being by way of Camden and Amboy, and thence up the bay twenty miles or so, to the battery in New York. There was no such thing as a dining car, a buffet car or a drawing room car in all the land. There were none but hand brakes on the trains, and the cars were held together by loose coupling links. The rails were not fastened together at their badly laminated ends, and it was the fashion to call trains that reached a maximum speed of twenty miles an hour, “lightning expresses,” and to stop them at every little wayside station. The engines were fed upon wood, and it was a common thing for trains to stop their intolerable jolting for full twenty minutes to take fresh supplies of wood and water. There was immeasurably more of weariness then, in a journey from Richmond or Cincinnati or Buffalo to New York, than would be tolerated now in a trip across the continent. As a consequence few people travelled except for short distances and a journey which we now think nothing of making comfortably in a single night, was then a matter of grave consequence, to be undertaken only after much deliberation and with much of preparation. New York seemed more distant to the dweller in the West or South than Hong Kong and Yokohama do in our time, and the number of people who had journeyed beyond the borders of our own country was so small that those who had done so were regarded as persons of interestingly adventurous experience. Quite necessarily all parts of the country were markedly provincial in speech, manner, habits and even in dress. New England had a nasal dialect of its own, so firmly rooted in use that it has required two or three generations of exacting Yankee school marms to eradicate it from the speech even of the educated class. New York state had another, and the Southerner was known everywhere by a speech which “bewrayed” him. And as it was with speech, so also was it with manners, customs, ideas. Prejudice was everywhere rampant, opinion intolerant, and usage merciless in its narrow illiberality. Only in what was then the West--the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi--was there anything of cosmopolitan liberality and tolerance. They were found in that region because the population of the West had been drawn from all parts of the country. Attrition of mind with mind, and the mingling of men of various origin had there in a large degree worn off the angles of provincial prejudice and bred a liberality of mind elsewhere uncommon in our country. Edmonia and Dorothy were to make their formidable journey to New York in easy stages. They remained for several days with friends in Richmond, while completing those preliminary preparations which were necessary before setting out for the national capital. They were to stay in Washington for a fortnight, in Baltimore for three weeks, in Philadelphia for a week or two, and in New York for nearly two months before sailing for Europe in May.