Aglonby expressed herself as became a lady who had
been receiving guests in that very room for fifty years with stiff but
genuine courtesy. The atmosphere was so familiar to Sir Robert that he
could scarcely believe himself to be in an American household. Could
this be the American type of his dreams? Was there ever a country in
which the scenes shifted so completely with a few hours or days of
travel? "If this goes on, America will mean everything, anything, to
me," he thought. "When I hear of a Frenchman, or German, or Italian, I
have some idea of what I shall find; but it is not so here at all. This
Mr. Aglonby is quite evidently a gentleman, and a high-bred one; but so
was Porter in Boston, and Colonel De Witt, and those Baltimore fellows;
yet how different they all are! These men remind me more of my
grandfather and my great-uncles than any Englishman of the present day.
Perhaps they are English. I'll ask. Who would ever suppose them to be
countrymen of Ketchum's?"

After dinner,--and you may be sure the dinner was a good one, for Miss
Aglonby was one of a generation of women whose knowledge of housewifely
arts was such that, shut up in a lighthouse or wrecked on a desert
island, they would have made shift to get a nice meal somehow, even if
they could not have served it, as she did, off old china and graced it
with old silver,--after dinner, then, a long and pleasant evening set
in, with no thought or talk of business-matters. Sir Robert was charmed
with his new acquaintances, and not less by the matter than by the
manner of their conversation. Did they talk of travels, Mr. Aglonby
"liked to read books of adventure," but had never been out of the State
of Virginia, and had no wish to go anywhere. He deplored his fate in
being compelled at his age to leave it permanently and take up his
residence in Florida, where his physician was sending him. He talked of
"Mr. Pope" and "Mr. Addison," quoted Milton and the Latin classics, and
had chanced upon "a modern work lately, by a writer named Thackeray,"
"Henry Esmond," which had pleased him extremely. On hearing this, Sir
Robert took occasion to ask him whether he liked any of the writings of
this and that New-England author of the day, about whom he had been
hearing a great deal since his arrival in the country, and Mr. Aglonby
replied, with perfect truth, that he had "never heard of them," though
he added that Irving and Cooper, the latest additions to his library,
wer