Long time have we been climbing together up the political eminence, until we have at last reached its high summit,—the Fourth of July. Cold and bleak was the weather, and wholly new and uncleared the path on which we set out, thousands of years ago, among the hitherto unknown, pre-Columbian regions of America. The way was beset with obstructions,—heaps of coal and fossil remains,—and strewn with bones of races, human and animal, as strange even to our museums as they were novel to ourselves. Among these freshly discovered relics of our great ancestors, we trode carefully, and lingered with pleased wonder among ruins, which shamed by their age and size the usurping glories of Egyptian, Chinese, and Assyrian antiquities. At last, however, having traversed those broad plains, over which hung the gray, uncertain twilight of chronicle and geological fiction, we emerged, by a sudden turn in the road, into the clearer light and more solid undebatable ground rediscovered and retouched by more modern nations; convinced by our large inspection and survey, that those who landed on our shores long before Columbus—the Cabots, Cortereals, Verrazannis, Vespuccis, etc.—had, like provident _patres familias_, packed carefully away large stores of carbonized fuel and bone manure for the use of those who should come behind and after them, and had left well-feathered nests for the more helpless brood which might flock here in times long subsequent to their own. Refreshed from the fatigues of this long wandering tramp, we then took a fresh start 304 years ago from Sainte Augustine, plodded on northwards forty-eight years to Jamestown, in six years more passed the little group of Dutch cabins on Manhattan island, and so, trending off eastward, followed the wavy coast for eight years more, until we brought up, in 1620, at the newly erected temperance inn at Plymouth, where we halted, glad even of its scant and unpromising cheer. Very early after leaving the James, we were accosted by that well-known wag, John Smith, who turned up in high feather with Pocahontas,—the future mother of Virginia,—and who keeps turning up and down everywhere in all humors, moods, and tenses,—active, passive, transitive, and intransitive,—to suit and amuse every taste. [Illustration: A PURITAN BREAKFAST. (p. 259) ]