e saw the carriage leave the
park, and said: "Oh, mother, how can you find pleasure in her society,
and are the Americans generally like her?"

"Not half as good as she, some of them, though vastly more refined and
better educated," Daisy replied, warming up in defense of the woman who
was so kind to her, and whom she knew to be honest and true as steel.
"There are plenty of ignorant, vulgar women in England, traveling on
their money recently acquired, who at heart are not half as good as Mrs.
Browne," she said; "and for that matter there are titled ladies too who
know precious little more than she. Why, old Lady Oakley once sent me a
note, in which more than half the words were misspelled, and her
capitals were everywhere except in the right place; but she is _my
lady_, and so it is all right. I tell you Bessie, there is, after all,
but little difference between the English and the Americans, who, as a
class, are better informed than we are and know ten times more about our
country than we do about theirs."

Daisy grew very eloquent and earnest as she talked, but Bessie was not
convinced, and felt a shrinking from Mrs. Rossiter-Browne as from
something positively bad; and here she did the woman great injustice,
for never was there a kinder, truer heart than Mrs. Browne's, and if, in
her girlhood, she had possessed a tithe of her present fortune, she
would have made a far different woman from what she was.

For a few days longer she staid at the "George," and astonished the
guests with the richness of her toilets and the singularity of her
speech, which was something wonderful to her hearers, who looked upon
her as a specimen of Americans generally. But this she would not permit;
and once, when she overheard the remark, "that's a fair sample of them,
I suppose," turned fiercely on the knot of ladies who, she knew, were
discussing her, and said:

"If it's me you are talking up and think a fair sample let me tell you
that you are much mistaken. I ain't a sample of nothin'. I am just
myself, and Uncle Sam is not at all responsible for me, unless it is
that he didn't give me a chance, when young, to go to school. I was
poor, and had to work for my livin', and my old blind mother's, too. She
is dead this many a year; but if she could of lived till now, when I
have so much more than I know what to do with, I'd have dressed her up
in silks and satins, and brought her over the seas and flouted her in
your faces as another s