The evening, with one of those sudden changes of New Brunswick, had become cold and chilly.  The sun looked red and lurid through the heavy masses of fog clouds drifting through the sky; this fog, which comes all the way from the Banks of Newfoundland, and which is particularly disagreeable sometimes along the Bay shore and in St. John, in opposition to the general clearness of the American atmosphere is but little known in the interior of the country.  Numerous summer fallows are burning around, and the breeze flings over us showers of blackened leaves and blossoms.  As we approached home, we were accosted by one Mr. Isaac Hanselpecker, a neighbour of ours; he was leaning over the bars, apparently wanting a lounge excessively.  He had just finished milking, and had handed the pails to Miss Hanselpecker, as he called his wife.  If there be a trait of American character peculiar to itself, displayed more fully than another by contrast with Europeans, it is in the treatment of the gentler sex, differing as it does materially from the picture of the Englishman, standing with his back to the fire, while the ladies freeze around him; or the glittering politeness of the Frenchman, hovering like a butterfly by the music stand; it has in it more of intellect and real tenderness than either, although tending as it does to the advancement of national character, some of their own talented ones begin to complain that in the refined circles of the States they are becoming almost too civilised in this respect:  the ladies requiring rather more than is due to them.  Yet among the working classes it has a sweet and wholesome influence, softening as it does the asperities of labour, and lightening the burthen to each.  Here woman’s empire is within, and here she shines the household star of the poor man’s hearth; not in idleness, for in America, of all countries in the world, prosperity depends on female industry.  Here “she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness,” and for this reason, perhaps, it is, that their husbands arise and call them blessed.  Now Mr. Hanselpecker had all the respect for his lady natural to his country, and assisted her domestic toils by milking the cows, making fires, and fetching wood and water.  Yet there was one material point in which he failed:  she was often “scant of bread,” he being one who, even in this land of toil, got along, somehow or other, with wondrous little bodily labour; professing to be a farmer, he held one of the finest pieces of land in the settlement, but his agricultural operations, for the most part, consisted in hoeing a few sickly stems of corn, while others were reaping buckwheat, or sowing a patch of flax, “’cause the old woman wanted loom gears;” shooting cranes, spearing salmon, or trapping musquash on the lake, he prefers to raising fowl or sheep, as cranes find their own provisions, and fish require no fences to keep them from the fields.  His wife’s skill, however, in managing the dairy department, is, when