Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/301

 most to my taste, and to which I owe some of my most beautiful hours in the New World. You know my faculty of receiving decided impressions as regards persons, and of my coming into rapport with them almost at the first moment. This faculty or power, which has never yet deceived me, has become more keen since I went abroad on my Viking expedition, quite alone, and have thereby been brought into immediate connection with a great number of persons. I have, of late in particular, acquired a sort of mercurial sensitiveness to the various temperaments and natures which approach me, and the barometer of my feelings rises or falls accordingly. Thus as I liked Mrs. W. H. from the first moment, did I like—but in another way—Mrs. Holbrook, the wife of the Professor of Natural History, from the first moment when I saw and heard her. I became animated, and as it were awakened, by the fresh intelligent life which spoke in that lovely, animated woman. There is nothing commonplace, nothing conventional in her. Everything is clear, peculiar, living, and above all, good. I felt it like a draught of the very elixir of life—the very fountain of youth. The next day I dined with Mrs. W. H., at her beautiful, elegant residence, the sea-breezes coming in refreshingly through the curtains of the windows. Her mother, Mrs. R., a beautiful old lady, with splendid eyes; her sister, Miss Lucas R.; three ideally lovely and charming young girls, her nieces; and three very agreeable gentlemen, composed the party. Mr. Holbrook is, together with Aggassiz, the Swiss, now on a natural history expedition to the great fens of Florida, called the Ever Glades.

After an excellent dinner we drove to the battery, the fashionable promenade of the city, and which consists of a bald inclosure along the beach, where people walk round and round in a circle, so that they see again and again all those they know, and all those they do not know, who are promenading there, a thing that I should have