Taking leave of our
hospitable cousins in old Lee with about as much solemnity as we may
suppose Major Laing parted with his friends when he set out in search of
desert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a rough road,
passed the Devil's Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little streamlet
noisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely, half-
ruinous mill, and climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a wide
sandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills, and
dotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines. In the centre of this
desolate region were some twenty or thirty small dwellings, grouped
together as irregularly as a Hottentot kraal. Unfenced, unguarded, open
to all comers and goers, stood that city of the beggars,--no wall or
paling between the ragged cabins to remind one of the jealous
distinctions of property. The great idea of its founders seemed visible
in its unappropriated freedom. Was not the whole round world their own?
and should they haggle about boundaries and title-deeds? For them, on
distant plains, ripened golden harvests; for them, in far-off workshops,
busy hands were toiling; for them, if they had but the grace to note it,
the broad earth put on her garniture of beauty, and over them hung the
silent mystery of heaven and its stars.
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