or so
praiseworthy.

The notion that every husbandman is to be a freeholder, is as Utopian in
practice, as it would be to expect that all men were to be on the same
level in fortune, condition, education and habits. As such a state of
things as the last never yet did exist, it was probably never designed
by divine wisdom that it should exist. The whole structure of society
must be changed, even in this country, ere it could exist among
ourselves, and the change would not have been made a month before the
utter impracticability of such a social fusion would make itself felt by
all.

We have elsewhere imputed much of the anti-rent feeling to provincial
education and habits. This term has given the deepest offence to those
who were most obnoxious to the charge. Nevertheless, our opinion is
unchanged. We know that the distance between the cataract of Niagara and
the Massachusetts line is a large hundred leagues, and that it is as
great between Sandy Hook and the 45th parallel of latitude. Many
excellent things, moral and physical, are to be found within these
limits, beyond a question; but we happen to know by an experience that
has extended to other quarters of the world, for a term now exceeding
forty years, that more are to be found beyond them. If "honourable
gentlemen" at Albany fancy the reverse, they must still permit us to
believe they are too much under the influence of provincial notions.

THE REDSKINS.

CHAPTER I.

"Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said--Thou wert my daughter; and thy father
Was duke of Milan; and his only heir
A princess;--no worse issued."

_Tempest._

My uncle Ro and myself had been travelling together in the East, and had
been absent from home fully five years, when we reached Paris. For
eighteen months neither of us had seen a line from America, when we
drove through the barriers, on our way from Egypt, via Algiers,
Marseilles, and Lyons. Not once, in all that time, had we crossed our
own track, in a way to enable us to pick up a straggling letter; and all
our previous precautions to have the epistles meet us at different
bankers in Italy, Turkey, and Malta, were thrown away.

My uncle was an old traveller--I might almost say, an old resident--in
Europe; for he had passed no less than twenty years of his fifty-nine
off the American continent. A bachelor, with nothing to do but to take
care of a very ample estate, which was rapidly increa