hearts of these simple villagers with his tones as
he could move the hearts of thousands more learned than they with his
marvellous pathos; and this vagabond was called Oliver Goldsmith." I
have no words to say the ecstasy this thought gave me. Many a proud
traveller doubtless swept past the poor wayfarer as he went, dusty
and footsore, and who was, nevertheless, journeying onward to a great
immortality; to be a name remembered with blessings by generations when
the haughty man that scorned him was forgotten forever. "And so now,"
thought I, "some splendid Russian or some Saxon Croesus will crash by
and not be conscious that the thin and weary-looking youth, with the
girl's bundle on his stick and the red umbrella under his arm, that this
is Potts! Ay, sir, you fancy that to be threadbare and footsore is to
be vulgar-minded and ignoble, and you never so much as suspect that the
heart inside that poor plaid waistcoat is throbbing with ambitions high
as a Kaiser's, and that the brain within that battered Jim Crow is the
realm of thoughts profound as Bacon's, and high-soaring as Milton's."

If I make my reader a sharer in these musings of mine, it is because
they occupied me for some miles of the way. Vaterchen was not talkative,
and loved to smoke on uninterruptedly. I fancy that, in his way, he was
as great a dreamer as myself. Catinka would have talked incessantly if
any one had listened, or could understand her. As it was, she recited
legends and sang songs for herself, as happy as ever a blackbird was to
listen to his own melody; and though I paid no especial attention to her
music, still the sounds floated through all my thoughts, bathing them
with a soothing flood; just as the air we breathe is often loaded with
a sweet and perfumed breath ere we know it. On the whole, we journeyed
along very pleasantly; and what between the fresh morning air, the brisk
exercise, and the novelty of the situation, I felt in a train of spirits
that made me delighted with everything. "This, after all," thought I,
"is more like the original plan I sketched out for myself. This is the
true mode to see life and the world. The student of nature never begins
his studies with the more complicated organizations; he sets out with
what is simplest in structure, and least intricate in function; he
begins with the extreme link of the chain; so, too, I start with the
investigation of those whose lives of petty cares and small ambitions
must render