TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNIAS. 
27 
all its thousand eddies a tissue of golden and trembling mist, 
streaming down from the depths of Heaven ! There was a 
single sad spot on the scene. The north star, so high and 
brilliant in the latitude where I had spent my previous years, 
was gradually sinking into the haze about the horizon. I had 
in very early life looked with greater interest upon that than 
any other star. The little house which my deceased father 
had built on the shore of a beautiful lake among the green 
woods of Vermont, stood u north and south” upon the autho¬ 
rity of that star. And after he had died at that humble out¬ 
post of the settlements, leaving me a boy of nine years, his 
death-bed, the little house, and the star which had guided my 
parent’s hand in laying the foundation on the brow of the 
deep wilderness, came to be objects of the tenderest recol¬ 
lection. I was sorry to see it obscured; for it always burned 
brightly in our woodland home; and was the only thing which, 
as years rolled on, remained associated with paternal love. 
I remember, too, another class of emotions that gave oc¬ 
cupation to my heart in those beautiful nights. We thought 
and talked of Cook. He had ploughed those seas long be¬ 
fore us; had discovered the group of islands to which our 
voyage tended ; had met a fearful death at the hands of the 
inhabitants; and some of his bones yet lay, scraped and 
prepared for the gods, in the deep caverns of Hawaii! The 
waters rippling at our ship’s side, had borne him; had 
rushed in tempests, and lain in great beauty around him ; 
had greeted the discovery flag of the brave old Fatherland, 
and heard its cannon boom ! We were sailing under the 
same flag. It was not, indeed, the same identical bunting 
which floated in 1789 ; but it was the emblem of the same 
social organization, of the same broad intelligence ; the in¬ 
signia of the same Power, whose military embattlements, 
grain fields and homes, gird the Earth ! I was glad to ap¬ 
proach the Hawaiian Islands on the track of Cook, under 
the old British flag. 
Is there a human sense which derives its nutriment from 
