In my next chapter, which will, I trust, be very short, I purport to say a few words as to what I saw of the American army, and therefore I will not now describe the regiments which we visited. The tents were all encompassed by snow, and the ground on which they stood was a bed of mud; but yet the soldiers out here were not so wretchedly forlorn, or apparently so miserably uncomfortable, as those at Benton Barracks. I did not encounter that horrid sickly stench, nor were the men so pale and woe-begone. On the following day we returned to St. Louis, bringing back with us our friend the German aid-de-camp. I stayed two days longer in that city, and then Ithought that I had seen enough of Missouri; enough of Missouri at any rate under the present circumstances of frost and secession. As regards the people of the West, I must say that they were not such as I expected to find them. With the Northerns we are all more or less intimately acquainted. Those Americans whom we meet in our own country, or on the continent, are generally from the North, or if not so they have that type of American manners which has become familiar to us. They are talkative, intelligent, inclined to be social, though frequently not sympathetically social with ourselves;somewhat soi-disant, but almost invariably companionable. As the traveler goes southward into Maryland and Washington, the type is not altered to any great extent. The hard intelligence of the Yankee gives place gradually to the softer, and perhaps more polished, manner of the Southern. But the change thus experienced is not great as is that between the American of the Western and the American of the Atlantic States. In the West I found the men gloomy and silent--I might almost say sullen. A dozen of them will sit for hours round a stove, speechless. They chew tobacco and ruminate.
They are not offended if you speak to them, but they are not pleased. They answer with monosyllables, or, if it be practicable, with a gesture of the head. They care nothing for the graces or--shall I say--for the decencies of life. They are essentially a dirty people. Dirt, untidiness, and noise seem in nowise to afflict them. Things are constantly done before your eyes which should be done and might be done behind your back. No doubt we daily come into the closest contact with matters which, if we saw all that appertains to them, would cause us to shake and shudder. In other countries we do not see all this, but in the Western States we do.
I have eaten in Bedouin tents, and have been ministered to by Turks and Arabs. I have sojourned in the hotels of old Spain and of Spanish America. I have lived in Connaught, and have taken up my quarters with monks of different nations. I have, as it were, been educated to dirt, and taken out my degree in outward abominations.
