of me as an intimate friend of the writer. The friendship was not stated as a matter of fact, but so conveyed that it cost me much trouble to make it understood and believed, even by Mr. Willis’s own family, that I had never seen him but once, and then without having previously heard so much as his name. On my return the acquaintance who brought him was anxious to ask pardon if he had done mischief, events having by that time made Mr. Willis’s ways pretty well known. His partner in the property and editorship of the ‘New York Mirror’ called on me at West Point, and offered and rendered such extraordinary courtesy that I was at first almost as much perplexed as he and his wife were when they learned that I had never seen Mr. Willis but once. They pondered, they consulted, they cross-questioned me, they inquired whether _I_ had any notion what Mr. Willis could have meant by writing of me as in a state of close intimacy with him. In like manner, when, some time after, I was in a carriage with some members of a picnic party to Monument Mountain, a little girl seated at my feet clasped my knees fondly, looked up in my face, and said, ‘O Miss Martineau! You are _such_ a friend of my Uncle Nathaniel’s!’ Her father was present; and I tried to get off without explanation. But it was impossible,--they all knew how very intimate I was with Nathaniel; and there was a renewal of the amazement at my having seen him only once. I tried three of his letters; and the reception was in each case much the same,--a throwing down of the letter with an air not to be mistaken. In each case the reply was the same, when I subsequently found myself at liberty to ask what this might mean. ‘Mr. Willis is not entitled to write to me: he is no acquaintance of mine.’ As for the two ladies of whom I was especially to beware, I became exceedingly well acquainted with them, to my own advantage and pleasure; and, as a natural consequence, I discovered Mr. Willis’s reasons for desiring to keep us apart. I hardly need add that I burned the rest of his letters. He had better have spared himself the trouble of so much manœuvring, by which he lost a good deal, and could hardly have gained anything. I have simply stated the facts, because, in the first place, I do not wish to be considered one of Mr. Willis’s friends; and, in the next, it may be useful, and conducive to justice, to show, by a practical instance, what Mr. Willis’s pretensions to intimacy are worth. His countrymen and countrywomen accept, in simplicity, his accounts of our aristocracy as from the pen of one of their own coterie; and they may as well have the opportunity of judging for themselves whether their notorious ‘Penciller’ is qualified to write of Scotch dukes and English marquises and European celebrities of all kinds in the way he has