My father and I remained between five and six months at Cincinnati, and my remembrances of the time are pleasant ones. In the way of amusement, to the best of my recollection, there was not much besides rambling over the country with my brother, the old companion of those London rambles which seemed to me then almost as far off in the dim past as they do now. But we were free, tied to no bounds, and very slightly to any hours. And I enjoyed those rambles immensely. I do not remember that the country about Cincinnati struck me as especially interesting or beautiful, and the Ohio, _la belle rivière_, distinctly disappointed me. But it was a new world, and every object, whether animate or inanimate, was for us full of interest. Looking back to those Cincinnati days, I have to say that I liked the Americans, principally, I think, at that time, as far as my remembrances serve, because some quality in their manners and behaviour had the effect of making me less shy with them than with others. I was then, and to a great degree have never ceased to be, painfully shy. How miserably this weakness afflicts those who suffer from it, how it disqualifies them and puts them at a disadvantage in circumstances constantly recurring, those who are free from it cannot imagine. And they glorify their superiority by saying all sorts of hard things of those who suffer from shyness--very unjustly in my opinion. Shyness proceeds in almost all cases, I should say probably in all, from diffidence. A man who thinks sufficiently well of himself is never shy. Did any one ever see a vain man shy? I do not think the Americans are an especially vain people; but there are specialties of their social condition which lead to every American citizen’s estimate of himself, from the cradle upwards, being equal to his estimate of any other man. And one consequence of this is a certain frank and unconstrained manner in their intercourse with strangers or new acquaintances which is invaluable to a shy man.