from a prejudice in favor of Southerners at all, as was proved when she
went to New Orleans later and promptly asked the first acquaintance she
made whether all the education was not at the North.

The week that followed was a very gay one, the Ketchums' friends in the
neighborhood and in Kalsing being most intent on hospitable thoughts and
providing something agreeable in the shape of an entertainment for every
night. Every moment of the day, too, of every day was filled up. It seemed
to Mrs. Ketchum that "those English people," as she called them, were
never idle, and had discovered the secret of perpetual motion.

Sir Robert had the boudoir, to which he devoted exactly two hours after
breakfast. He had a geological chart of America, with what he felt to be
melancholy blanks for the chalk and oolite beds of his own country, and
appropriate fossils indicated by an index-finger in red ink. He had the
Poor-Law and electoral systems to master, as well as the prison systems of
the different States. He had to prove that the Mound-Builders and the race
that built the buried cities of Central America were one and the same. He
had innumerable questions, political, social, agricultural, pressing upon
him, from the history of spiritualism, the purity of the ballot, and the
McCormack reaper, down to certain expressions that immensely struck and
pleased him, which had to be entered in the diary as "unconscious poetry
of the Westerners,"--such phrases as "the fall" (of the leaf),
"morning-glories," "dancing like a breeze," "Daphnes" (instead of laurels),
and many more, which he hoped would be "permanently engrafted on the
mother-tongue." There were other entries to be made,--"customs of the
Westerners," their "descent," "taxation," "climate" (as affected by the
Great Lakes), "population in 1900," and so on. There were books, books,
books, to be read, referred to, ordered. There was even a little taxidermy
to be done, and the "native birds" to be first sought, then bought, then