The pleasant spinster from Hamburg I mentioned in my last letter as being so well read, has, I find, "drawn the line" of her information at geography and physical science. She comes out strong in Sanscrit and Greek literature (which she knows of course by translations), and in church history, but she drives me frantic by her endless talking about America, in the course of which she continually leaps without any warning from New York to Rio de Janeiro and thence to Valparaiso. She has friends in each of these localities, and it is apparently a fixed conviction of hers that they take tea together every evening. At first I tried to show her that these places were all far apart and that the ways of one were not those of the others, and from her apparent comprehension and submission I used to fancy I had succeeded; but it was only the elastic and transient bowing of the reed before the gale. A rather amusing incident occurred the other evening. I was speaking of the different classes of people that made up our population, and endeavoring to give a keen analysis of the Irish character, when she asked me to tell her something about a people we had with us called "Yankees," about whom she had heard such strange stories, and who seemed to be, if report were true, of all the peoples in the world the very worst (_das allerschlimmste_). What was their genesis and what were they? Imagine the feelings of the poor old lady, who had asked the question merely from a wish to please me by her intelligent interest in our affairs, when the truth was told her....