but, to grounds cultivated for beauty, such prodigal growth of trees, whose foliage recognizes no winter, are a wealth and a blessing. To-day, we look out of open windows, upon a summer of both trees and temperature.
I was called upon yesterday to remember an appeal to your patriotism, which I promised to make—you being a general and the object of appeal being a revolutionary soldier with whom I have lately swapped hats, with the understanding that your influence to procure him a pension was to be "thrown in." As the hat I got by my bargain is a relic, having been worn by a revolutionary head while crossing from its first to its second century, and two years beyond the crossing, I must be excused for giving the history of "our trade" rather circumstantially—the hat being thus made authentic by having its story told, and the wearer being brought to your charitable notice, "as agreed."
My friend Torrey, the village blacksmith, had sevral times offered to "show me the beat" of the revolutionary soldier I visited and described in the Home Journal last summer. He declared that "old Babcock, up in the mountains," was "more of a cur'osity," for he could hold a stick in both hands and jump over it, at a hundred years old, and that was two years ago. He was "still full of fun and as sharp as a 'coon," though quite a vagrant in his habits, and going to and fro, between here and
