NOTEBOOK by crippling the other man, but I don't see how I could do it by letting him cripple me. Emerson died while we were in New Orleans. So glad I visited him two or three weeks before. At first he did not remember me but the voyage with his son recalled me. (Probably in 1878.) Story of Bob Toombs who challenged an old deacon, who resigned from his church, made a will, then went to practicing with his rifle—whereupon Toombs backed out and was forever ruined in the eyes of the South. The romance of boating is gone now. In Hannibal the steamboatman is no longer a god. The youth don't talk river slang any more. Their pride is apparently railways— which they take a peculiar vanity in reducing to initials— an affectation which prevails all over the West. They roll these initials as a sweet morsel under the tongue. No domestic architecture twenty years ago. Now it booms in the very villages—and improves all the time. The Stewart mausoleum would not be built now. Met a passenger who spoke good English, and who after hearing a good deal of brag about great men said his country was very small and remote, but had produced two or three pretty big men; named a couple nobody ever heard of—then offered to bet that the third had been heard of, named Jesus Christ. He was born close to the Grotto, and was familiar with it. It seemed like meeting a person who had known Him. On this trip four great men died—Emerson and Long- fellow here, and Darwin and Dr. John Brown abroad.