"On the Simplon," says a German traveler, "amid the desert of snow and mist, in the vicinity of a refuge, a boy and his little sister were journeying up the mountain by the side of our carriage. Both had on their backs little baskets filled with wood, which they had gathered in the lower mountains, where there is still some vegetation. The boy gave us some specimens of rock crystal and other stone, for which we gave him some small coins. The delight with which he cast stolen glances at his money, as he passed by our carriage, made upon me an indelible impression. Never before had I seen such a heavenly expression of felicity. I could not but reflect that God had placed all sources and capabilities for happiness in the human heart; and that, with respect to happiness, it is perfectly indifferent how and where one dwells." "A man," says Cumberland, "who is gifted with worldly qualities and accommodations is armed with hands, as a ship with grappling-irons, ready to catch hold of, and make himself fast to everything he comes in contact with, and such a man, with all these properties of adhesion, has also the property, like the polypus, of a most miraculous and convenient indivisibility; cut off his hold--nay, cut him how you will, he is still a polypus, whole and entire. Men of this sort still work their way out of their obscurity like cockroaches out of the hold of a ship, and crawl into notice, nay, even into kings' palaces, as the frogs did into Pharaoh's; the happy faculty of noting times and seasons, and a lucky promptitude to avail themselves of moments with address and boldness, are alone such all-sufficient requisites, such marketable stores of worldly knowledge, that, although the minds of those who own them shall be, as to all the liberal sciences, a rasa tabula, yet knowing these things needful to be known, let their difficulties and distresses be what they may, though the storm of adversity threatens to overwhelm them, they are in a life-boat, buoyed up by corks, and cannot sink. These are the stray children turned loose upon the world, whom Fortune, in her charity, takes charge of, and for whose guidance in the by-ways and cross-roads of their pilgrimage she sets up fairy finger-posts, discoverable by those whose eyes are near the ground, but unperceived by such whose looks are raised above it." "Genial manners are good," says Emerson, "and power of accommodation to any circumstance; but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness,--whether it be to make baskets, or broad-swords, or canals, or statues, or songs."