fancy that he decided to pitch his tent there. He bought from his college friend Pumpelly, who lived near by, a domain of some two hundred acres, which he named Glenmary, in honor of his wife, and there in the fall of 1837 he set up his household gods. In his paper on “The Four Rivers,” contributed to one of the September “Mirrors” of that year, he thus announces his discovery:-- “Owego Creek should have a prettier name, for its small vale is the soul and essence of loveliness. A meadow of a mile in breadth, fertile, soft, and sprinkled with stately trees, furnishes a bed for its swift windings; and from the edge of this new Tempé, on the southern side, rise three steppes or natural terraces, over the highest of which the forest rears its head, and looks in upon the meeting of the rivers; while down the sides, terrace by terrace, leap the small streamlets from the mountain springs, forming each again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face of Nature.… Here would I have a home! Give me a cottage by one of these shining streamlets, upon one of these terraces that seem steps to Olympus, and let me ramble over these mountain sides, while my flowers are growing and my head silvering in tranquil happiness.” In this secluded Arcadia his Penates had rest for five years, and hence he wrote his “À l’Abri, or the Tent Pitched,” contributed to the “Mirror” as “Letters from under a Bridge,” the first one appearing July 7, 1838. This is Willis’s happiest book, and reflects the happiest part of his life. There was a side of him which turned gladly to rural repose and simple household pleasures. He imagined it to be “the kind of life best suited to his disposition as well as to his better nature,” and it had at the time the zest of novelty. For the last five years he had been a vagabond “in the gayest circles of the gayest cities in the world.” “There is a curious fact,” he writes, “I have learned for the first time in this wild country; that, as the forest is cleared, new springs rise to the surface of the ground, as if at the touch of the sunshine.… You have yourself been in your day, dear doctor, ‘a warped slip of wilderness,’ and will see at once that there lies in this ordinance of nature a beautiful analogy to certain moral changes that come in upon the heels of more cultivated and thoughtful manhood. There is no divining-rod whose dip shall tell us at twenty what we shall most relish at thirty.… You can scarce understand with what pleasure I find this new spring in my path, the content with which I admit the conviction that, without effort or self-denial, the mind will slake its thirst and the heart be satisfied with but the waste of what lies so near us.”