, owing to the competition in railway
rates, it would only cost me six shillings ($1.50) more, _plus_ $2.50
(ten shillings) from New York to Philadelphia. So we departed. In
Detroit I called on my cousin, Benjamin Stimson (the S. of "Two Years
before the Mast"), and found him a prominent citizen. So, skirting along
southern Canada, we got to Niagara, and thence to Albany and down the
Hudson to New York, and so on to Philadelphia.

It seems to me now that at this time all trace of my former life and self
had vanished. I seemed to be only prompt to the saddle, canoe-paddle,
revolver, steamboat, and railroad. My wife said that after this and
other periods of Western travel I was always for three weeks as wild as
an Indian, and so I most truly and unaffectedly was. I did not _act_ in
a foolish or disorderly manner at all, but Tennessee and Elk River were
in me. Robert Hunt and Sam Fox and many more had expressed their
amazement at the amount of extremely familiar and congenial nature which
they had found in me, and they were quite right. Sam and Goshorn
declared that I was the only Northern man whom they had ever known who
ever learned to paddle a dug-out _correctly_; but as I was obliged to do
this sometimes for fifteen hours a day _nolens volens_, it is not
remarkable that I became an expert.

As regards the real unaffected feeling of wildness born to savage nature,
life, and association, it is absolutely as different from all civilised
feeling whatever as bird from fish; and it very rarely happens that an
educated man ever knows what it is. What there is of it in me which
Indians recognise is, I believe, entirely due to hereditary endowment.

"Zum Wald, zum Wald, steht mir mein Sinn.
So einzig, ach! so einzig hin.
Dort lebt man freundlich, lebt man froh,
Und nirgends, nirgends lebt man so."

It does not come from reading or culture--it comes of itself by nature,
or not at all; nor has it over-much to do with thought. Only in
something like superstition can it find expression, but that must be
childlike and sweet and sincere, and without the giggling with which such
subjects are invariably received by ladies in society.

I went with my wife and her mother and sister to pass some time at
Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, which we did very pleasantly at a country
inn. It is a very interesting town, where a peculiar German dialect is
generally spoken. There was a very respectable wealthy middle-a