have that person listen. Which
reminds me that in after years I got some praise in the newspapers for
the saying that a Yankee's idea of hell was a place where he must mind
his own business. It came about in this way. In a letter to Charles
Astor Bristed I made this remark, and illustrated it with a picture of
Virgil taking a Yankee attired in a chimney-pot hat and long night-gown
into the Inferno, over whose gate was written--

"Badate a vostri affari voi che intrate!"
(Mind your own business ye who enter here!)

One day soon after my arrival at Princeton, George Boker laid on the
table by me a paper or picture with its face down. I took no notice of
it. After a time he said, "Why don't you look at that picture?" I
replied simply, "If you wanted me to see it you would have turned it face
up." To which he remarked, "I put it there to see whether you would look
at it. I thought you would not." George was a "deep, sagacious file,"
who studied men like books.

My cousin who accompanied me had as a boy "run away and gone to sea" cod-
fishing on the Grand Banks. If I had gone with him it would have done me
good. Another cousin, Benjamin Stimson, did the same; he is the S. often
mentioned in Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast." Dana and Stimson were
friends, and ran away together. It was quite the rule for all my Yankee
cousins to do this, and they all benefited by it. In consequence of his
nautical experience Sam was soon at home among all sailors, and not
having my scruples as to knowing who was who or their affairs, soon knew
everything that was going on. Our captain was a handsome, dissipated,
and "loud" young man, with rather more sail than ballast, but
good-natured and obliging.

"Come day, go day," we passed the Gulf Stream and the Azores, and had
long sunny calms, when we could not sail, and lay about on deck, warm and
lazy, and saw the Azores, and so on, till we were near the Spanish coast.
One evening there clipped right under our lee a fisherman's smack. "I
say, Leland, hail that fellow!" said the captain. So I called in
Spanish, "Adonde venga usted?"

"Da Algesiras," was the reply, which thrilled out of my heart the thought
that, like the squire in Chaucer--

"He had been at the siege of Algecir."

So I called, in parting,