have been, when he knocked at the door of a modest dwelling, which, in France, would have been esteemed scarcely fit for a private gentleman, and when a female opened the door, and without parade let him into the presence of one who had created a nation and declined a crown. Washington received him with cordiality and kindness, but terrified beyond doubt at the dangers to which he was about to expose himself, attempted to dissuade the young adventurer from his enterprise. Chateaubriand, however, would not be persuaded, and soon after hired a guide and really began his journey, fancying that he had merely to go straight to the Pole, as he had gone from Saint Malo to Paris. He reached the limit of civilization, in what was then considered a short time, and with indescribable joy found himself amid the dark and mysterious forests of the new world, where it seemed _to him_, no human foot had ever been planted before. He thus describes his sensations, when his soul first became replete with astonishment and amazement at the magnificence of the scene. “I wandered from tree to tree, now turning to the right and then to the left, saying to myself, here there are no beaten paths, no restricted dwelling places; presidents, kings and oligarchies, have no power here. By way of exhibiting my freedom from all control, I committed countless wild pranks, which made the steady Dutchman, who was my guide, fancy me a fool.” The young lieutenant, however, looked anxiously for one of those Indian villages, in which the children of nature, the men of the soil, might certainly be found. His first essay, however, by no means impressed him favorably in relation to the true Native Americans. After a journey of several days, he saw in the depth of a forest, compared with which, all France was but a park, a wigwam from which strange sounds issued, and which in that place must have astonished him indeed. He listened with attention, and heard a well known “_chant populaire_” of France, with an accompaniment wrung from a violin, which certainly, Stradivarius never made. The wanderer entered the hut, and amid a bevy of Indians, who danced as if Saint Vitus had touched them, he saw an old man of diminutive stature, with his hair “_à l’oisseau royal_,” with a green coat, a coarse vest, cut however, _à l’agonie_ de Louis XV., ruffles and wristbands of coarse cotton, busy in teaching a dozen Iroquois to dance the cotillion and _minuet de la cour_. The teacher’s name was Violet, and strange to say, he was the progenitor of that individual of the same name, made so famous by the late Captain Marryatt. Violet had been a servant of the Count Rochambeau, and had been induced to establish himself on one of the little lakes in New York, amid the Iroquois.—French nature and human nature are however, different entirely, and the _valet de chambre_ had begun to civilize North American Indians, from the _point du départ de la danse_.