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that there is a great deal of amiability in the way the superiors manage and deal with them in their visits. The white attendants are more like the French bonne than the English waiting-woman. They are all occupied about the dressings and goings to and fro, offering opinions as to what suits complexion, and hints as to what is becoming, such as only a highly indulged servant would think of giving in England.

Some of the party made their way to an upper room, where the numerous and munificent gifts to the bride had been arranged for the purpose of being shewn merely to relatives. The admiration. of beautiful things soon reached the ears of those below, and troop after troop ascended, and exclaimed, and admired, contrary to the intention of the lord of the mansion, who, finding his instructions illunderstood, or at least ill-obeyed, sent a messenger, who most relentlessly locked the doors by which the parties had made their way into a neighbouring chamber. It is the plan of most houses to have all the chambers opening into one another. This was rather a comical scrape-a whole train of ladies and gentlemen locked up as if they had been suspected of designing to carry something away. The amiable lady of the house made her way in, and apologised very handsomely for the series of mistakes, and suffered the culprits to escape without farther punishment.

"The reception" having poured out its multitude, the bride and bridegroom were at last emancipated, and made a retreat to procure some food, and to dress for travelling-and presently they slipt away by a side-door, where the drawing up of their carriage was concealed from the public gaze-and the scene of light-hearted mirth having passed the element in which those who are equipped in perpetual sable feel at home, my friend and I, by the same private door, obtained our chariot too, and returned to town.

As a proof of the easy manner of the domestics, it may be worth while to mention, that the one who opened the door for us on our return, said, “Well, ladies, I hope you have enjoyed your day"—a kind of sympathy much more natural than the assumed automatonism of an English servant, who goes through all evolutions as if he had no comprehension of what you are about, and cared as little as if you were in the bottom of the sea.

The pieces of cake which we brought home were in pretty card-board boxes tied with white ribbons. Indeed, on occasion of two of the servants making a match, while I stayed in the house of another friend, during the winter, they presented five such boxes, so tied, to the ladies of the family and their guests. People of all ranks in America do such things in a dashing style. They earn money quickly, and spend it freely. We also brought home some

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splendid bunches of flowers, and related all our wonders, and wished the dear young people happiness, but, being tolerably exhausted by the long day of excitement, went to rest, glad that we need not rise to dress for another wedding to-morrow.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CITIES.

THE traveller marvels at the well-laid-out and nearly filled up streets of Buffalo, which a few years ago consisted of but a store and a hotel-and the gathering throng at Geneva, with the extensive saltworks of Salina, where lately there was only the haunt of the red hunter-and the orderly and thriving population of Rochester, loading canal-boats with pile on pile of sacks and casks, containing grain, flour, butter, cheese, and all the bountiful produce of a very rich country. He hears of Troy and Utica, and all manner of ancient names, till he is at a loss to remember in which era of time he lives, and on which quarter of the globe he stands. But he feels it is all new-the growth of yesterday. He need but go a few roods from most of these flourishing cities, to fall in with black stumps, obstinately holding their room in the fields of winter wheat; or lopped and girdled trees like so many criminals awaiting their doom; or whole acres of fir wrenched up by a machine, their once sky-point

ing tops prone in the coarse and fenny grass, and their roots standing in the air, like the fangs of a strong tooth that has been drawn from its place by an engine not less stern and resolute. The forest seems ancient like mother earth, and like the deep blue sky-but the cities are like parvenus, all new, and smart, and bright; so that, when from the nor'-west you get down to Albany, you feel as if you had reached a very ancient place, parts of it reminding one of Holland with a sort of modern square cut about it.

Washington, were the spaces filled up between its very magnificent public edifices, would be very grand. Baltimore, with its tasteful monuments and fine rivers, is filled up; its regular orderly streets giving one a little breathing of up hill and down dale; reminding Scotch folks of Jeanie Deans' delight at having her legs rested by climbing Gunnerbury hill, after two or three hundred miles of plain walking. Philadelphia is full of philanthropists and philanthropic institutions; is clean, handsome, and orderly as a young quaker's pasteboard bonnet. Hartford, with its fine streets, and fine trees, and all the histories attached to them-New Haven, with its avenue of elms, like the interlacing roofs of an ancient cathedral-Boston, majestic, graceful, with its beautifully laid out common and height crowned by its noble state house-these, and many more, one traverses with an ever-rising perception of the civilisation, wealth, taste, and beauty of the country.

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