North and South, our good cousins are fond of anniversaries and speechmakings. I wonder where they get their taste for them from? Some few veterans dine together on anniversaries of old French war days, and there is a Balaclava Dinner in the Old Country; but, though we have a reasonably long list of fighting successes to commemorate, their anniversaries are mostly left to the almanacks. The other day the Americans had a celebration of the Battle of Cowpens, wherein the heroic Morgan gave the diabolical Tarleton the deuce of a whipping. I wonder if it was worth remembering? But it is better to remember such things perhaps than Sherman's Raid or Wilderness--or Chickahominy. There are bitternesses enough remaining--the rivalries and jealousies of generals are still active and these memories might be left to die out. The great war which so deeply moved the population of the United States has left many traces in Soldiers' Homes, and men deprived of legs or arms, or bearing marks of indelible wounds, are to be met with wherever there is any considerable gathering of people all over the Union. The clerk at the bar of the hotel, to whom we were talking a moment ago, was a captain in a regiment of militia, and served with distinction, having risen to the grade he occupies by conduct and courage during the war; and if he is known among his friends by the title of "Colonel," he deserves, probably, the brevet conferred upon him by the authority of the general public around him. The conductor of the train on the Pennsylvania Railroad, to whose attention we were so much indebted, was an ex-officer of volunteers, was engaged at the first battle of Bull Run, where he was wounded, and in several other actions. And our good friend the Major, who enabled us to pass many an hour listening to his admirable rendering of negro minstrelsy, bore in his body a proof of the dangers he had passed, in the shape of a Confederate bullet, or it might have been (for I am not quite sure now) a projectile of the Federal persuasion. And so on. Scarcely a day passed that we did not meet someone who had been fighting on one side or the other. One great change has come over Americans since I was last here, and, whether it was the ridicule to which they were exposed or to a sense of their greatness as a nation that it be due, it is to be commended. Except by a professional interviewer, not one of the party was asked, "What do you think, sir, of our country?"!