sky comparable, for splendor of color or translucent purity, to
that of the Northern States.]

I have been reading your favorite book, "Salmonia." ... I am rather
surprised at your liking it so very much, because, though the
descriptions are beautiful, and the natural history interesting,
and the philosophical and moral reflections scattered through it
delightful, yet there is so much that is purely technical about
fishing and its processes, and addressed only to the hook-and-line
fraternity, that I should not have thought it calculated to charm
you so greatly. However, you may have some associations connected
with it; liking is a very complex and many-motived thing....

We went through the fish and fruit markets the other day;
unfortunately it was rather late in the morning, and of course the
glory of the market was over, but yet there remained enough to
enchant us, with their abundant plenteousness of good things. The
fruit-market was beautiful; fruit-baskets half as high as I am,
placed in rows of a dozen, filled with peaches, and painted of a
bright vermilion color, which throws a ruddy becoming tint over the
downy fruit. It looked like something in the "Arabian Nights;"
heaps, literally heaps of melons, apples, pears, and wild grapes,
in the greatest profusion. I was enchanted with the beautiful
forms, bright colors, and fragrant smell, but I saw no flowers, and
I have seen hardly any since I have been here, which is rather a
grief to me....

Americans are the most extravagant people in the world, and flowers
are among them objects of the most lavish expenditure. The prices
paid for nosegays, wreaths, baskets, and devices of every sort of
hot-house plants, are incredible to any reasonable mind. At parties
and balls ladies are laden with costly nosegays which will not even
survive the evening's fatigue of carrying them. Dinner and luncheon
parties are adorned, not only with masses of exquisite bloom as
table ornaments, but by every lady's plate a magnificent nosegay of
hot-house flowers is placed; and I knew a lady who, wishing to
adorn her ballroom with rather more than usual floral magnificence,
had it hung round with garlands of white camellias and myosotis.

At the theater enormously expensive nosegays and huge baskets of
forced