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“The proper study of mankind is man;” and, according to my view, no phase of our common humanity is altogether unworthy of investigation. Acting upon this belief two or three summers ago, when making, in company with my sister, a little excursion into the hill-country of New Hampshire, I turned my horse’s head towards Barrington for the purpose of seeing these semi-civilized strollers in their own home, and returning, once for all, their numerous visits. Taking leave of our hospitable cousins in old Lee with about as much solemnity as we may suppose Major Laing(1) parted with his friends when he set out in search of desert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a rough road, passed the Devil’s Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little streamlet noisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely, half-ruinous mill, and, climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a wide, sandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills, and dotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines. In the centre of this desolate region were some twenty or thirty small dwellings, grouped together as irregularly as a Hottentot kraal. Unfenced, unguarded, open to all comers and goers, stood that city of the beggars,–no wall or paling between the ragged cabins to remind one of the jealous distinctions of property. The great idea of its founders seemed visible in its unappropriated freedom. Was not the whole round world their own? and should they haggle about boundaries and title-deeds? For them, on distant plains, ripened golden harvests; for them, in far-off workshops, busy hands were toiling; for them, if they had but the grace to note it, the broad earth put on her garniture of beauty, and over them hung the silent mystery of heaven and its stars. That comfortable philosophy which modern transcendentalism has but dimly shadowed forth–that poetic agrarianism, which gives all to each and each to all–is the real life of this city of unwork. To each of its dingy dwellers might be not unaptly applied the language of one who, I trust, will pardon me for quoting her beautiful poem in this connection:–

“Other hands may grasp the field and forest,
Proud proprietors in pomp may shine,
. . . . . . .
Thou art wealthier,–all the world is thine.”(2)

(1) Alexander Gordon Laing was a major in the British army, who served on the west coast of Africa and made journeys into the interior in the attempt to establish commercial relations with the natives, and especially to discover the sources of the Niger. He was treacherously murdered in 1826 by the guard that was attending him on his return from Timbuctoo to the coast. His travels excited great interest in their day in England and America. (2) From a poem, *Why Thus Longing?* by Mrs. Harriet Winslow Sewall, preserved in Whittier’s *Songs of Three Centuries.*

But look! the clouds are breaking. “Fair weather cometh out of the north.” The wind has blown away the mists; on the gilded spire of John Street glimmers a beam of sunshine; and there is the sky again, hard, blue, and cold in its eternal purity, not a whit the worse for the storm. In the beautiful present the past is no longer needed. Reverently and gratefully let its volume be laid aside; and when again the shadows of the outward world fall upon the spirit may I not lack a good angel to remind me of its solace, even if he comes in the shape of a Barrington beggar.