Finally, he came up
to me and said that as I bore a striking resemblance to a family of
Stanburys, he was induced to inquire if I was connected with them. I was
sorry to be obliged to answer in the negative. At another place they
took me for a lawyer in search of a place to settle, and strongly
recommended their own village. Moreover, I heard some of the students at
Yale College conjecturing that I was an Englishman, and to-day, as I was
standing without my coat at the door of a tavern, a man came up to me,
and asked me for some oats for his horse."
It was during this trip, I have small doubt, that he found the scenery,
and perhaps the persons, for that pretty interlude, "The Seven
Vagabonds." The story is placed not far from Stamford, and the conjurer
in it says, "I am taking a trip northward, this warm weather, across the
Connecticut first, and then up through Vermont, and may be into Canada
before the fall." The narrator himself queries by what right he came
among these wanderers, and furnishes himself an answer which suggests
that side of his nature most apt to appear in these journeys: "The free
mind that preferred its own folly to another's wisdom; the open spirit
that found companions everywhere; above all, the restless impulse that
had so often made me wretched in the midst of enjoyments: these were my
claims to be of their society." "If there be a faculty," he also writes,
"which I possess more perfectly than most men, it is that of throwing
myself mentally into situations foreign to my own, and detecting with a
cheerful eye the desirableness of each.
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