In this manner this volatile young savage entertained me all through the dinner, utterly superficial herself, yet possessed of a singular sharpness and wit, mostly at my expense; yet she was so charming I forgave her. There is no denying that you become enraged, insulted, chagrined by these women, who, however, by a look, dispel your annoyance. I do not understand it. I found that while an author of a novel she was grossly ignorant of the literature of her own country, yet she possessed that consummate American froth by which she could convince the average person that she was brilliant to the point of scintillation. I fancy that any keen, well-educated woman must have seen that I was laughing at her, yet so inborn was her belief that a Chinaman must be an imbecile that she was ever joking at my expense. The last story she told me illustrates the peculiar fancy for joking these women possess. I had been describing a storm at Manchester-by-the-Sea and the splendor of the ocean. "Did you see the tea-leaves?" she asked, solemnly. "No," I replied. "That is strange," she said. "I fear you are not very observing. After every storm the tea-leaves still wash up all along Massachusetts Bay," alluding to the fact that loads of tea on ships were tossed over by the Americans during the quarrel with England before the Revolution. The daring of the American woman impressed me. This same lady asked me not to remain with the men to smoke but go on the veranda with her, where _tete-a-tete_ she produced a gold cigarette-case and offered me a cigarette. This I found not uncommon. American women of the fast sets drink at the clubs; an insidious drink--the "high-ball"--is a common one, yet I never saw a woman under the influence of wine or liquor. The amount of both consumed in America, is amazing. The consumption per head in the United States for beer alone is ten and a half gallons for each of the eighty millions. My friend, a prohibitionist, a member of a political party whose object is to ruin the wine industry of the world, put it stronger, and, backed by facts, said that if the wine, beer, whisky, gin, and alcoholic drinks of all kinds and the tea and coffee drank yearly by the Americans could be collected it would make a lake two miles square and ten feet deep. The alcoholic drinks alone if collected would fill a canal one hundred miles long, one hundred feet wide, and ten feet deep. May their saints propitiate this insatiate thirst!