than their Milesian compeers, or to see them passing out of the Charles-street Church in all the Sunday bravery of broadcloth coats, shiny hats, wonderfully laundered skirts of snowy whiteness, and bodices of all the hues of the rainbow.  And all through the Union their glossy black faces and gleaming white teeth shed a kind of dusky radiance over the traveller’s path.  Who but can recall with gratitude the expansive geniality and reassuring smile of the white-coated negro waiter, as compared with the supercilious indifference, if not positive rudeness, of his pale colleague?  And what will ever efface the mental kodak of George (not Sambo any more) shuffling rapidly into the dining-room, with his huge flat palm inverted high over his head and bearing a colossal tray heaped up with good things for the guest under his charge?  And shall I ever forget the grotesque gravity of the negro brakeman in Louisiana, with his tall silk hat? or the pair of gloves pathetically shared between two neatly dressed negro youths in a railway carriage in Georgia? or the pickaninnies slumbering sweetly in old packing-cases in a hut at Jacksonville, while their father thrummed the soft guitar with friendly grin?  It has always seemed to me a reproach to American artists that they fill the air with sighs over the absence of the picturesque in the United States, while almost totally overlooking the fine flesh-tones and gay dressing of the coloured brother at their elbow.

The most conventional society of America is apt to be more or less shrouded by the pall of monotony that attends convention elsewhere, but typical American society—­the society of the great mass of Americans—­shows distinctly more variety than that of England.  In social meetings, as in business, the American is ever on the alert for some new thing:  and the brain of every pretty girl is cudgelled in order to provide some novelty for her next party.  Hence the progressive euchre, the “library” parties, the “shadow” dances, the conversation parties, and the long series of ingenious games, the adoption of which, for some of us at least, has done much to lighten the deadly dulness of English “small and earlies.”  Even the sacro-sanctity of whist has not been respected, and the astonished shade of Hoyle has to look on at his favourite game in the form of “drive” and “duplicate.”  The way in which whist has been taken up in the United States is a good example of the national unwillingness to remain in the ruts of one’s ancestors.  Possibly the best club-players of England are at least as good as the best Americans, but the general average of play and the general interest in the game are distinctly higher in the United States.  Every English whist-player with any pretension to science knows what he has to expect when he finds an unknown lady as his partner, especially if she is below thirty; but in America he will often find himself “put to his trumps” by a bright girl in her teens.  The girls in Boston