and conversation going on between the ladies and
gentlemen then and there assembled, made one quite forget we were at sea
on Lake Ontario, the "Beautiful Lake," which, like other beautiful
creations, can be very angry if vexed.

The Americans have very fine steam vessels on their side of the lake,
but they are flimsily constructed, painted glaringly, white, and green,
and yellow, without comfort or good attendance, and with a
devil-may-care sort of captain, who seems really scarcely to know or to
care whether he has passengers or has not, a scrambling hurried meal,
and divers other unmentionables.

The American gentry always prefer the British boats, for two good
reasons; they see Queen Victoria's people, and they meet with the utmost
civility, attention, and comfort. They sit down to dinner, or
breakfast, or tea, like Christian men and women, where there is no
railway eating and drinking; where due time is spent in refreshing the
body and spirits; and where people help each other, or the waiters help
them, at table, without a scramble, like hogs, for the best and the
most--a custom which all travelled Americans detest and abominate as
much as the most fastidious Englishman.

It is not unusual at hotel dinners, or on board steamers, to see a man,
I cannot call him a gentleman, sitting next a female, totally neglect
her, and heap his plate with fish, with flesh, with pie, with pudding,
with potato, with cranberry jam, with pickles, with salad, with all and
every thing then within his reach, swallow in a trice all this jumble of
edibles, jump up and vanish.

Can such a being have a stomach, or a digestion, and must he not
necessarily, about thirty-five years of age, be yellow, spare, and
parchment-skinned, with angular projections, and a prodigious tendency
to tobacco?

An American gentleman--mind, I lay a stress upon the second word--never
bolts his victuals, never picks his teeth at table, never spits upon the
carpet, or guesses; he knows not gin-sling, and he eschews mint-julep;
but he does, I am ashamed to say, admire a sherry cobbler, particularly
if he does not get a second-hand piece of vermicelli to suck it through.
Reader, do you know what a sherry cobbler is? I will enlighten you. Let
the sun shine at about 80 deg. Fahrenheit. Then take a lump of ice; fix it
at the edge of a board; rasp it with a tool made like a drawing knife or
carpenter's plane, set face upwards. Collect the raspings, the fine
raspings