faction in receiving and imparting all the details concerning
them. Our passenger-friend opened his budget with as much complacence as
ever did Mr. Gladstone or Disraeli, and with a confident air of knowing
that he was going not only to enjoy a piece of good-fortune himself, but
to administer a great gratification to us. Our "casualty" turned out to be
the affair of a Catholic priest, of which our informer spoke only in dark
hints and with significant shoulder-shrugs and eyebrow-elevations, because
it was "not exactly the thing to get out, you know"; but if it wasn't to
get out, why did he let it out? and so from my dark corner I watched him
as a cat does a mouse, and the lamp-light shone full upon him, and I
understood every word and shrug, and I am going to tell it all to the
world. I translated that the holy father had been "skylarking" in a boat,
and in gay society had forgotten his vows of frugality and abstinence and
general mortification of the flesh, and had become, not very drunk, but
drunk enough to be dangerous, when he came ashore and took a horse in his
hands, and so upset his carriage, and gashed his temporal artery, and came
to grief, which is such a casualty as does not happen every day, and I
don't blame people for making the most of it. Then the moral was pointed,
and the tale adorned, and the impression deepened, solemnized, and struck
home by the fact that the very horse concerned in the "casualty" was to be
fastened behind our coach, and the whole population came out with lanterns
and umbrellas to tie him on,--all but one man, who was deaf, and stood on
the piazza, anxious and eager to know everything that had been and was
still occurring, and yet sorry to give trouble, and so compromising the
matter and making it worse, as compromises generally do, by questioning
everybody with a deprecating, fawning air.

Item. We shall all, if we live long enough, be deaf, but we need not be
meek about it. I for one am determined to walk up to people and demand
what they are saying at the point of the bayonet. Deafness, if it must be
so, but independence at any rate.

And when the fulness of time is come, we alight at Fort-William-Henry
Hotel, and all night long through the sentient woods I hear the booming of
Johnson's cannon, the rattle of Dieskau's guns, and that wild war-whoop,
more terrible than all. Again old Monro watches from his fortress-walls
the steadily approaching foe, and looks in vain for help, save