In the course of about six weeks after we had domiciled ourselves, we changed our lodgings, and went to board with an old American lady, a widow, and her daughter, who lived in a wooden house, where No. 100. Liberty Street, now stands. In this house we learned the secret, that in whatever country Heaven is pleased to cast a man's lot, if he expects to live comfortably, he must live with the natives of the country; and for the same reason, if he wants a wife, he should marry a woman who has been brought up there. We here found the victuals cooked as they ought to be; but in the European boarding-houses the proverb holds good, that God gives meat, but the Devil sends cooks. How, indeed, can a woman make a pie that never saw a pumpkin? How can she make cakes who never saw buck-wheat?

The daughter of our landlady was a big, masculine, single damsel, about thirty-five years of age; she, however, had a child, but where she got it I know not, as I never could learn that she had had a husband. This child took sick; and one morning, after it had been ill some four or five days, I was in the jeopardy of falling into a deep pit just as I was stepping in the morning out of doors. This pit had been dug by the swine in the course of the previous night, and when it was discovered, the child was given up for lost, for the hogs are regarded as ominous grave-diggers; great lamentations and woe accordingly took place, and sure enough that same evening the child was removed.

It was about this time that the rage for moving up-town commenced, and our good landlady, at the instigation of her big daughter, could do no less than follow the fashion of the town, with a cart-load of moveables, driven by a Dutch carman, leaving us to seek new lodgings, which we found in a house next door to our workshop.