342 MRS. TROLLOPE. " We can not resist a melancholy suspicion that if he had relaxed a little sooner he might have been spared to us longer. Anxiety, rather than actual work, may have been injurious, when he began to grow nervous under the strain of keeping engagements against time." Not one man in many thousands could have lived his life for a single year without destruction. Nature had given him an admirable constitution. He had a sound digestion, tranquil nerves, a cheerful disposition, and a taste for rural pleasures. He should have lived to " four score and upward." America may claim some property in this gifted and genial man. He used to berate us soundly (and justly, too) for republishing his works without paying him copy- right for the same. I have the impression, however, that he owed his place in the Post-office, in an indirect way, to the American people. We have seen above that as a boy of twelve, he arrived with his mother and sisters, on Christmas day, 1827, at the mouth of the Mississippi, and made with them a three years' tour of the United States. It is possible tnat he may have assisted in the drawing of the comic pictures with which his mother enlivened her work upon the " Domestic Manners of the Americans," and doubtless he nad his share in the numberless anec- dotes that figure in its pages. The youth escorted his mother to some of those " large evening parties " which she describes, where there was " no ecartS, no chess, very little music, and that lamentably bad," and where " to eat inconceivable quantities of cake, ice, and pickled oysters, and to show half their revenue in silks and satins, seemed to be the chief object of the ladies." We are sure that he passed, with his mother, those " four days of excitement and fatigue at Niagara," where, as she says, " we drenched ourselves in spray, we cut our feet on the rocks, we blistered our faces in the sun, we
