Queen Catherine.

I saw little of Lucy that night.  She met us at evening prayers, and tears were in her eyes as she arose from her knees.  Without speaking, she kissed her father for good night, more affectionately than ever, I thought, and then turned to me.  Her hand was extended, (we had seldom met or parted for eighteen years, without observing this little act of kindness), but she did not—­nay, could not, speak.  I pressed the little hand fervently in my own, and relinquished it again, in the same eloquent silence.  She was seen no more by us until next day.

The breakfast had ever been a happy meal at Clawbonny.  My father, though merely a ship-master, was one of the better class; and he had imbibed many notions, in the course of his different voyages, that placed him much in advance of the ordinary habits of his day and country.  Then an American ship-master is usually superior to those of other countries.  This arises from some of the peculiarities of our institutions, as well as from the circumstance that the navy is so small.  Among other improvements, my father had broken in upon the venerable American custom of swallowing a meal as soon as out of bed.  The breakfast at Clawbonny, from my earliest infancy, or as long as I can remember, had been eaten regularly at nine o’clock, a happy medium between the laziness of dissipation and the hurry of ill-formed habits.  At that hour the whole family used to meet, still fresh from a night’s repose, and yet enlivened and gay by an hour or two of exercise in the open air, instead of coming to the family board half asleep, with a sort of drowsy sulkiness, as, if the meal were a duty, and not a pleasure.  We ate as leisurely as keen appetites would permit; laughed, chatted, related the events of the morning, conversed of our plans for the day, and indulged our several tastes and humours, like people who had been up and stirring, and not like so many drowsy drones swallowing our food for form’s sake.  The American breakfast has been celebrated by several modern writers, and it deserves to be, though certainly not to be compared to that of France.  Still it might be far better than it is, did our people understand the mood in which it ought to be enjoyed.

While on this subject, the reader will excuse an old man’s prolixity, if I say a word on the state of the science of the table in general, as it is put in practice in this great republic.  A writer of this country, one Mr. Cooper, has somewhere said that the Americans are the grossest feeders in the civilized world, and warns his countrymen to remember that a national character may be formed in the kitchen.  This remark is commented on by Captain Marryatt, who calls it both unjust and ill-natured.  As for the ill-nature I shall say nothing, unless it be to remark that I do not well see how that which is undeniably true ought to be thought so very ill-natured.  That it is true, every American who has seen much of