I have tried in vain to put the young man upon his guard. Give them hair and complexion, and they are deaf adders all; yet what is that compared to principle, and some notion of cooking? Miss Pomeroy asks for nothing if she has a box of sweets; yet only the other day I heard her confess to eating bread and cheese in an inn, along with that unfortunate young man, who probably considered it a proof of simplicity. He is sadly mistaken. Ten courses at dinner is the ordinary thing in New York, I believe, one of them canvas-back ducks upon ice! By three o'clock, when this horrid meal was over, Mrs. Pomeroy and I were both so chilled and fatigued that I sent Cecilia to entreat that the woman of the inn would allow us to rest for an hour in a room where there were no drunkards. We were conducted to a small bedchamber, where I lay down on the bed, while Mrs. Pomeroy had a nap upon two chairs. Like myself, she is always troubled by a tendency to breathlessness after eating--and even lunch in a ditch is a meal, of course. She also talked a little about her daughter in perhaps a pardonable strain for a mother, who can scarcely be expected to realise what the girl really is. A Mr. Calhoun of Richmond, a suburb of New York, appears to have paid her some attentions. She must have greatly exaggerated them to her mother, for Mrs. Pomeroy evidently believes that it is fully in her power to marry the young man if she likes. It will be a merciful escape for Sir Archibald for a while, even though they can be divorced so easily in New York. SIR ARCHIBALD MAXWELL MACKENZIE