taxed one farthing in the hogshead for the sake of a war about Algiers? The idea is preposterous.

Next comes the more extensive question,-How far the general cause of human happiness and civilization is likely to be affected by the French occupation of Algiers? I address you as one who believes that, if civilization and happiness be not synonymous terms, civilization, at least, diminishes the horrors of human misery. If I thought otherwise, I should not discuss the subject with you.

The moment an Englishman can divest himself of apprehensions, as I think he safely may, that the French can do any harm to England by retaining Algiers, it will be natural, at the first view of the subject, for the liberality of his heart to argue thus :-France is by much the more civilized nation, and her dominion ought to insure some chance of civilization, as she has already brought into Algiers the abolition of hideous punishments, and the knowledge of arts and sciences that diminish bigotry and barbarism. Yes, my friend, this position is true; and its truth. is some consolation to me. When I go out to the gate of Babazoon, and am shown the spot where the Jews used to be burnt alive, and where criminals were precipitated from a high wall, to be caught by hooks half-way down, and detained in tortures for perhaps a week, I bless the event that has put Algiers under any dominion that will exclude such horrors. At the outside of that dreadful gate, as late as 1813, a friend of mine, too authentic an informant, saw a state criminal chained to a post to be starved alive. The sufferer was a florid, stout man on the first day of his punishment, and he bore the pangs of famine for several days with heroic fortitude; but on the ninth day he was heard scream-.. ing for water to quench his thirst, and died with his bones coming through his skin.

Further, in spite of all that I hear and see as to the difficulty of getting the natives to coalesce with their conquerors, I cannot divest my mind of the idea that the French will ultimately plant here the most important arts and sciences that tend to abate human misery. The Mussulman's bigotry must ultimately retreat before civilization; and God knows there is room enough for improvement in this barbarous land. The native population, though it will sometimes show you heads and forms worthy of a scriptural picture, exhibits incomparably more numerous objects of such wretchedness as you would not meet with in an European city elephantiasis and blindness are excessively common; and disease and poverty may be said to walk the streets. Until the French arrived there was scarcely an European surgeon or physician in the regency, except some runaway druggists' 'prentices from Christendom; now there is an established school both of surgery and medicine, under the inspection of talented men. The doctrine of fatalism opposes itself in limine to the very profession of medicine and surgery. A French officer, who has written an account of the conquest, describes an interesting scene which he witnessed between a young Arab, who was brought in wounded to the French camp, and his aged father, who came to visit him. The leg-bone of the youth had been shattered, but his life might have been saved by amputation of the limb. The old man hung over him in agony, beseeching him not to offend God and Mahomet by submitting to the operation. His son followed the advice, and Mahomet took him to himself in reward of his piety. There are,

nevertheless, Moors and Jews who pretend to make both clinical and surgical cures, and women who are called in as sages femmes; but the native doctors know not a tittle of anatomy, and scarcely the names of their own medicines, many of which are noxious in the cases in which they are prescribed. In surgery they understand not even the use of a lancet. They console the cholic, the stone, and pleurisy with the application of red-hot iron to the suffering parts. This treatment often elicits shrieks of assurance from the patients that they are perfectly cured, and intreaties that the application may be removed. They bleed and amputate with a razor, and stop hæmorrhage with boiling pitch. Dr. Abernethy, in lecturing on the disease of wens, said that he knew not how to cure them, and that perhaps whistling to them was not the worst prescription. In like manner, it is possible that the amulets bestowed on the Algerines by their holy maraboots are amongst the most innocent of their cures.

Enormous mortality and suffering necessarily result from this ignorance of the healing art. For one hideous malady they know no sort of remedy. The blood of the sufferer runs infected in his veins all his life, and makes his children also its victims. When the plague used to come here, its ravages exceeded all conception: whole villages and cities have been known to be unpeopled by it; harvests rotted on the ground for want of reapers; and flocks and herds wandered wide without a master. Large encampments of the Arabs might be met with, where the dead lay unburied under their tents. Leweson, who witnessed the plague of Algiers in 1787, says that, of an evening, the only sounds to be heard were the lamentations at funerals and the howlings of the jackals.

I am restrained only by the disagreeableness of the subject from mentioning other instances of the human misery resulting from ignorance and barbarism in this country; but I assure you that I have seen enough to convince me that the retention of the country by France as a point d'appui for the entrance of European civilization into Africa is a consummation devoutly to be wished for.

I have already alluded more than once to the faults which the French have committed since their occupation of the colony, including, under the gentle denomination of faults, a few useless murders committed on the natives. With regard to this subject, however, I am deterred from bestowing my prolixity upon you by two considerations. In the first place, the French themselves speak with regret of those occurrences which have sullied their character for humanity: their press has indignantly exposed them; and it is my firm opinion, if France perseveres in retaining Algiers, that she will learn, as we ourselves have certainly learnt in India, to a certain degree, the policy of being just and humane. In the next place, I should feel it my duty, as an Englishman criminating the cruelties of the French in northern Africa, to cast a glance at the question whether our own conduct in Caffraria has been perfectly immaculate? In my opinion, the latter country could make out a stronger case against us than Algiers could against the French: so on this topic I shall abstain from drawing up any special indictment against the French, though I leave you to understand in general that their conduct would admit of amelioration.

THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT.

"Notre bonheur, mon cher, se tiendra toujours entre la plante de nos pieds et notre occiput; et qu'il coûte un million par an ou cent louis, la perception intrinsique est la même au-dedans de nous."-Le Père Goriot.

THERE were a hundred students in the new class matriculated at Yale College, in Connecticut, in the year 18-. They were young men of different ages and of all conditions in life, but less various in their mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the widely-separated states from which they came. It is not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French and English, the German and the Italian, should possess distinct national traits: yet one American is supposed to be like every other, though the two between whom the comparison is drawn were born and bred as far apart, and in as different latitudes as the Highland cateran and the brigand of Calabria.

I looked around me with some interest, when, on the first morning of the term, the president, professors, and students of the university assembled in the college chapel at the sound of the prayer-bell, and, with my brother Freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing up with our motley and, as yet, unclassical heads and habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes. The berry-brown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched by study, was still dark and deep on the cheek of one; the look of command breathing through the indolent attitude betrayed in another, the young Carolinian and slave-master; a coat of green, garnished with fur and bright buttons, and shaped less by the tailor than by the Herculean and expansive frame over which it was strained, had a taste of Kentucky in its complexion; the white skin and red or sandy hair, cold expression, stiff black coat, and serious attention to the service, told of the Puritan son of New Hampshire or Vermont; and, perked up in his well-fitted coat, the exquisite of the class, stood the slight and metropolitan New Yorker, with a firm belief in his tailor and himself written on his effeminate lip, and an occasional look at his neighbour's coats and shoulders, that might have been con strued into wonder upon what western river or mountain dwelt the builders of such coats and men!

Rather annoyed at last by the glances of one or two seniors, who were amusing themselves with my simple gaze of curiosity, I turned my attention to my more immediate neighbourhood. A youth with close, curling, brown hair, rather under-sized, but with a certain decision and nerve in his lip which struck me immediately, and which seemed to express somehow a confidence in himself which his limbs scarce bore out, stood with his back to the pulpit, and with his foot on the seat, and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be beyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom of the college to take places at prayers and recitation alphabetically, and he was likely to be my neighbour in chapel and hall for the next four years, I speculated rather more than I should else have done on his face and manner; and as the president came to his Amen, I came to the

conclusion, that whatever might be Mr. "S.'s" capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be very demonstrative and uncomfortable.

The term went on, the politics of the little republic fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or peculiarities wore off by collision or developed by intimacy, the different members of the class rose or fell in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent and spirit became more just and definite. The "Southerners and Northeners," as they are called, soon discovered, like the classes that had gone before them, that they had no qualities in common, and of the secret societies which exist among the students in that university, joined each that of their own compatriots. The Carolinian or Georgian, who had passed his life on a plantation secluded from the society of his equals, soon found out the value of his chivalrous deportment and graceful indolence in the gay society for which the town is remarkable; while the Vermontese, or White-Mountaineer, "made unfashionably," and ill at ease on a carpet, took another line of ambition, and sat down with the advantage of constitutional patience and perseverance to the study which he would find in the end a "better continuer," even in the race for a lady's favour.

It was the only republic I have ever known-that class of Freshmen. It was a fair arena; and neither in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor religion, have I, in much searching through the world, found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of our own republic!its society is the very core and gall of the worst growth of aristocracy. Talk of the republic of letters! -the two groves by the pyramid of Caius Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love of religion! What is bought and sold like that which has the name of the first? What is made a snare and a tool by the designing like the last? But here— with a government over us ever kindly and paternal, no favour shown, and no privilege denied,-every equality in the competitors at all possible-age, previous education, and, above all, worldly position,-it was an arena in which a generous spirit would wrestle with an abandon of heart and limb he might never know in the world again. Every individual rising or falling by the estimation he exacts of his fellows, there is no such school of honour. Each, of the many palms of scholarship, from the severest to the lightest, aiming at that which best suits his genius, and as welcome as another to the goal, there is no apology for the laggard. Of the feelings that stir the heart in our youth-of the few, the very few, which have no recoil, and leave no repentance-this leaping from the starting-post of mind-this first spread of the encouraged wing in the free heaven of thought and knowledge-is recorded in my own slender experience as the most joyous and the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright honour with the tools of political ambition, he who has leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion, he who has loved, hoped, and trusted in the greater arena of life and manhood,-must look back on days like these as the brokenwinged eagle to the sky-as the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie.

II.

New Haven is not alone the seat of a university. It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and sunny gardens, the refinement of its society, its central position and accessibility, and the facilities for attending the

lectures of the College Professors, render it a most desirable place of instruction in every department. Among others, the female schools of the place have a great reputation, and this, which in Europe, or with a European state of society, would probably be an evil, is, from the simple and frank character of manners in America, a mutual and decided advantage. The daughters of the first families of the country are sent here, committed for two, three, or four years, to the exclusive care of the head of the establishment, and (as one of the privileges and advantages of the school) associating freely with the general society of the town, the male part, of course, composed principally of students. A more easy and liberal intercourse exists in no society in the world, and in no society that I have ever seen is the tone of morals and manners so high and unexceptionable. Attachments are often formed, and little harm is thought of it; and unless it is a very strong case of disparity or objection, no obstacle is thrown in the way of the common intercourse between lovers; and the lady returns to her family, and the gentleman senior disappears with his degree, and they meet and marry-if they like. If they do not, the lady stands as well in the matrimonial market as ever, and the gentleman (unlike his horse) is not damaged by having been on his knees.

Like "Le Noir Fainéant," at the tournament, my friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than an actor in the various pursuits of the university. A sudden interference in a quarrel in which a brother freshman was contending against odds enlightened the class as to his spirit and personal strength; he acquitted himself at recitations with the air of self-contempt for such easy excellence; he dressed plainly, but with instinctive taste; and at the end of the first term, having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with his books and a kind of trapper's dog he had brought with him from the west, he had acquired an ascendency in the opinion of the class for which no one could well account, but to which every one unhesitatingly assented.

We returned after our first short vacation, and of my hundred classmates there was but one whom I much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at meeting him, for the first time, seemed to open his heart to me. He invited me to breakfast with him. By favour seldom granted to a freshman, he had a lodging in the town-the rest of the class being compelled to live with a chum in the college buildings. I found his rooms-(I was the first of the class who had entered them)-more luxuriously furnished than I had expected from the simplicity of his appearance, but his books, not many, but select, and (what is in America an expensive luxury) in the best English editions and superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise. How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra-civilization in the forests of the west was a mystery that remained to be solved.

III.

At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a rambling old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town. It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describable shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony, to use an expressive Gal