America, but an absurd substitute is
employed. I cannot particularise them after this preface, lest I should
be accused of indelicacy myself. I may, however, state one little
circumstance which will fully prove the correctness of what I say.

When at Niagara Falls I was escorting a young lady with whom I was on
friendly terms. She had been standing on a piece of rock, the better to
view the scene, when she slipped down, and was evidently hurt by the
fall: she had, in fact, grazed her shin. As she limped a little in
walking home, I said, "Did you hurt your leg much?" She turned from me,
evidently much shocked, or much offended,--and not being aware that I
had committed any very heinous offence, I begged to know what was the
reason of her displeasure. After some hesitation, she said that as she
knew me well, she would tell me that the word _leg_ was never mentioned
before ladies. I apologised for my want of refinement, which was
attributable to having been accustomed only to _English_ society; and
added, that as such articles must occasionally be referred to, even in
the most polite circles in America, perhaps she would inform me by what
name I might mention them without shocking the company. Her reply was,
that the word _limb_ was used; "nay," continued she, "I am not so
particular as some people are, for I know those who always say limb of a
table, or limb of a piano-forte."

There the conversation dropped; but a few months afterwards I was
obliged to acknowledge that the young lady was correct when she asserted
that some people were more particular than even she was.

I was requested by a lady to escort her to a seminary for young ladies,
and on being ushered into the reception-room, conceive my astonishment
at beholding a square piano-forte with four _limbs_. However, that the
ladies who visited their daughters might feel in its full force the
extreme delicacy [see note at end of chapter] of the mistress of the
establishment, and her care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas
of the young ladies under her charge, she had dressed all these four
limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!

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"An English lady, who had long kept a fashionable boarding-school in one
of the Atlantic cities, told me that one of her earliest cares with
every new-comer, was to endeavour to substitute real delicacy for that
affect