Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/106

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LONDON.
103

your forests are cut dawn, and they have room for their limbs to spread." I smiled and was silent; but if I saw in vision our graceful, drooping, elm-embowering roods of ground, and, as I looked at the stiff, upright English elm, had something of the pharisaical "holier than thou" flit over my mind, I may be forgiven.

I was walking one day with some young Englishwomen, when a short, sallow, broad man, to whom Nature had been niggardly, to say the least of it, passed us. "I think," said I, "that is a countryman of mine; I have seen him in New-York." "I took him for an American," said one of my companions, with perfect nonchalance. "Pray tell me why." "He looks so like the pictures in Mrs. Trollope's book!" It is true, this was a secluded young person in a provincial town, but I felt mortified that in one fair young mind Mrs. Trollope's vulgar caricatures should stand as the type of my countrymen.

I have heard persons repeatedly expressing a desire to visit America—for what? "To see a prairie"—"to see Niagara"—"to witness the manner of the help to their employers; it must be so very comical!" but, above all, "to eat canvass-back ducks!" The canvass-backs are in the vision of America what St. Peter's is in the view of Rome. But patience, my dear C. In the first place, it matters little what such thinkers think of us; and then things are mending. The steamers have already cancelled half the distance between the two continents. The two worlds are daily weaving more closely their