The conversation generally turned upon agricultural matters, in which, of course, they were all deeply interested--in fact, so interested, that they interested us. We could not help observing how much better educated they seem to be than the same class at home. Two lively young fellows entered into a brisk discussion as to the relative superiority of their different States. One, a tall, lanky, loose-jointed specimen, was a landowner in “Alabama”--or “Alabawmer,” as he called it, with a by no means unpleasant drawl; the other was a restless, eager-eyed young Texan, as full of quips and cranks as a young monkey. He seemed to regard life generally as a good joke, and turned everything into a laugh; sometimes the laugh was against himself, but he was shrewd and sensible enough, though he had a queer, quaint way of handling his subject. It was a pleasant journey on the whole; their rough-and-ready talk was amusing, and gave us a new view of life in the wilds. Their account of the various methods of cultivating lands in the different States was most interesting, and we wish we could drop these grains of useful knowledge among those who could benefit by it. The seeds we sow and the harvests we gather have little to do with the agricultural interests. Our conductor, as usual, when he has leisure from his official duties, lounges across to our section and enters into a pleasant conversation with us. He discusses the social, political, and literary questions of the day with sound good sense and much discrimination. He opens his stores of knowledge freely, and shows us through every department of his mind; as one door shuts he opens another, takes a header, and plunges from one subject to another without any preliminary leading up thereto; he seems determined to make the best use of his time, and show us how much worldly and intellectual gossip can be gathered in the wilds of Alabama. He reminds us of the clever tradesman who conducts you through the warehouse where all his best goods are on exhibition. He embellished his conversation with poetical quotations from Tennyson and Shakespeare, and occasionally fished up from the depths of his memory a mysterious passage of Browning and tried to make sense of it. He endeavoured, but failed, to extract the poet’s meaning from the conglomerated mass of fine phrases and high-sounding words with which he had scrupulously clothed and concealed it, as though he never intended anybody ever should find it out; and, indeed, if he entered on the quest, might have some difficulty in finding it out himself. Our conductor appears to be a devotee of the drama, too, and is not disposed to hide his light under a bushel. He waxed critical on the subject of Modjeska’s Juliet and Bernhardt’s Camille; he had seen both once when he had been travelling East. The time passed so pleasantly that we were sorry when his duties called him away, but they did not very often. Our agricultural