two girls, there were a grey-haired elderly man, two younger gentlemen, and three or four mounted blacks in suits of striped cotton, one of whom led a couple of hounds in a long leash, while another had a buck strapped behind him on the horse. “Is the poor gentleman much hurt?” asked one of the young ladies in a sweet kind voice. Ichabod, as bold as a lion in general, was awkward and bashful when addressed by a lady, and seemed to be weighing the words of his answer, when I felt it necessary to reply for myself. On discovering that I was a stranger in the land, General Warfield insisted that I should accompany the party to his house, just across the Missouri border, where my injured thumb should receive every attention, and where he and his family would gladly welcome me. Yielding willingly to this hospitable persuasion, I permitted Ichabod and one of the negroes to help me to remount my mustang, and we rode towards the Missouri boundary. The family whose acquaintance I had just made in so singular a way, bore no similarity to the travelling Americans whom it had previously fallen to my lot to encounter. General Warfield, his son, daughters, and nephew, had the well-bred air and unobtrusive demeanour which I had hitherto deemed exclusively insular. They asked me no abrupt questions as to my station or errand: they indulged in no diatribes against my country, nor in any extravagant laudations of their own; and I might have fancied myself the guest of some long-descended family at home, but for the wild scenes and unusual objects that met my eye as we rode along. It turned out that General Warfield, a retired military officer, _not_ a militiaman, was of an old Virginian family, and had migrated to the newer soil of Missouri six years ago. There his children had grown to be men and women, in the hardy habits of that wild country, a mere outpost of civilisation; and indeed they were returning from a hunting expedition into Iowa when they stumbled upon me in my prostrate condition. Three hours’ ride brought us to the General’s house, a large building of mingled wood and stone, with a pretty garden on one hand, and on the other the farm-buildings, the corrals for horses and cattle, and the negro huts. Within I found furniture of old-fashioned dark mahogany, partridge-wood, and bird’s-eye maple, old family pictures, pretty knickknacks picked up during a three years’ residence in Europe, and the massive silver plate which had been handed down from father to son ever since the ancestral Warfield settled in Virginia in the reign of Charles I. I never knew anything so _un_-American, in respect to the usual standard of comparison, as the mode of life, the bearing, and tastes, of General Warfield and his high-spirited and amiable children. Here was no exaggeration of sentiment, no outrageous national vanity, no rude indifference to the feelings of others, no prying, no pretension. I felt, as I conversed with them, how wide was the gulf that severed the