This page has been validated.
144
OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR.

of his horsemen, he broke through a band of thirty-five robbers, under a famous bandit leader, killing one and wounding several others.

This company has some valuable nuggets for such marauders. Here is the president of the nearly finished Vera Cruz Railway, Mr. Gibbs, of England, as witty as he is wise, and wise as he is witty, one of the least "stuck up" of well-educated Englishmen I have ever met. He is a representative of Oxford scholarship and London business. He can scan Greek lines or Mexican landscapes with equal accuracy. He confesses to England's aristocratic detestation of the Yankee until the war compelled her to see, first, that we had pluck; second, success; and third, and logically, that we were right. That is the usual construction of an Englishman's syllogism, pluck first, principle last. Then, of course, we ceased to be whittling, nasal Yankees, and turned into gentlemen. He breaks forth at the mouth, like all punsters, and makes fun for the million (of dollars) that rides at his side.

The head of the house of Rosecrans, a rival railroad enterprise, is also here—General Palmer, self-contained, ready to thrust the point of an argument into his antagonist, as whilom the point of his sword, and that as this without malice, though now as then unto the death.

Mr. Parish, the learned and traveled member of the party, is at home equally in the best modern languages and modern society. It is a striking evidence of the union of culture and business, these polished and highly-educated gentlemen on railroad thoughts intent. It shows, what ought to be the case more and more, the best university training a preliminary to the entrance into every profession.

The agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, a Congregational clergyman, is the fourth; whom, as he is lying awake on his bed in the room where I am now writing, it will not answer to say much about, or I should see the sheeted living, as Cæsar did the "sheeted dead," walking the floor and squaring off. England and America, despite Geneva decisions and the peace societies, would