ly circumstances. It was
not my intention to impose on you that picture as an actual likeness of
him--though had you ever seen him I might easily have done so, as it
really resembles him very much in his personal traits."

"Well, I am glad he did not sit for this picture," said Col. Donaldson;
"now I can listen to your story with some pleasure."

"Thank you; you must first take some reflections suggested to me by the
incidents I have here narrated. Of the character of these reflections,
you will form some conception from the title I have given to the tale
into which I have interwoven them. I have called it

"LIFE IN AMERICA."

"Men and Manners in America" was the comprehensive title of a book
issued some fifteen or twenty years ago, by a gentleman from Scotland,
to whom, we fear, Americans have never tendered the grateful
acknowledgments he deserved for his disinterested efforts to teach
them to eat eggs properly, and to give due time to the mastication of
their food. This benevolently instructive work was the precursor of a
host of others on the same topics, and others of a kindred character.
America has been the standard subject for the trial essays of European
tyros in philosophy, political economy, and book-making in general.
Society in America has been presented, it would seem, in all its
aspects--religious, educational, industrial, political, commercial, and
fashionable. Our schools and our prisons, our churches and our theatres,
have been in turn the subject of investigation, of unqualified censure,
and of scarcely less unqualified laudation.

The subject thus dissected, put together, and dissected again, has
not been able to restrain some wincing and an occasional outcry,
when the scalpel has been held by a more than usually unskilful
hand--demonstrations of sensibility which have occasioned apparently as
much disapprobation as surprise in the anatomists. We flatter ourselves
that there is peculiar fitness in the metaphor just used, for the outer
form only of American life has been touched by these various writers.
Its spirit, that which gives to it its peculiar organization, has evaded
them as completely as the soul of man evades the keenest investigations
of the dissecting room. Even of the seat of the spirit--of the point
whence it sends forth its subtle influences, giving activity and
direction to every member--of the HOMES of America, they have little
real knowledge. The anatomist--the reader will pa