A beautiful trait of Bayard’s character comes gracefully into view as we read his grateful acknowledgments of the kindnesses he received. On his first walk in his apprentice days, in Pennsylvania, having determined to see some mountains, although he had to walk two hundred miles to view them, he was kindly served at a well, on the way, by a farmer’s girl, who cheerfully drew the bucket from the well and ran for a glass, that he, a dusty, thirsty stranger, might drink without further fatigue; and in his later years he records the fact in his book, with the sweetest expressions of thankfulness. So when he arrived at Frankfort, and was kindly received and entertained by Mr. Richard S. Willis, the American consul, brother of Bayard’s old friend, Nathaniel P. Willis, he sits down at once, and in his letters to his friends, and in his public correspondence, he speaks of the generosity and thoughtfulness of his old friend, and the hospitable and cultured characteristics of his new friend. They were noble friends, who made for him a home at their fireside in Frankfort, and deserve the thanks of every admirer of Bayard Taylor. His thanks they had throughout a long life, and not only thanks, but grateful deeds. It was Bayard’s purpose to go to Heidelberg, with his cousin, and give himself to close study, at the University, or with private tutors; but just how he was going to obtain the means to pay his expenses was something of an enigma. It may be that his good fortune in the outset made him too confident and careless in regard to other undertakings. At all events, his stay in Heidelberg was much shorter than he had at first intended that it should be, and his studies were much more broken and superficial than his letters show he thought they would be. He was not constituted for close, hard, metaphysical study, and made but little attempts in that direction, after he arrived at Heidelberg. He loved the grand old Castle better than the whittled benches of the University. He enjoyed the Kaisersthul and the lesser mountains, far more than the monotonous recital of German theories. The river Neckar called him in its murmurs, the clouds beckoned to him as they flew over the Heligen Berg, the wind called for him as it sighed around the vineyards of Ziegelhausen, and all thoughts of private, quiet study fled at the summons. So he climbed the mountains. It was always a passion with him to gain an altitude as high as possible, and look out upon the world. He tells how, when a boy, he ventured out of a chamber window in the old farm-house at Kennett, and seeing a row of slats which the carpenters had used for steps in ascending the roof, he sallied forth, and there astride of the roof, gained his first view of a landscape. He said afterward, that the roof appeared to be so high and the view so extensive, that he imagined he could see Niagara Falls. Whether this inclination to climb up came to him through the stories of his old Swiss nurse, whose bed-time