Strange as it may sound, the traveller sometimes finds it difficult to carry on an argument with an American, on account of his complete ignorance of the subject upon which he will go on arguing; or, worse still, from his wonderful misconceptions, for some of which he may possibly be indebted to rural orators and rural newspapers. I was in this way myself often reminded of what a well-known American editor said to me—of course very much exaggerating the fact; still, however, his remark may have some grains of truth in it, ‘that his countrymen were, and must long continue to be, in matters out of their own business, and beyond their own country, the most ignorant people in the civilised world.’ Another difficulty one occasionally meets with is that you do not know how much you are to discount from the speaker’s grand phrases, in order to arrive at his own meaning; for it sometimes happens that the ideas that are in his own mind are very inadequate to the language he uses to express them. I was, for instance, for several days thrown into close contact with a very gentlemanly, well-spoken, well-mannered merchant, who had seen something of the world, for his business had frequently taken him to South America and to Europe. On one occasion he astonished me by affirming ‘that the farmers, of all classes in the United States, possessed the finest intellects.’ Anybody else would have meant by these words, that among them were to be found the most powerful and most cultivated intellects—minds great in imaginative power, or in the power of apprehending political, or speculative, or scientific truth. But of these uses of the intellect my companion had not so much as the germ of a conception. To nothing of this kind had his sight ever reached. What he meant by the finest intellect was just this: a mind capable of giving a pretty correct practical judgment on the ordinary occurrences of daily business. At another time the same gentleman startled me by the announcement ‘that many of the blacks were very fine scholars.’ After a time it became evident that he had no conception of scholarship beyond the elements of reading and writing, and the power of keeping accounts accurately. If a man had attained to the point of doing these things with ease, he had achieved everything; for my companion had caught no glimpse of anything beyond. [Sidenote: _What one may Repeat._]