No one, I suppose, will so mistake my meaning as to imagine that I mention anecdotes of this kind with any wish to raise a laugh at the expense of the people I travelled among. It seems almost impertinent to remark that there are plenty of people in America who are very well informed, and plenty of people who express their ideas with perfect correctness. Their system, however, of equal education, and of equal chances to all, brings a great many to the front (and small blame to them for such a result), who—this I suppose to have been the history of the casual fellow-traveller whose expressions I have just repeated—never had any education but that of the common primary schools, and never afterwards had time for reading anything but newspapers, and never attempted to master anything except the details of their own business. This must be the case with many. Many others, however, there are, as is very well known, who have used what was acquired at the common primary school as a foundation for a solid and extensive structure of after acquisitions. My object is to give a correct idea of America, and of the different kinds of Americans the traveller in the United States meets with, as they were seen by myself. If omissions are made, this object cannot be answered, and so what I might say would convey only erroneous conceptions. One is generally precluded from making any reference to what he saw or heard in private houses; but there are no reasons for silence as to what took place at tables-d’hôte, and in railway cars, on board steam-boats, and in coaches: all this was said and done in public. And besides, most of the people who in America make laughable observations would, considering the point from which they started, have had no observations at all to make, had their lot been cast on this side the water, or anywhere else excepting in the United States. ‘Sir,’ said a gentleman to me one morning at breakfast (we were seated together at a small table in one of the large hotels of a great city in the Valley of the Mississippi),—‘Sir, have you seen our Forest?’ ‘Sir,’ I replied, ‘for the last thousand miles and more, since I left Richmond, I have scarcely seen anything else.’ ‘Sir,’ my interrogator responded with an indignant tone, ‘I am not speaking of the material, but of the intellectual Forest—of our Forest—the great Forest—the grandest delineator of the sublime and of the ridiculous in the united world.’ I afterwards found that this grand delineator of the ridiculous was the actor Forest, who is not unknown professionally in this country, and who was playing in the town I was then staying at. I also found that his admirer was a dealer in ready-made clothes, who took his meals at the hotel.