The sameness of ideas, of expressions, of faces, became unbearable. I could tell quite well by the look of men’s faces what news they had heard, and what they were saying or going to say about it. Here were crafty politicals and practical men of business, and persons of a philosophical and reflective temperament, as well as the foolish, the mere pleasure-hunters, and the unthinking mass of an hotel world, all looking forward to a near to-morrow to end the woes of the state, always waiting for a “decisive” battle or “an indignant uprising of the people” to drive the Republicans out of power and office. Not one of them could or would see that the contest, when terminated, would give birth to others--that the vast bodies of diverse interests, prejudices, hatreds, and wrongs set in motion by war over so enormous a surface, where they had been kept suspended and inert by the powers of compromise, could never be reconsolidated and restored to the same state as before, and that it would be the work of time, the labour of many years, ere they could settle to rest in any shape whatever. I am told respectable Americans do not use the word “Britisher,” but I am bound to say I heard Americans who looked very respectable using the word at the time of which I speak, when there was still irritation on both sides in consequence of the surrender of Mason and Slidell--in the minds of the friends of the South, because they were balked in their anticipation of a foreign war; in the Federal mind, because, after much threatening and menaces, they had seen the captives surrendered to the British by the President, or, more properly speaking, by Mr. Seward. Hence it was, perhaps, that Canada was always mentioned in such a tone of contempt, as though the speakers sought to relieve their feelings by abuse of a British dependency. “Goin’ to Canada!” exclaimed the faithful Milesian who had been my attendant--in fact, my substitute for a nurse. “Lord help us! _That’s_ a poor place, anyhow. I thought you’d be contint wid the snow we’ve got here. It’s plinty, anyhow. But Canada!” The man had never been there in his life, but he spoke as if it were beyond the bounds of civilisation. He had served in a British regiment for many years; many of his brothers had been, I think he told me, in the service, but now they were all in the States, and to his notion thriving like himself. In no country on earth is an old nationality so soon absorbed as in America. I am inclined to think the regard professed for England by American literary men is sentimental, and is produced by education and study rather than by any feeling transmitted in families or by society.