This question must be left for divines to determine; but sure am I that humble love and not proud reason, keeps the door of earthly happiness, as far as it is attainable. I am not going, like the admirable Crichton, to make an oration in praise of ignorance; but a very high degree of refinement certainly produces a quickness of discernment, a niggard approbation, and a fastidiousness of taste, that find a thousand repulsive and disgusting qualities mingled with those that excite our admiration, and would, (were we less critical,) produce affection. Alas! that the tree should so literally impart the knowledge of good and evil; much evil and little good. It is time to return from this excursion to the point from which I set out. The Princes and Cæsars of the Flats had as much to tell of the sagacity and attachments of the animals, as their mistress related of their own. Numberless anecdotes that delighted me in the last century, I would recount, but fear I should not find my audience of such easy belief as I was, nor so convinced of the integrity of my informers. One circumstance I must mention, because I well know it to be true. The colonel had a horse which he rode occasionally, but which oftener travelled with Mrs. Schuyler in an open carriage. At particular times, when bringing home hay or corn, they yoked Wolf, for so he was called, in a waggon; an indignity to which, for a while, he unwillingly submitted. At length, knowing resistance was vain, he had recourse to stratagem; and whenever he saw Tyte marshalling his cavalry for service, he swam over to the island, the umbrageous and tangled border of which I formerly mentioned; there he fed with fearless impunity till he saw the boat approach; whenever that happened, he plunged into the thicket, and led his followers such a chase, that they were glad to give up the pursuit. When he saw from his retreat that the work was over, and the fields bare, he very coolly returned. Being, by this time, rather old, and a favourite, the colonel allowed him to be indulged in his dislike to drudgery. The mind which is at ease, neither stung by remorse, nor goaded by ambition or other turbulent passions, nor worn with anxiety for the supply of daily wants, nor sunk into languor by stupid idleness, forms attachments and amusements, to which those exalted by culture would not stoop, and those crushed by want and care could not rise. Of this nature was the attachment to the tame animals, which the domestics appropriated to themselves, and to the little fanciful gardens where they raised herbs or plants of difficult culture, to sell and give to their friends. Each negro was indulged with his racoon, his great squirrel or muskrat, or perhaps his beaver, which he tamed and attached to himself, by daily feeding and caressing him in the farm-yard. One was sure about all such houses to find these animals, in whom their masters took the highest pleasure. All these small features of human nature must not be despised