and found content every where. I had begun to taste the luxury of intellectual pleasures with a very keen relish. Winter, always severe, but this year armed with tenfold vigour, checked my researches among birds and plants, which constituted my summer delights; and poetry was all that remained to me. While I was, “in some diviner mood,” exulting in these scenes of inspiration, opened to me by the “humanizing muse,” the terrible decree went forth, that I was to read no more “idle books or plays.” This decree was merely the result of a momentary fit of sickness and dejection, and never meant to be seriously enforced. It produced, however, the effect of making me read so much divinity that I fancied myself got quite “beyond the flaming bounds of space and time;” and thought I could never relish light reading any more. In this solemn mood, my greatest relaxation was a visit now and then to aunt’s sister-in-law, now entirely bed-ridden, but still possessing great powers of conversation, which were called forth by the flattering attention of a child to one whom the world had forsaken. I loved, indeed, play, strictly such, thoughtless, childish play, and next to that, calm reflection and discussion. The world was too busy and too artful for me. I found myself most at home with those who had not entered, or those who had left it. My father’s illness was much aggravated by the conflict which begun to arise in his mind regarding his proposed removal to his lands, which were already surrounded by a new population, consisting of these fashionable emigrants from the gay world at New-York, whom I have been describing, and a set of fierce republicans, if any thing sneaking and drawling may be so called, whom litigious contention had banished from their native province, and who seemed let loose, like Samson’s foxes, to carry mischief and conflagration wherever they went. Among this motley crew there was no regular place of worship, nor any likely prospect that there should, for their religions had as many shades of difference as the leaves in autumn; and every man of substance who arrived, was preacher and magistrate to his own little colony. To hear their people talk, one would think time had run back to the days of the levellers. The settlers from New-York, however, struggled hard for superiority, but they were not equal in chicane to their adversaries, whose power lay in their cunning. It was particularly hard for people who acknowledged no superior, who had a thorough knowledge of law and scripture, ready to wrest to every selfish purpose, it was particularly hard, I say, for such all-sufficient personages to hold their lands from such people as my father and others, of “king George’s red coats,” as they elegantly styled them. But they were fertile in expedients. From the original establishment of these provinces, the Connecticut River had been accounted the boundary, to the east, of the province of New-York,