The “dear doctor” to whom these letters were addressed was Dr. T. O. Porter, with whom their author afterwards formed a literary partnership. The little bridge under which they were written, with its stone seat, its “floor of running water,” its nest of swallows, and its diminutive fresh-water lobster--which reminded Willis of Talleyrand--deserves remembering with Pope’s famous grotto at Twickenham. Like Cowley, Willis acknowledged himself fond of little things. He disliked the ocean and great rivers,--though he finally came to live on the banks of one. He loved small streams and narrow valleys. The lawny, homelike scenery of the Owego was just suited to his taste. Above all things in nature, he delighted in running water, which had an affinity with his own lively and sparkling temper. “À l’Abri” was, and remains, a thoroughly enjoyable book, chatty, pleasantly digressive, and filled with sunshine and the air of out-doors. It must be confessed that Willis was something of a cockney in the presence of great Nature. He viewed her more as a landscape gardener than as a naturalist. He had not the intense passion for her, the rapt communion with her, of elect spirits like Wordsworth and Thoreau. She furnished him rather with a hundred pretty and playful analogies, a hundred texts for little sermons on cheerfulness and content, in which he rode his fancy sometimes too far and let his sentiment answer too quickly to trifling provocations. He must have been but an amateurish farmer, too, ordering his breakfast served under a balsam fir, and selling his crops “for the oddity of the sensation.” Naturally, except in literary harvests, his farm did not pay, though he was always exclaiming with grateful surprise at the bounty of nature in yielding him actual buckwheat, in addition to the health, amusement, and moral lessons derived in the process of cultivating that interesting grain. One suspects that he grew more flowers of speech than any grosser product from his two hundred acres. If the crows ate his corn in the blade, he merely philosophized, “Think what times we live in, when even the crows are obliged to anticipate their income!” If the red heifer chewed up a lace cape bleaching on the lawn, he humorously excused the heifer on account of the drought. If the boys reported that the deer were browsing in troops on his buckwheat, by the light of the moon, he answered, “Let them!” One is reminded by this last discouragement to agriculture that Owego was still in the backwoods. Some of the most interesting passages in the letters describe the wild life of the lumbermen, whose rafts glided past the Glenmary meadows “like a singing and swearing phantom of an unfinished barn,” and whose fires by night lit up the bends of the Susquehanna, where their huge flotillas lay moored. Willis once descended the river on the top of a freshet in a steamboat of light draught, but his usual way of coming and going was by stage over very rough roads, the Erie railway