but the latter grew rank and long, unshorn and untidy. "Oh," thought I, "for a pair of English shears, to make these green carpets as smooth and soft and thick as the close-piled Genoa velvet." It looked neglected and slovenly. Came home up Broadway, which is a long street of tolerable width, full of shops, in short the American Oxford Road, where all people go to exhibit themselves and examine others. The women that I have seen hitherto have all been very gaily dressed, with a pretension to French style, and a more than English exaggeration of it. They all appear to me to walk with a French shuffle, which, as their pavements are flat, I can only account for by their wearing shoes made in the French fashion, which are enough in themselves to make a waddler of the best walker that ever set foot to earth. Two or three were pretty girls; but the town being quite empty, these are probably bad specimens of the graces and charms that adorn Broadway in its season of shining. Came home and had tea; after which my father, I, and Mr. ---- crossed the Park (a small bit of grass enclosed in white palings, in plain English, a green) to the theatre. Wallack was to act in the Rent Day. Mercy, how strange I felt as I once more set foot in a theatre; the sound of the applause set my teeth on edge. The house is pretty, though rather gloomy, well formed, about the size of the Haymarket, with plenty of gold carving, and red silk about it, looking rich and warm. The audience was considerable, but all men; scarce, I should think, twenty women in the dress circle, where, by the by, as well as in the private boxes, I saw men sitting with their hats on. The Rent Day is a thorough melodrama, only the German monster has put on a red waistcoat and top boots. Nathless this is a good thing of a bad sort: the incidents, though not all probable, or even as skilfully tacked together as they might be, are striking and dramatically effective, and the whole piece turns on those home feelings, those bitterest realities of every-day life, that wring one's heart, beyond the pain that one allows works of fiction to excite. As for the imitation of Wilkie's pictures, the first was very pretty, but the second I did not see, my face being buried in my handkerchief, besides having a quarter less seven fathom of tears over it, at the time. I cried most bitterly during the whole piece; for as in his very first scene Wallack asks his wife if she will go with him to America, and she replies, "What! leave the farm?" I set off from thence and ceased no more. The manager's wife and another woman were in the box, which was his, and I thought we should have carried away the front of it with our tears. Wallack played admirably: I had never seen him before, and was greatly delighted with his acting. I thought him handsome of a rustic kind, the very thing for the part he played, a fine English yeoman: he reminded me of ----. At the end of the play, came