A carriage is waiting for us at New Haven. On reaching there, we are driven at once to the happy home of Mr. W. G. Shepard, who forthwith presents me to Master Walter Whittle Shepard. This important character is only twelve months old, but is full of life and promise. If he combines the sweet spirit and graceful manners of his mother with the strong character and bright intellect of his father, I believe he will make a great and useful man notwithstanding the fact that he bears the author’s name.
New Haven, with her one hundred thousand souls and great manufacturing interests, with her parks and colleges, with her broad streets and lordly elms, is one of the prettiest cities on the American continent.
When we retired last night, the snow was falling thick and fast; but we awoke this morning to find that God had snatched a beautiful Sabbath day from the bosom of the storm.
Mark Twain is in New Haven. In the course of a lecture delivered here, he said: “A certain college student got the words theological and zoological confused—he did not know one from the other. In talking to a friend, this collegian said: ‘There are a great many donkeys in the Theological Garden.’”
My stay in New Haven has been as pleasant as a midsummer dream, and seemingly as short as a widower’s courtship. But we must now return to New York. In less than three hours we will leave by the State Line, on “The State of Indiana,” for Glasgow, Scotland. And now that the time of my departure has come, I find myself breathing a prayer to God, asking that He will direct my course; that He will guide my footsteps; that in all my wanderings He will keep me from danger and death; that He will finally bring me back in health and safety to the land of my birth, to the friends of my childhood, to those whom I love and who are dearer to me than life itself. And so may it be. More heartily than ever before, I can say:
“My native country! thee,
Land of the noble free,
Thy name I love:
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills;
My heart with rapture thrills
Like that above.”