It was not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid,
fathomless sense of diversion.
He encountered by chance in Holland a young American, with whom, for
a time, he formed a sort of traveler's partnership. They were men of a
very different cast, but each, in his way, was so good a fellow that,
for a few weeks at least, it seemed something of a pleasure to share
the chances of the road. Newman's comrade, whose name was Babcock, was
a young Unitarian minister, a small, spare, neatly-attired man, with
a strikingly candid physiognomy. He was a native of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in
another suburb of the New England metropolis. His digestion was weak and
he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy--a regimen to which he was
so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted
when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies did
not flourish under the table d'hote system. In Paris he had purchased
a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itself an American
Agency, and at which the New York illustrated papers were also to
be procured, and he had carried it about with him, and shown extreme
serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position of having his
hominy prepared for him and served at anomalous hours, at the hotels he
successively visited.
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