Besides being a great financier and seafaring man, our Vermont pedler took up social life as a specialty, and distinguished himself among the high fashionables. The moral ideas that he had brought from Down East, were just as dashing as his Wall-street corners. He still kept the telegraph wires quivering with conjugal messages, and when he took domestic ease and the fresh salt air on the Jersey sea-coast, at Long Branch, in a high-swung carriage, with four seats, and stable help in trainer's clothes, wasn't his wife at another watering-place, called Newport, with a high-swinging carriage of her own, all cushioned off with silk, and with her gold-mounted harness rattling over six horses, just as black and shiny as his? If that isn't conjugal sympathy, such as goes down among the upper crust of New York, I don't know what is. Just the same number of horses, just the same swing in her carriage, just the same people--no, I am a little out there. She had relations in the seats, and he hadn't always. But then, what is all that compared to a great many fashionable, married folks in New York--so extravagantly fond of each other, that they make the Atlantic Ocean for a connecting link, year after year, and correspond tenderly in bills of exchange. Our poor, dead pedler from Vermont wasn't the only man in New York who lived and loved by steam and telegraph. XXVII. MORE ABOUT FISK. When the New England mind, which is a little apt to be troubled about the marriage relations of its emigrants, asks you about my report, you can say that this New England couple were only following the upper-crust fashion with married people in our great cities, where men and their wives find the Atlantic Ocean more convenient than a divorce court. Being imbued with morality from the Hub, they only set an example of easy distances. It takes a good, solid foundation of religion for even a born Vermonter to stand against a sudden rush of money. This man seemed to start fair. He began his life with _us_. Next he went to Boston, the very spring and fountain of high moral ideas, where every law has a higher law to nullify it. He left his better half in the salubrious atmosphere, where she performed her domestic duties alone, while he was toiling down Erie railroad stock, and promulgating sweet sounds from the Grand Opera House. Bound together in conjugal sympathy, by ever-vibrating telegraph wires, what could have been more satisfactory and highly fashionable than these hymeneal relations? This is what Cousin Dempster has been saying to me with a queer smile on his lips, and something that seems almost sarcastic in his voice. Says he, "If this way of life is persisted in, and is held respectable in social circles, who has a right to find fault when sin and sorrow spring out of it? Who among the thousands who abandon honorable homes for personal pleasures shall dare to condemn him?