The little page-boy had a pet of a wooly head. Henry once gave him a tip--"fee," as they call it in America--and said: "There, that's for a new wig when this one is worn out," gently pulling the astrakhan-like hair. The tip would have bought him many wigs, I think! "Why, Uncle Tom, how your face shines to-night!" said my hostess to one of the very old servants. "Yes, Missie, glycerine and rose-water, Missie!" He had taken some from her dressing-table to shine up his face in honor of me! A shiny complexion is considered to be a great beauty among the negroes! The dear old man! He was very bent and very old; and looked like one of the logs that he used to bring in for the fire--a log from some hoary, lichened tree whose life was long since past. He would produce a pin from his head when you wanted one; he had them stuck in his pad of white wooly hair: "Always handy then, Missie," he would say. "Ask them to sing 'Sweet Violets,' Uncle Tom." He was acting as a sort of master of the ceremonies at the entertainment the servants were giving me. "Don't think they know dat, Miss Olly." "Why, I heard them singing it the other night!" And she hummed the tune. "Oh, dat was 'Sweet Vio-_letts_,' Miss Olly!" Washington was the first city I had seen in America where the people did not hurry, and where the social life did not seem entirely the work of women. The men asserted themselves here as something more than machines in the background untiringly turning out the dollars, while their wives and daughters give luncheons and teas at which only women are present. Beautifully as the women dress, they talk very little about clothes. I was much struck by their culture--by the evidences that they had read far more and developed a more fastidious taste than most young Englishwomen. Yet it is all mixed up with extraordinary na•vetŽ. The vivacity, the appearance, at least, of _reality_, the animation, the energy of American women delighted me. They are very sympathetic, too, in spite of a certain callousness which comes of regarding everything in life, even love, as "lots of fun." I did not think that they, or the men either, had much natural sense of beauty. They admire beauty in a curious way through their intellect. Nearly every American girl has a cast of the winged Victory of the Louvre in her room. She makes it a point of her _education_ to admire it. There! I am beginning to generalize--the very thing I was resolute to avoid. How silly to generalize about a country which embraces such extremes of climate as the sharp winters of Boston and New York and the warm winds of Florida which blow through palms and orange groves! XII SOME LIKES AND DISLIKES