with us, and their companionship made the journey very agreeable, though it was as hot as the Lower Danube, and the dust more uncomfortable and dirtying than any we have at home. Most part of the way the soil is as light and sandy as that about Dorking, and the trains seem to raise greater clouds of it. The greater part of the journey was along the banks of the Merrimac, a fine river with as much water as the Thames at Richmond, I should say, but spread over a bed generally twice as broad. We saw the White Mountains at a distance on our left, and passed through a number of flourishing towns. The thing that struck me most was the apparent fusion into one class of the whole community. As you know, every one goes into the same long carriages, holding from sixty to eighty people. Of these there were four or often five on our train, and I often passed through them (as you may do, up the middle, without disturbing the passengers, who sit in pairs with their faces to the engine on each side of the passage), as there was a great deal of local traffic, seventy people often getting out at a station, I thus saw really a very considerable number of people on this first day in the States, and certainly should have been exceedingly puzzled to sort them in the broadest way, either into rich and poor, gentlemen or ladies (in the conventional sense) and common people, or any other radical division. I certainly saw at some stations children running about without shoes, and workmen in as dirty blouses as those of Europe; but in the trains they were all well dressed, quiet, self-respecting people, without any pretence to polish, or any approach to vulgarity. The bad taste in women’s dress, which I am told to expect elsewhere, does not certainly prevail in New England. All the women wore neat short dresses, with moderate trimmings according to taste; but I did not see an extravagant garment or, I am bound to add, a really pretty one along the whole line. On the whole I thought the women as good looking as any I have ever travelled amongst, but paler and sadder, or at any rate quieter, than a like number of Englishwomen. Once or twice men in stove-pipe hats (the ordinary tile of so-called civilisation), and wearing perhaps better cloth and whiter linen than the average, got in, but not one whom you would have picked out as a person bred and brought up in a different way, and occupying a station above or apart from the rest, as you see in every train in England. It may have been chance, but certainly it was startling. Then another surprise. They are certainly the least demonstrative people so far as strangers are concerned that I have ever been amongst. I had the prevailing idea that a Yankee was a note of interrogation walking about the world, and besides craving for all sorts of information about you, was always ready to impart to you the particulars of his own birth, parentage, and education, and his opinion on everything, “from Adam’s