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[282] many years we must yet go thither, as did Robinson Crusoe to his wreck, for many of the very materials of living. But materials take their value from him who uses them, and that wreck would have long since passed from memory had there not been a Robinson Crusoe.

The brilliant and somewhat worldly Bishop Wilberforce was once pointed out to me, riding in the Park at London, as I walked with Carlyle and Froude thirty years ago; and it was perhaps they who told me a story which the Bishop loved to tell of himself, as to the rebuke he once received from a curate whom he had reproved. The curate was given to fox-hunting, and when the bishop once reproved him and said it had a worldly appearance, “Not more worldly,” the curate replied, “than a certain ball at Blenheim Palace” at which the bishop had been present. The bishop explained that he was staying in the house, to be sure, but was never within three rooms of the dancing. “Oh! If it comes to that, your lordship,” said the curate, “I never am within three fields of the hounds.”

Grant that nowhere in America have we yet got within those three fields,--we will

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