Mr. Arlington's smiling glance was again turned on me; and I met it with a hearty laugh. "Indeed, Aunt Nancy," said the Colonel, who seemed strangely annoyed at my laughter, "I think your friend does you little credit, and I can only hope that he had some of these lordly airs drubbed out of him at the West." As Col. Donaldson spoke he threw down the engraving which he had held, and pushed his chair from the table. "I assure you, sir," I replied, "my friend has as few lordly airs as it is possible to conceive in one born to such lordly circumstances. It was not my intention to impose on you that picture as an actual likeness of him--though had you ever seen him I might easily have done so, as it really resembles him very much in his personal traits." "Well, I am glad he did not sit for this picture," said Col. Donaldson; "now I can listen to your story with some pleasure." "Thank you; you must first take some reflections suggested to me by the incidents I have here narrated. Of the character of these reflections, you will form some conception from the title I have given to the tale into which I have interwoven them. I have called it "LIFE IN AMERICA." "Men and Manners in America" was the comprehensive title of a book issued some fifteen or twenty years ago, by a gentleman from Scotland, to whom, we fear, Americans have never tendered the grateful acknowledgments he deserved for his disinterested efforts to teach them to eat eggs properly, and to give due time to the mastication of their food. This benevolently instructive work was the precursor of a host of others on the same topics, and others of a kindred character. America has been the standard subject for the trial essays of European tyros in philosophy, political economy, and book-making in general. Society in America has been presented, it would seem, in all its aspects--religious, educational, industrial, political, commercial, and fashionable. Our schools and our prisons, our churches and our theatres, have been in turn the subject of investigation, of unqualified censure, and of scarcely less unqualified laudation.