He proceeded to ask a great number of questions, but I cut him short, saying, "You must excuse me, my good friend, for keeping up some of my Old English prejudices here, while you and I are alone together. From me you shall hear none of the particulars, though I dare say Mr. Byles will tell you all about it. With us, it is a matter of etiquette for a principal in such an affair to talk about it to no one but his second." "Oh, very well," he answered; "perhaps you are right. In my part of the country, I mean the part where I was born, they carry matters further than even you do in England, for they won't let us fight at all, and send a man to the penitentiary for asking his friend to take a morning's walk with him. In fact, the three great distinctions between the North and South are these. In the South, they fight duels whenever they can; have slaves for their servants; and grow tobacco and cotton. In New England, they never fight if they can help it; are slaves to their own servants, and make wooden clocks and wooden nutmegs." Probably one could not have had a more serviceable or amusing companion, when going about a disagreeable piece of business, than Mr. Wheatley. There was a lightness, or, to use a vulgar expression, a devil-may-carishness about his conversation which imperceptibly led one away from serious views, even of a serious business; and when I got out of his carriage, at the door of Mr. Byles's house, I could have fired a pistol at an antagonist without half the hesitation and remorse which I should have felt an hour before. The house of Mr. Byles was very different from any gentleman's dwelling I had yet seen in Virginia, and was indeed an ornamented sort of cottage--the reality of that whereof we see many imitations in Great Britain. It was all upon one floor--unless indeed there were rooms for the servants upstairs, which I do not know--and parlours, dining-room, bedrooms, &c, stretched out in a confused sort of labyrinth, which I did not attempt to penetrate any further than I was led by others. An enormous swarm of little black boys, with one respectable elderly gentleman of the same colour, were all ready to receive us: and, by the way in which they climbed into Mr. Wheatley's carriage, seized upon all the loose articles it contained, and carried them off, Heaven knows whither, they put me in mind of the little hairy savages, which boarded the ship of Sinbad the sailor, during one of his marvellous voyages. None of them seemed to know anything about their master, however. It was a thing recognized and understood, that whoever came to the house was to make himself comfortable--that the house would contain any possible number, and that all that was in it was at the disposal of the guests.