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[227] self-selected, in free meeting, and therefore never discordant. The hour rule of Congress might be useful, though far less needed among the frogs than among the profane croakers of the fens at Washington.

Here is a sketch of the mountain scenery of New Hampshire, as seen from the Holderness Mountain, or North Hill, during a visit which he made to his native valley in the autumn of 1841:—

The earth sphered up all around us, in every quarter of the horizon, like the crater of a vast volcano, and the great hollow within the mountain circle was as smoky as Vesuvius or Etna in their recess of eruption. The little village of Plymouth lay right at our feet, with its beautiful expanse of intervale opening on the eye like a lake among the woods and hills, and the Pemigewasset, bordered along its crooked way with rows of maples, meandering from upland to upland through the meadows. Our young footsteps had wandered over these localities. Time had cast it all far back: that Pemigewasset, with its meadows and border trees; that little village whitening in the margin of its intervale; and that one house which we could distinguish, where the mother that watched over and endured our wayward childhood totters at fourscore!

To the south stretched a broken, swelling upland country, but champaign from the top of North Hill, patched all over with grain-fields and green wood-lots, the roofs of the farm-houses shining in the sun. Southwest, the Cardigan Mountain showed its bald forehead among the smokes of a

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