18 NORTH CAROLINA 



object of my present journey and its probable 

 duration, some account of my previous visits 

 South, my notion of New England weather, 

 my impressions of Washington, especially of 

 the height of the Washington monument as 

 compared with other similar structures (a 

 question of peculiar moment to him, for 

 some reason now past recall), and Heaven 

 knows what else ; while on a thousand or 

 two of other topics I had confessed ignorance. 

 I had never been to Chautauqua ; that was 

 perhaps my examiner's most serious disap- 

 pointment. He was at present engaged on 

 a Chautauquan course of reading, as it ap- 

 peared, — the best course of reading that he 

 had ever seen, he was inclined to think. 

 Here again he had me playing second fiddle, 

 or rather no fiddle at all. 



His was a wholesome catholicity of mind, 

 but it pleased me to notice that he too had 

 felt the touch of the modern spirit, and was 

 something of a specialist. Geography, or 

 perhaps I should say climatology, seemed to 

 lie uppermost in his thoughts. Once, I re- 

 member, he brought out a ponderous atlas 

 of the world, a book of really astonishing 

 proportions when the size of the house was 



