"I am a cosmopolite. I could never see why I should think the better or the worse of a place, for my happening to draw my first breath there. I am of the company of the truth-seekers. A fact, though it were an ugly one, is of more worth to me than a thousand pleasantest fancies. But a fact is not the less one for being agreeable: the extension of a fine race is an agreeable fact to a naturalist. "The earlier emigrations to New England were emphatically aristocratic emigrations. Their aim was to found precisely what you claim to show here. Their aim was to found a community of gentlemen,--a community, that is to say, religious, just, generous, courteous. They proposed equality, but equality on a high plane. Their work has been hindered by its very success. The claimants for adoption have crowded in faster than full provision could be made for them. They cannot instantly be assimilated. Their voices sometimes rise above those of the true children. But New England is there, strong and tranquil. Her heart has room for all that ask a place in it. She welcomes these orphans to it motherly, and will make them all thoroughly her own with time. "Come to us, Westlake. I have planned out a tour for you." And Dr. Borrow, tracing the route he had marked out for his friend, sketched the country it led through, comparing what came before us with reminiscences of other travels. No contrasts here of misery with splendor rebuke a thoughtless admiration. Nowhere the picturesqueness of ruin and squalor; everywhere the lovely, living beauty of healthfulness, dignity, and order. With what a swell of feeling does the distant New-Englander listen to accounts of family life in the old home! How dear every detail, making that real again which had come to be like a sweet, shadowy dream! Dr. Borrow led us through the beautiful street of a New-England village, under the Gothic arches of its religious elms. He did not fear to throw open for us the willing door. He showed us the simple, heartsome interior, with its orderly ease, its unambitious hospitality, its refined enjoyments. Other travellers have drawn for us other pictures. They have told us of a pomp and state which have reconciled us to our rudeness. But Dr. Borrow sketched the New-England home, such as we know it by tradition, such as it still exists among those who are content to live as their fathers lived before them. "Hold on, Borrow!" cried Westlake; "you don't suppose you are going to persuade me that there is neither poverty nor overwork in New England! I have heard, and I think I have seen, that there are hard lives lived there,--harder than those of our slaves, of my slaves, for example;--and that not by foreigners, who, you may say, are not up to the mark yet, but by Americans born and bred."