336 MRS. TROLLOPE. extremely dismal. The gentlemen spit, talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again. The ladies look at each other's dresses till they know every pin by heart ; talk of parson somebody's last sermon on the day of judgment, on Dr. t'otherbody's new pills for dyspepsia, till the "tea" is announced, when they will all console themselves for whatever they may have suffered in keep- ing awake, by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake, and custard, hoe cake, johnny cake, waffle cake, and dodger cake, pickled peaches, and preserved cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung beef, apple sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in any other country of the known world. After this massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit." One day of the year in America she enjoyed, namely, the Fourth of July, because on that day the people around her seemed to be happy, and on that day alone. " To me," she remarks, " the dreary coldness and want of enthusiasm in American manners is one of their great- est defects, and I therefore hailed the demonstrations of general feeling which this day elicits with real pleasure. On the Fourth of July, the hearts of the people seem to awaken from a three hundred and sixty-four days' sleep they appear high-spirited, gay, animated, social, generous, or at least liberal in expense ; and would they but refrain from spitting on that hallowed day, I should say that on the Fourth of July, at least, they appeared to be an amiable people. It is true that the women have little to do with the pageantry, the splendor, or the gayety of the day ; but, setting this defect aside, it was indeed a glorious sight to behold a jubilee so heartfelt as this ; and had they not the bad taste and bad feeling to utter an annual oration, with unvarying abuse of the mother country,
