air, earth and water, Ward is as soft-spoken and as quiet-moving as the most indolent man in the world, and, among his neighbors, he stands for the most simply honest and kind-hearted of men, who knows his own rights pretty well, but is willing to help everybody else to theirs.
But Ward's plums and peaches are not the only "largest of their kind," for which he could take the premium. As he sat down by our hickory-fire for an evening's chat, I could not but confess I had rarely seen, out of England, such a specimen of stock for a farmer to be proud of as the well-developed, handsome daughter, of sixteen, who had come in with him, and to whose lap my children ran with their dolls in the opposite corner. I had admired her fine proportions and energetic movement as she skated on the river a day or two before; but her frank and truthful manners, liberally-moulded features, and joyous expressions of health and happiness, made her show even better in a drawing-room; and I patriotically wished, as I compared her with the slices of American loveliness principally looked to for the continuation of our country, that such whole girls were plentier.
To return to river dangers, however.
Ward thought he had run one or two risks of drowning, even in such small waters as the Hudson. He was once made "almost too sea-sick to hold on," here in this Highland bay, by being sent to the topmast of a sloop, in one
