not know. Mystification sat on all faces, when the individual who had before attacked Mr. Latham's misstatements, took up the defence of the puzzled colonists i volunteering to answer the question if he would explain how "impossible roots enter equations." No reply was given to this, when, on some of the gentlemen urging him, perhaps rather, mischievously, to answer, he retorted angrily, "I'm master of mathematics as well as of other sciences; but I see there's an intention to make fun of me. I don't choose to be made a butt of, and I'll show you that I can be as savage as other people." This threat had the effect of producing a total silence for the remainder of the journey; but Mr. Latham took an opportunity of explaining to me that in this speech he intended no personal allusion, but had found it necessary to check the ill-timed mirth in the stage. In spite of his presumption and pedantry, he never lost an opportunity of showing kindness. I saw him last in the very extremity of terror, during a violent gale off the coast of Maine.
For the first fifty miles after leaving the Bend, our road lay through country as solitary and wild as could be conceived—high hills, covered with endless forests of small growth. I looked in vain for the gigantic trees so celebrated by travellers in America. If they ever grew in this region, they now, in the shape of ships, are to be found on every sea where England's flag waves. Occasionally the smoke of an Indian wigwam would rise in a thin blue cloud from among the dark foliage of the hemlock; and by the primitive habitation one of the aboriginal possessors of the soil might be seen, in tattered habiliments, cleaning a gun or repairing a bark canoe, scarcely
