norance.

At the distance of a few miles from Winchester, we passed an encampment of
gipsies, by the way-side. They were better-looking than I had expected to
see them, though their faces were hardly perceptible in the grey of the
morning. They appeared well fed and very comfortably bivouacked. Why do
not these people appear in America? or, do they come, and get absorbed,
like all the rest, by the humane and popular tendencies of the country?
What a homage will it be to the institutions, if it be found that even a
gipsy cease to be a gipsy in such a country! Just as the sun rose, I got
out to our lodgings and went to bed.

After a sound sleep of two or three hours, I rose and went to the
drawing-room. A lady was in it, seated in a way to allow me to see no
more than a small part of her side-face. In that little, I saw the
countenance of your aunt's family. It was the sister whom we had never
seen, and who had hastened out of Hertfordshire to meet us. There are
obvious reasons why such a subject cannot be treated in this letter, but
the study of two sisters who had been educated, the one in England and
the other in America, who possessed so much in common, and yet, who were
separated by so much that was not in common, was to me a matter of
singular interest. It showed me, at a glance, the manner in which the
distinctive moral and physical features of nations are formed; the
points of resemblance being just sufficient to render the points of
difference more obvious.

A new and nearer route to Netley had been discovered during my absence,
and our unpractised Americans had done little else than admire ruins for
the past week. The European who comes to America plunges into the virgin
forest with wonder and delight; while the American who goes to Europe
finds his greatest pleasure, at first, in hunting up the memorials of the
past. Each is in quest of novelty, and is burning with the desire to gaze
at objects of which he has often read.

The steam-boat made but one or two voyages a week between Southampton
and Havre, and we were obliged to wait a day or two for the next trip.
The intervening time was passed in the manner just named. Every place of
any importance in England has some work or other written on the subject
of its history, its beauties, and its monuments. It is lucky to escape a
folio. Our works on Southampton, (which are of moderate dimensions,
however,) spoke of some Roman remains in the neighbourhood. The spo