in guiding the ship of the establishment in some critical and perilous
places of late years. I should add that he is warmly interested in all
the efforts now making for the good of the poor.

Among other persons of distinction, this evening, I noticed Lord and
Lady Palmerston.

A lady asked me this evening what I thought of the beauty of the
ladies of the English aristocracy: she was a Scotch lady, by the by;
so the question was a fair one. I replied, that certainly report had
not exaggerated their charms. Then came a home question--how the
ladies of England compared with the ladies of America. "Now for it,
patriotism," said I to myself; and, invoking to my aid certain fair
saints of my own country, whose faces I distinctly remembered, I
assured her that I had never seen more beautiful women than I had in
America. Grieved was I to be obliged to add, "But your ladies keep
their beauty much later and longer." This fact stares one in the face
in every company; one meets ladies past fifty, glowing, radiant, and
blooming, with a freshness of complexion and fulness of outline
refreshing to contemplate. What can be the reason? Tell us, Muses and
Graces, what can it be? Is it the conservative power of sea fogs and
coal smoke--the same cause that keeps the turf green, and makes the
holly and ivy flourish? How comes it that our married ladies dwindle,
fade, and grow thin--that their noses incline to sharpness, and their
elbows to angularity, just at the time of life when their island
sisters round out into a comfortable and becoming amplitude and
fulness? If it is the fog and the sea coal, why, then, I am afraid we
never shall come up with them. But perhaps there may be other causes
why a country which starts some of the most beautiful girls in the
world produces so few beautiful women. Have not our close-heated stove