n't
dwell much upon him in my last letter, and I don't believe now I can
make him quite clear to you. He has been a good deal abroad, and he
is Europeanized enough not to think much of America, though I can't
find that he quite approves of Europe, and his experience seems not
to have left him any particular country in either hemisphere.

He isn't the Bostonian of Uncle Jack's imagination, and I suspect he
wouldn't like to be. He is rather too young, still, to have much of
an antislavery record, and even if he had lived soon enough, I think
that he would not have been a John Brown man. I am afraid that he
believes in "vulgar and meretricious distinctions" of all sorts, and
that he hasn't an atom of "magnanimous democracy" in him. In fact, I
find, to my great astonishment, that some ideas which I thought were
held only in England, and which I had never seriously thought of,
seem actually a part of Mr. Arbuton's nature or education. He talks
about the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good
families, as I supposed nobody in _this_ country _ever_ did,--in
earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had
such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke
out somebody's unhappiness,--to keep the high-born daughter from
marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of
in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I
could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in
talking in that way. Such things sound so differently in real life;
and I laughed at them till I found that he didn't know what to make
of my laughing, and then I took leave to differ with him in some of
his notions; but he never disputes anything I say, and so makes it
seem rude to differ with him. I always feel, though he begins it,
as if I had thrust my opinions upon him. But in spite of his
weaknesses and disagreeabilities, there is something really _high_
about him; he is so scrupulously true, so exactly just, that Uncle
Jack himself couldn't be more so; though you can see that he respects
his virtues as the peculiar result of some extraordinary system. Here
at Quebec, though he goes round patronizing the landscape and the
antiquities, and coldly smiling at my little enthusiasms, there is
really a great deal that ought t