produce of your province exported to Britain?

A. It must be small, as we produce little that is wanted in Britain. I suppose that it cannot exceed 40,000 Pounds.

Q. You have said that you pay heavy taxes in Pennsylvania; what do they amount to in the pound?

A. The tax on all estates, real and personal, is eighteen pence in the pound, fully rated; and the tax on the profits of trades and professions, with other taxes, do, I suppose, make full half a crown in the pound.

Q. What was the temper of America towards Great Britain before the year 1763?

A. The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in all their courts, obedience to acts of parliament. Numerous as the people are in the several old provinces, they cost you nothing in forts, citadels, garrisons, or armies, to keep them in subjection. They were governed by this country at the expense only of a little pen, ink, and paper. They were led by a thread. They had not only a respect, but an affection, for Great Britain, for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions, that greatly increased the commerce. Natives of Britain were always treated with particular regard; to be an Old England man was, of itself, a character of some respect, and gave a kind of rank among us.

Q. And what is their temper

now?

A. O, very much altered.

Q. And have they not still the same respect for parliament?

A. No; it is greatly lessened.
Q. To what cause is that owing?

A. To a concurrence of causes: the restraints lately laid on their trade, by which the bringing of foreign gold and silver into the colonies was prevented; the prohibition of making paper money among themselves, and then demanding a new and heavy tax for stamps; taking away at the same time trials by juries, and refusing to receive & hear their humble petitions.

Q. Don't you think they would submit to the stamp-act if it was modified, the obnoxious parts taken out, and the duties reduced to some particulars, of small moment? A. No; they will never submit to it.

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Six years ago, near the noon of a mild October day, the writer first stepped on board the dainty Lady of the Lake," one of the small steamers that ply between the places of interest on the shores of Winnipiseogee, and from its forward upper deck first enjoyed the glorious view of the lake from The Wiers, the tree-crowned islands dotting its surface, the undulations of the sweeping shores, and all those attractive features so often described by tourists, and which Edward Everett declared rivalled all he had seen from the Highlands of Scotland to the Golden Horn of Constantinople, from the summits of the Hartz Mountains to the Fountain of Vaucluse." Since then my footsteps have wandered almost yearly to this mountain lake, set like a gem in the heart of New Hampshire; but of all my annual pilgrimages none has given me greater satisfaction than the first. My other visits have been made in June, or in August, during the hot midsummer days. To see the lake in its glory, it should be visited in the fall. The sedative influence and peculiar quiet of the scene during the charming days of an Indian summer, with the bright tints of an autumnal foliage, graduating to the soft haze of the mountain blue, reflected in its waters, are most wonderful and enchanting. Then, indeed, the lake is most worthy of its aboriginal name "The Smile of the Great Spirit."

With one foot upon the very outskirts of civilization, and the other pressing the unreclaimed forest that stretches dark and unbroken northwards, Lake Winnipiseogee forms the connecting link between man and nature, a link that is naturally a quaint and curious compound of both extremes, where one may at will solace himself with all the comforts and delicacies that man's art can procure; or, turning his face northward and forestward, plunge all at once into solitude so dense and unbroken that he can, with scarcely an effort, fancy himself the solitary discoverer of a new and hitherto unknown world. The cultivation is limited around the immediate borders of the lake. Scarcely are the surroundings less wild than they were in 1652, when Captains Edward Johnson and Simon Willard carved their initials, which are still visible, on the Endicott rock near its outlet. The straggling parties of Indians, who pass by it now on their way to trade with the visitors at the great hotels in the cities and among the mountains, see it but little more civilized in expression than their forefathers did, whose wigwams, before New Hampshire felt the white man's foot, spotted the meadows of the Merrimack below,

"Where the old smoked in silence their pipes, and the young

To the pike and the white perch their baited lines flung;

Where the boy shaped his arrows, and where

the shy maid

Wove her many-hued baskets and bright wampum braid."

And yet in no way is it a sense of seclusion amid the forests, of being

shut in by untamed hills amid the heart of the wilderness, that Winnipiseogee inspires. Indeed, the lake is not shut in by any abrupt mountain walls. Its islands and shores fringe the water with winding lines, and long, low, narrow capes of green. But the mountains retreat gradually back from them, with large spaces of cheerful light, or vistas of more gently sloping land between. The whole impression is not of wild, but of cheerful and symmetrical, beauty. The form of the lake is very irregular.

At the west end are three large bays; on the north is a fourth; and at the east are three others. Its greatest length approximates thirty miles, and in width it varies from one to ten miles. Its waters lie at an altitude of five hundred feet above the sea level. The sources of the lake are principally from springs in its own bosom. Its outlet is a rapid river of the same name. Here and there along its shores, crowning pleasant hillsides, or lying in some quiet nook, are pleasant villages: Centre Harbor, Wolfeborough, Alton Bay, Lake Village are of these, but more frequently green slopes of hills and dark forests, interspersed with projecting rocks covered with moss and wild flowers, border and are reflected back by the dark blue waters. Winnipiseogee is a queen, an Indian queen if you will, but yet, like Solomon's dark beauty in the Canticles, exquisitely comely. In fact, no more beautiful lake exists under Italian or tropical skies than this same mountain-girted Winnipiseogee, with its pure, unfathomable waters, and the three hundred and sixty-five fairylike islands dotting its pellucid sur

face; one, indeed, to each day of the twelve calendar months. Is there a providence in it that this lake, as well as Lake George and Casco bay, should bear just that number of bright green gems upon their bosoms?

Famous as is Lake Winnipiseogee for its beautiful surroundings, lovely islands, and sparkling waters, there are but a few people who realize its value as a reservoir of motive power, who stop to think that it has called into being Laconia, Franklin, Concord, Hooksett, Manchester, Nashua, Lawrence, and Lowell, and that if some upheaval of nature should topple into it the hills and mountains that surround it, those places, with all their thriving industries. would wither and die. It is in reality the heart of central New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Its waters are the life blood, the source of the wealth, thrift, and prosperity of the whole Merrimack valley. The Merrimack river is said to turn a greater number of water wheels than any other of equal length on the earth, and it is capable. when all its privileges are improved, of doing much more than it does now; but the Merrimack is little more than the great lake let loose, and without that reservoir would be of small use in manufacturing.

This fact is fully realized by the Massachusetts manufacturing corporation which has control of the outlet at The Wiers, and watches with the closest attention every rise and fall of its waters, which are gathered and stored up in wet seasons and let loose in dry. The manufacturers of New Hampshire are of course as vitally interested in the matter as their Mas