am obliged to own my task of indication is not
the easy thing it once was. With good health,
good spirits, and an adequate supply of circular
notes, you can find amusement almost everywhere.
Education also can be obtained on very
favourable terms in a vast variety of foreign
cities. The puzzle is where to send the father
and mother with some three sons and five
daughters who want to live comfortably, mix
occasionally in society, not altogether deny
themselves public amusements, but at the same
time avoid extravagance and display; spending,
let us say, from twelve to fifteen hundred a
year.

Once on a time I could have put my finger
on full half a dozen places where all this could
be accomplished well and pleasantly; but now,
instead of saying freely take your choice of
Brussels, Dresden, some Rhine city, Venice, or
Florence, I am forced to pause and consider what
can be comprised within this income, and where?
Time was when a good house, very tolerably
furnished, in any of the cities I have just mentioned,
might be obtained for something like one
hundred and fifty or eighty pounds a year;
now-a-days that sum must be at the least
doubled. Carriage hire by the month that was
then three hundred francs is now five hundred.
Servants' wages are more than twice what they
once were, and all the ordinary material of life
must be set down as at least one-third, and, in
some cases, the double of its former cost. But
this is not all. In former days, when a family
left England for the Continent, they really
"came abroad;" that is to say, there was that
amount of transition and change of circumstance
which necessitated and justified a totally new
mode of life. They were, in a word, perfectly
satisfied to submit to sacrifices which, if undergone
at home, would have been deemed humiliations,
and the same people who would have
pinched themselves in many ways for the sake
of living in some cognate quarter with a pretentious
name, would have, without the consciousness
of a sacrifice, mounted up two stories high
to an humble lodging in Coblentz. The
"Coelum non omnium" maxim has its limitations.
There are agencies in the sight of a new
architecture and new faces and the sound of a
new language that made rude work with a score
of those prejudices which pertain to home life.
The man whose breakfast appetite would have
been seriously damaged if the powdered flunkey
had not duly folded his napkin or laid the Times
in its accustomed place, is now, by a mere change
of venue, satisfied to have his coffee fetched to
him by a moustached anomaly, half insolent,
half servile, ready for the meanest offices, and
yet expecting to be treated with a sort of
equality. It was really marvellous to mark
once on a time how unrepiningly the Briton
seemed to submit himself to windows that
would not open, doors that would not shut,
food that he couldn't digest, and a fire that
he could not see, all that he might date his
letter from Hohenschwein-Strasse, 2nd Stock,
Dresden.

There is no doubt that such practices rubbed
off a great deal of snobbery, and if they were
not without suggesting some little affectations,
they did good service in routing much of that
stupid class pretension which obtains at home.
In the first place, where there are no so-called
fashionable quarters, no man can be cut or
shunned for living in a remote or little-visited
one. You cannot test your neighbour's claim
to acquaintance by his equipage so long as you
both drive out in a " fiacre," nor measure his
respectability by the number of his liveried
domestics, while each is waited on by a bearded
brigand with a gilt chain festooned over a glass-
buttoned waistcoat.

Now, in the days before railroads, it was curious
to see what an amount of "Bullism" was worn off
by the mere process of the journey to the city of
sojourn. The passport bureau, the custom-house,
the lumbering old diligence with its six white
horses, its queer driver and its queerer company,
were each and all shocks to some old and
cherished notion, gradually impressing the traveller
that he was living under a new sky and
new influences, and insensibly suggesting to him
how much his personal comfort depended on
some effort to conform to the ways of the foreigner.
Now, booked at the Great Eastern
station for Vienna, the Englishman rolls along
over the metal lines, scarcely conscious that he
is transported beyond the land of bronchitis and
penny newspapers, and only awake to the fact
as he perceives the change given him in zwanzigers
instead of shillings.

Our present-day Englishman, therefore, imbibes
less of the Continent than his predecessor,
notwithstanding being a better linguist, and far
better acquainted with the literature of
continental nations. Luckily, all that contact which
came of the old mode of travel—- the hundred
little accidents and incidents of the road; those
chance and passing intimacies, for your diligence
was far more social than the rail; the wayside
halts; the long strolls up hill; the fireside
gossipings of snowy nights, when the road would
be blocked up for hours—the traveller now
speeds along, nor knows anything of his vis-à-vis
till, perhaps, a collision may have blended
them into unpleasant intimacy.

For the same reason, your English resident
now-a-days is far less disposed to adopt foreign
usages than formerly. The spring from Brighton
to the change of Naples is made so easily
and so speedily, there is no evaporation of John
Bullism by the way; and here, to come back
to where I started from, is one great source
of costly living. Foreigners, too, have met us
half way, and provided for us, at an especial
charge be it remembered, the sort of life we
require. Small houses with their own hall-door
and their own stairs rickety and mean enough
to recal home, have been built in many cities.
Shops for the sale of English sauces, and " beer
ale," are established everywhere. Bankers can
supply cooks warranted to send up vegetables
hard and beef raw; so that in point of
discomfort and indigestion, we are really almost