opinions have a tendency in that direction.  Beef-steaks and pickles certainly produce smart little men and women.  Let that be taken for granted.  But rosy laughter and winning, childish ways are, I fancy, the produce of bread and milk.  But there was a third reason why traveling on these boats was not so pleasant as I had expected.  I could not get my fellow-travelers to talk to me.  It must be understood that our fellow-travelers were not generally of that class which we Englishmen, in our pride, designate as gentlemen and ladies.  They were people, as I have said, in search of new homes and new fortunes.  But I protest that as such they would have been, in those parts, much more agreeable as companions to me than any gentlemen or any ladies, if only they would have talked to me.  I do not accuse them of any incivility.  If addressed, they answered me.  If application was made by me for any special information, trouble was taken to give it me.  But I found no aptitude, no wish for conversation—­nay, even a disinclination to converse.  In the Western States I do not think that I was ever addressed first by an American sitting next to me at table.  Indeed, I never held any conversation at a public table in the West.  I have sat in the same room with men for hours, and have not had a word spoken to me.  I have done my very best to break through this ice, and have always failed.  A Western American man is not a talking man.  He will sit for hours over a stove, with a cigar in his mouth and his hat over his eyes, chewing the cud of reflection.  A dozen will sit together in the same way, and there shall not be a dozen words spoken between them in an hour.  With the women one’s chance of conversation is still worse.  It seemed as though the cares of the world had been too much for them, and that all talking excepting as to business—­demands, for instance, on the servants for pickles for their children—­had gone by the board.  They were generally hard, dry, and melancholy.  I am speaking, of course, of aged females—­from five and twenty, perhaps, to thirty—­who had long since given up the amusements and levities of life.  I very soon abandoned any attempt at drawing a word from these ancient mothers of families; but not the less did I ponder in my mind over the circumstances of their lives.  Had things gone with them so sadly—­was the struggle for independence so hard—­that all the softness of existence had been trodden out of them?  In the cities, too, it was much the same.  It seemed to me that a future mother of a family, in those parts, had left all laughter behind her when she put out her finger for the wedding ring.