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them till their wicked father came along, as ignorant as they were, and examined it in vain till at last it broke in his fingers and he threw it down and trotted them hastily away!
I watched it from a distance, powerless and desolate, till the queer little antiquities disappeared.
In
Syracuse he encountered
Horace Greeley, who ‘was observed by all, and people tried to make the newsboys sell him his own life.’
In a letter from this place,
Mr. Higginson says:—
I am writing on the office desk and am constantly taken for the landlord.
A man has just come up and whispered confidentially, “A lot of first rate segars I'd like to sell you, Sir.”
“Thank you, Sir, I don't smoke,” I said without looking up. “Ah,” said he rather astonished, “ain't you the landlord of this here house?”
“No,” said I, shuddering.—Next a man indignant at not having been waked in time for his train—but happily the real landlord has just come in—a man in ruffled shirt and two seal rings.
Although his lectures at that time could not have been very remunerative, he rejoiced in working, and in working all the time.
He wrote to his wife while on this very trip:—
Like your father, and other very busy persons I suppose, I have the most intense dread of ennui. I very seldom suffer from the thing itself—but when I look forward and see a space of time which I cannot