and what no one dare prevent them from
enjoying.

The Americans have but one palace; there it,
is, that plain white Ionic building, much smaller
and less pretentious than half the Inigo Jones's
mansions that stud our green English parks.
It is truly a pleasant house, and stands in a
pleasant spot at the head of Central Avenue,
near the Potomac, and that ungraciously,
half-finished monument to Washington—a great man,
who needs no monument. That wicket still leads
past the back windows and through the grounds;
there are no claims of divine right or divine wrong
here; those paths are open to every doctor's boy
who chooses to run whistling through. There
urchins go to snatch stolen pleasures at
surreptitious marbles. Within those plain rooms the
President grasps the hands of all that come with
hands hard from rail-splitting and barge-rowing,
yet with honester and cleaner hands than those
of half the statesmen or kings of Europe.

If you want to see the old water-logged
officers, fast growing senile, of America, you
must not go, however, to the National
Admiralty, but to Old Point Comfort, or to the
Sulphur Springs, for Saratoga now is a little
"rowdy." You can get to Old Point from
Baltimore by one of the Norfolk steamers. It
gives a great zest and piquancy to the bathing
there, the chance of a shark biting you in two
before you can splutter back to shore. The
captains also now and then turn up at the White
Mountains, Lake George, Lake Minnipissiogee,
or Niagara; but, after all, the sea-shore is the
true lounge of " the old salt."

I have seen them on the harbour terraces at
Charlestown, enjoying a sou'-west wind on their
honest faces, and telling stories of how a British
admiral was once beaten off by the harbour forts.
Ten to one but a grandson will be swimming
a little schooner near, and trying all he can
do (closely watched, though, by the family
Newfoundland dog) to drown himself beyond
all hope of salvage. The sun on a passing
clipper sail —a sea-gull wheeling white against
the blue—the wave washing thin and green
over the landing-place stones, that seem so
many square emeralds—all delight the old
American officer, who is as brave and wary as
old Nestor. See him at a " clam bake," or a
sea-side pic-nic, and hear how he talks of the
old Shannon and Chesapeake days, when we
Englishers got as good as we gave. If he is
younger, be sure he is (as all sailors are all over
the world) a gallant old beau and a lover of horses
—both tastes, I suppose, arising from the same
love of contrariety common to perverse man—
he has been half his life at sea, debarred from
the society of ladies, and far away from a stable.

The nation whose yachts have beaten ours,
and whose privateer schooners, even in the last
war, in shape, power, and swiftness, were models
to the whole world, who build, in fact, " higher
bred" and smarter vessels than we do, have no
less than seven naval stations, or dockyards, in
the States, where they build, equip, and repair
(but not re-make) the winged castles that are
to guard the vast seaboard from Portland to
New Orleans, to garrison that great blue rolling
moat that God has put between them and all
enemies of universal freedom. Here, with Carolina
cedar and Carolina pine, with Californian
redwood and northern fir, the Americans could, if
they but raised their axes, fill all the seas of
Europe with their armed navies.

The first dockyard of this ever-growing
country that I will mention, because it is,
perhaps, the most northern, is that of Portsmouth,
in New Hampshire, which, though the smallest
of the United States establishments, has a good
floating dock, and is tended by hardy, sinewy
workmen, who do not drive the chisel and smite
with the mallet less vigorously because the New
Hampshire climate is bracing and toughening.

Then comes Charlestown, the station of Boston
harbour, where the store dock will receive the
largest-class vessels. This Charlestown is the
place held by our troops in the old war after
that victory so fatal to us, at the earth redoubt
on Bunker's Hill, just above Charlestown. It
was looking down from the grand memorial
column standing on that hill, from where the
brave men in green frocks and leather hunting
shirts once retreated after their ominous and
obstinate defence, that I first saw this dockyard,
its sheds, and its enclosures; but I was so far
above them that they looked blue and toy like
and I could hear no mallets ring, or axes split
and chip. First-class frigates and ships of the
line are built here; but I do not find that the
iron-plated vessels are much in favour yet with,
the Naval Department at Washington. No
nation is quicker in seizing on improvements, on
the new, in fact, if it is better than the old, but
I could not find that iron had any hopes as yet
of superseding wood in America. Iron has no
doubt, they say, great and newly ascertained
advantages for defence and durability, but we
have not yet seen it tried in a great " all fired
war," and for all we know it may have on real,
not government trial, many fatal disadvantages.
Besides, the Americans are (we all know)
behindhand with Europe in taxes and national
debt, secret-service money, and bribery at
elections, and cannot be expected to always
undertand what is really advantageous to them.

The next depot is that at Brooklyn, one of
the suburbs of New York. The granite dock
there is worthy of the Pharaohs; though the
landing-places, &c., of the city in general are
mere mean shaky structures on piles, and give
the whole water front of the town a shabby and
impoverished look.

The Brooklyn dockyard, on the impulse of
necessity, could pour forth vessels as fast as
Rome created them when Scipio required ships
to tame Carthage, or as Athens, when the
Lacedemonians began to grow threatening in the
Ægean. Let the desire of conquest once fill
the brain, and pervert and harden the heart of
America, and she would be one of the most
dreadful scourges the world has known since
that last Conqueror perished for expiation, like a
starved eagle, at St. Helena.