Travels in the United States, etc.,: during 1849 and 1850./ By the Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley.

TRAVELS IN AMERICA.
the natives took us for Americans (as of course they did, till we
told them we were not so, but Inglez) they would sometimes address us, as they evidently thought and intended, very sarcastically,
mimicking people in a great hurry, and saying breathlessly, vamos,
go. ahead!-ho! poco tiempo, poco tienrpo.
We were not sorry, after going up and down more ravines, and
gullies, and slippery and swampy passes, than I can recount (sometimes, that we might not tumble over their ears, leaning back till
we almost touched the tails of our mules), to reach the half-way
house, and stop at a canvas hotel built by an American speculator
in a small clearing where the sun burned with ferocious rays.
However, there were some splendid trees near, which afforded shelter for the mules while they rested.
We got some very nice lemonade and orangeade here, and had
the satisfaction of learning that Mrs. H's poor little boy had,
by a lucky accident, found his way hither after a long and weary
wandering in the forest; and his mother had come to claim him,
having fortunately heard this fact as she was prosecuting her disconsolate search not far off. The poor little fellow fell fast asleep
as soon as they laid him on a rude couch here, and it was thus,
wrapped in slumber, she found him. The generous-hearted American who told me the touching tale, could hardly repress his emotion as he described the intense feeling of the poor mother, as she
clasped her recovered treasure to her heart.
But such is the American: while he will affront with the utmost carelessness all kinds of hardships, dangers, and privations,
and display under the most appalling circumstances the firmest
presence of mind-as if, like Nelson in his boyhood, "he had never
seen fear," and could not understand what it meant.-his noble
feelings will trill at a tale of the sorrow of others, and his heroism
fails him when some affecting incident appeals to his unselfish and
generous sympathies. If the true hero-nature lives any where it
is in the American: if the age of chivalry is not past-though
Burke declared it was, in the Old World of Europe-if, in short,
chivalry still exists on earth, it is in the great and mighty WVest.
I think I see a satirical smile on the reader's lips, although so
many thousands of miles divide us; and I know if I were in a
London drawing-room what a chorus would be raised of "dollars
and cents!" &c., but I boldly write what I most conscientiously
believe: and how absurd it is to keep harping on one fault (and it
really seems almost their only one), as if either a nation or an individual could be absolutely perfect!
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