rialists of toasting his son.

The effect was electric. The most insolent and violent of the _vieux
moustaches_ took up the stool he was sitting upon and threw it through
the window; the glasses followed; and then he went round and embraced
the proposer.

"Brave Anglais!" was shouted from many heated lungs; and the evening
not only concluded in harmony, but they caused the hostess to make her
unwelcome visitor as comfortably lodged for the night as the resources
of her house would admit.

Thus it is all over the world; firmness and prudence carry the
traveller through among strange people and stranger scenes; and,
believe me, none but bullies, sharpers, or the dregs of the populace
in any Christian country will insult a stranger.

All the stories about spitting, and "I guess I can clear you, mister,"
as the man said when he spat across some stage-coach traveller out of
the opposite window, are very far-fetched. The Americans certainly do
spit a great deal too much for their own health and for other people's
ideas of comfort, but it arises from habit, and the too free practice
of chewing tobacco. I never saw an American of any class, or, as they
term it, of any grade, do it offensively, or on purpose to annoy a
stranger. They do it unconsciously, just as a Frenchman of the old
school blows his nose at dinner, or as an Englishman turns up his
coat-tails and occupies a fireplace, to the exclusion of the rest of
the company.

An Englishman should not form his notions of America from the works of
professed tourists--men and women who go to the United States, a
perfectly new country, for the express purpose of making a marketable
book: these are not the safest of guides. One class goes to depreciate
Republican institutions, the other to praise them. It is the casual
and unbiassed traveller who comes nearest to the truth.

Monsieur de Tocqueville was as much prepossesed by his own peculiar
views of the nature of human society as Mrs. Trollope. Extremes meet;
but truth lies usually in the centre. It is found at the bottom of the
well, where it never intrudes itself on general observation.

The Americans have no fixed character as a nation, and how can they?
The slave-holding cavaliers of the South have little in common with
the mercantile North; the cultivators and hewers of the western
forests are wholly dissimilar from the enterprising traders of the
eastern coast; republicanism is not always democracy, and democracy