“A sword is a very bad criterion of merit; why, a highway robber could prove his right to your purse by the same argument——”
My Yankee friend now walked about the room, and upset a chair and picked it up again, and then hummed a tune to show he was not mad. In the meantime, the Englishman had poured out deliberately three glasses—“Come,” said he, “I will be corrected by an American, at least in one particular; I will not drink my champagne alone when I can find two honest countrymen to share it with—we will drink America and England!”
“England and America!” replied my companion with some reluctance.
Before parting, the disputants both agreed that their countries had a mutual interest to cherish good feelings, and to rejoice at each other’s prosperity; both agreed that England now reaped a better profit from our Independence than she could have done from our colonial subjection; and that America, by the service she derived from English commerce, science, and letters, and from English industry in making her canals, working her mines, and improving her manufactures, was much more than overpaid for any injuries she had a right to complain of in asserting and maintaining her liberty.
A cup of coffee now poured its balm upon our national jealousies, and we parted with an invitation to visit our Englishman, who is a student of the Temple, in London.
The packets are in—and have brought several fresh personages from America, notwithstanding the season. They have arrived just in time to have the last snuff of the carnival.
The fire at New York is horrible, but not astonishing. Our shingled roofs are more combustible than any thing I know of—unless perhaps it be gunpowder. There has been but one fire in Paris during the last year.
What you say about the wind blowing off your night-cap in your sleep, I take to be mythology; it means to threaten that if Doctor —— and I stay away in this manner, Boreas, or Æolus, or some of the gods will be coming to bed to you.—But think only of the vapours, the mud and slough of Paris, and then look out upon your pines, clad in all the snowy magnificence of winter. I can almost see old Hyems with his grisly chin, grinning from the flanks of the Sharp Mountain. My advice is that you dissipate the ice, with mirth, and bright fires and old wine; and that you leave other things to the gods—and give my love to your mother.
LETTER XX.
The Dancing fever.—The Grand Masquerade.—Fooleries of the Carnival.—Mardi Gras.—Splendid Equipages.—Masquerades.—An Adventure.—Educated Women.—The Menus-Plaisirs.—A Fancy Ball.—Porte St. Martin.—The Masked Balls.—Descente de la Courtille.—End of the Carnival.—Birth-Day of Washington.