I have played many parts since on various stages in different parts of the world, but that, I think, was my sole Shakesperian attempt. And the members of that merry and kindly theatrical company! They have made their last exit from the larger boards we are all treading, every man and woman, every lad and lass of them. Not one but the old Falstaff of the company remains to write this chronicle of sixty years since! There were very few formal meetings among the notabilities of the little Cincinnati world of that time, but there was an amount of homely friendliness that impressed me very favourably; and there was plenty of that generous and abounding hospitality which subsequent experience has taught me to consider an especially American characteristic. I have since that time shared the splendid hospitality of splendid American hosts, and I have been under American roofs where there was little save a heartfelt welcome to offer. But the heartwarming effect produced by the latter was the same in both cases. How often have we all sat at magnificent boards where the host’s too evident delight consisted in giving you what you could not give him, and in the exulting manifestation of his magnificence. This is very rarely the feeling of an American host. He is thinking not of himself, but of you; and the object he is striving at when giving you of his best is that you should enjoy yourself while under his roof; that you should have, as he would phrase it, “a good time.” And upon my word he almost invariably succeeds. Nor were the Cincinnati girls in 1829 like the New York belles of 1887. But there was much of the same charm about them, which arises from unaffected and unself-regarding desire to please. American girls are accused of being desperate flirts. But many an Englishman has been deceived by imagining that the smiles and cheerfulness and laughing chatter of some charming girl new to Europe were intended for _his_ special benefit, when they were in truth only the perfectly natural and unaffected outcome of a desire to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her! Only beams falling, like those of the sun, upon the just and the unjust alike!