hen how dreadfully wrong are we! It is really a very
puzzling subject.

But this was not the only point on which I found my notions of
right and wrong utterly confounded; hardly a day passed in which
I did not discover that something or other that I had been taught
to consider lawful as eating, was held in abhorrence by those
around me; many words to which I had never heard an objectionable
meaning attached, were totally interdicted, and the strangest
paraphrastic sentences substituted. I confess it struck me, that
notwithstanding a general stiffness of manner, which I think must
exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, the Americans have
imaginations that kindle with alarming facility. I could give
many anecdotes to prove this, but will content myself with a few.

A young German gentleman of perfectly good manners, once came to
me greatly chagrined at having offended one of the principal
families in the neighbourhood, by having pronounced the word
_corset_ before the ladies of it. An old female friend had
kindly overcome her own feelings so far as to mention to him the
cause of the coolness he had remarked, and strongly advised his
making an apology. He told me that he was perfectly well
disposed to do so, but felt himself greatly at a loss how to
word it.

An English lady who had long kept a fashionable boarding-school
in one of the Atlantic cities, told me that one of her earliest
cares with every new comer, was the endeavour to substitute real
delicacy for this affected precision of manner; among many
anecdotes, she told me one of a young lady about fourteen, who on
entering the receiving room, where she only expected to see a
lady who had enquired for her, and finding a young man with her,
put her hands before her eyes, and ran out of the room again,
screaming "A man! a man! a man!"

On another occasion, one of the young ladies in going up stairs
to the drawing-room, unfortunately met a boy of fourteen coming
down, and her feelings were so violently agitated, that she
stopped panting and sobbing, nor would pass on till the boy had
swung himself up on the upper banisters, to leave the passage
free.

At Cincinnati there is a garden where the people go to eat ices,
and to look at roses. For the preservation of the flowers, there
is placed at the end of one of the walks a sign-post sort of
daub, representing a Swiss peasant girl, holding in her hand a
scroll, requesting that the roses might not be gathe