e certainly thought only occasionally of Bijou
at this period, and of Ethel not at all.

Miss Noel heard very regularly from Mrs. Sykes all this while; and that
energetic traveller had not been idle. She had made her new friends
"take her about tremendously," she said. She had seen all the large
towns in that part of the country, and thought them "very ugly and
monotonously commonplace, but prosperous-looking,--like the
inhabitants." The scenery she had found "far too uninteresting to repay
the bother of sketching it." But she had made a few pictures of "the
views most cracked up in the White Mountains,"--where she had been,--"a
sort of second-hand Switzerland of a place; really nothing after the
Himalayas, but made a great fuss over by the Americans." She described
with withering scorn a drive she took there.

"We came suddenly one day upon a party in a kind of Cheap-Jack van," she
wrote,--"gayly-dressed people, tricked off in smart finery, and larking
like a lot of Ramsgate tradesmen on the public road. One of the impudent
creatures made a trumpet of his great ugly fist and spelt out the name
of the hotel at which they were stopping, and then put his hand to his
ear, as if to listen for the response. Expecting _me_ to tell _them_
anything about myself! But I flatter myself that I was a match for them.
I just got out my umbrella and shot it up in their very faces as we
passed, in a way not to be mistaken. And--would you believe it?--the
rude wretches called out, 'The shower is over now! and 'What's the price
of starch?' and roared with laughing." A highly-colored description of "a
visit to a great Dissenting stronghold, Marbury Park," followed: "I was
immensely curious to see one of these characteristic national
exhibitions of hysteria, ignorance, superstition, and immorality, called
a 'camp-meeting.' to which the Americans of all classes flock annually
by the thousands, so I quite insisted upon being taken to one, though my
friends would have got out of it if they could. I fancy they were very
ashamed of it; and they had need to be. I will not attempt to describe
it in detail here,--you will hear what I have said of it in my
diary,--but a more glaringly vulgar, intensely American performance you
can't fancy. I have made a number of sketches of the grounds, the tents
and tent-life, with the people bathing and dressing and all that in the
most exposed manner; of the pavilion, where the roaring and ranting is
done; and