The line between the North and the South seems very sharply drawn in more respects than one. We were scarcely well out of Louisville before delays and stoppages commenced; and though the country was pleasant enough to look at in the bright, fall days, it was not necessary to stop from noon till nightfall in one place, to fully enjoy the pleasure. Another drawback to this pleasure was the reliance we had placed on the statement of the railroad agent, who told us it was quite unnecessary to carry a lunch-basket "on this route." Since we had found a lunch-basket, if not really cumbersome, at least not at all indispensable, from Sacramento to Omaha, we saw no reason why we should drag it with us through a civilized country, and consequently suffered the penalty of believing what a railroad ticket-agent said. In another section of the same sleeping-car with us was a party who had been wiser than we, and had brought loads of provisions with them. No wonder: they were Southerners, and had learned not to depend on the infallibility of their peculiar institutions. The head of the party was a little lady of twenty-five or thirty years, with pale, colorless face, and perfectly bloodless lips. I should have gone into all sorts of wild speculations about her--should have fancied how a sudden, dread fright had chased all the rosy tints from her lips back to her heart, during some terrible incident of the war; or how the news, too rashly told, of some near, dear friend stricken down by the fatal bullet, had curdled the red blood in her veins, and turned it to ice before it reached her cheeks--had she not been so vigorous and incessant a scold. Now it was the French waiting-maid to whom she administered a long, bitter string of cutting rebukes, while the unfortunate girl was lacing up my lady's boots; next it was her younger sister--whom she was evidently bringing home from school--whose lips she made to quiver with her sharp words; and then, for a change, the mulatto servant was summoned, by the well-scolded waiting-maid, to receive his portion of the sweets meted out. An ugly thing she was, and so different from the Southern lady I had met in the hotel at Louisville--one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen--whose grace nothing could exceed as she handed me a basket of fruit across the table, when one glance had told her that I was a stranger and tired out with the heat and travel.