There was no question now of Uncle Zebedee going, for the confinement, the excitement and the degradation had been too much for the old man, whose free and happy life had never known trouble or restraint, and his mind had gradually weakened under the burden imposed upon it; so that now, except when some unexpected incident roused the flickering flame of memory, the past few months were blotted from his mind, and in company with Jonathan--who, broken down by ill-usage and turned out of prison to die, had managed to crawl back to the friends he knew he should find shelter with--he roamed about harmless and contented, always watching for the Lottery's return, and promising, when she did come back, that he would give them all a fling such as Polperro had not seen for many a day.
It was an easy matter to cheat him now, and when, her journey all arranged, Joan stepped into the boat which was to take her round to Plymouth and left old Zebedee standing on the shore, raising his thin cracked voice to fetch her ear with cheery messages for Jerrem and for Adam, whom she was going to meet, her cup of bitterness seemed to overflow.
We are but beginning to understand what this America of ours is to do for the Old World. If we consider it under the figure of a vast steamship journeying to the relief of the mother nations, surely the beef and the flour, the cotton and the corn, even the inventions, with which it is freighted, form the least portion of its immeasurable cargo of supplies. Now, imagining our republic to be such a vessel, if Alaska be the stern and Florida the prow turned toward the other hemisphere for the peaceful conquest thereof, then must New York on the left hand and Texas upon the right be, in the days to come, the great paddle-wheels which shall drive it onward--New York not more so in a commercial than Texas in an agricultural sense. But it is with Texas only that we have here to do, and this in order to detail certain things hitherto unpublished which may not be without their use to the Humes and Motleys, the Froudes and Macaulays, of our nation in the wonderful future.
It is well to bear in mind from the outset that Texas is by far the largest of the States. To get even an idea of this, place within its boundaries New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania: even then you must pack into the crevices between these two or three granite boulders each of the size of Massachusetts to make a solid territory as large as Texas. As to that, however, Alaska is vast, and so is Sahara. If you set out upon a journey south and south-westward, beginning at the Potomac, and visit every Southern State in its order upon the map, you will find--and that almost immediately upon your arrival in Texas--that you have reached that State of them all which surpasses the others as much in prosperity as it does in dimensions. Near as Texas is to the equator, the oxygen of its abnormal growth is perceived by the newcomer in almost his first breath. There is a combination of causes for this. The Puritan who landed on Plymouth Rock gave character to, and transmitted himself down, the after ages of New England history; and the same is true of the influence of the Connecticut Austin who in 1820 began the settlement of Texas. The lapse of two centuries may have given a more earthward direction to the old energy, but the energy itself is there; and, somehow, the character and history of this larger New England of the West have been along the same line. Everything has helped forward the prosperity of the State. General health, moderate taxation, fertility of soil, astonishing diversity of product, cheap and rapid construction of railroads along lines both of latitude and longitude, immeasurable reserves of alternate sections of land held sacred for education,--these are some of the causes which are attracting an immigration of about a hundred thousand a year to a realm so vast that the two millions already there seem but pioneers of the coming hosts.