they could not be brought to fold their arms. To
attempt to subject a native American citizen to
this indignity was, of course, out of the question.
When I remark that I have seen a citizen
clad in a red shirt and a white hat driving a
hearse at a public funeral, you will recognise the
impossibility of any statuesque arrangements
in connexion with mail phaetons in the States.

For any native Yankee carriage I never
longed. I held the Noah's-ark cars on the
street railways in horror, and considered the
Broadway stages as abominations. As for a
trotting "waggon"—by which is meant a hard
shelf on an iron framework between two
immense wheels, to which a railway locomotive at
high pressure but disguised as a horse, has
been harnessed—I never could appreciate the
pleasure of being whirled along at the rate of
about eighteen miles an hour, with the gravel
thrown up by the wheels flying about you,
now bombarding your eyes, and now peppering
your cheeks. Thoroughly do I agree with the
general criticism passed on trotting waggons
by an old steam-boat captain who had endured
for a couple of hours the agony of the iron shelf.
"The darned thing," he remarked, "has got
no bulwarks." There is rather a pretty American
carriage called a Rockaway—not from
any peculiar oscillatory motion it possesses,
but from a watering-place hight Rockaway,
where it was first brought into use. The
Rockaway is in appearance something between
the French pamer à salade, in, which the
garçons de bureau of the Bank of France speed
on their bill-collecting missions, and the spring
cart of a fashionable London baker. Add to this
a grinning negro coachman, with a very large
silver or black velvet band to a very tall hat,
and the turn-out, you may imagine, is spruce and
sparkling. But I never longed for a Rockaway.
The American saddle-horses are the prettiest
creatures imaginable out of a circus, and are as
prettily harnessed. They are almost covered,
in summer, with a gracefully fantastic netting,
which keeps the flies from them.

Much less have I yearned for one of the
Hungarian equipages, about which such a fuss
is made in the Prater at Vienna. An open
double or triple bodied rattle-trap, generally
of a gaudy yellow, with two or four ragged
spiteful profligate little ponies, and the driver
in a hybrid hussar costume, a feather in his cap,
sky-blue tunic and pantaloons, much braiding,
and Hessian boots with very long tassels. This
is the crack Hungarian equipage, the Magyar
name of which I do not know, nor knowing
could pronounce. The Viennese hold this
turn-out to be, in the language of the mews,
very "down the road;" but it fails to excite
my longing. Hungarian ponies look wild and
picturesque enough in Mr. Zeitter's pictures; but
a gipsy's cart without the tilt is not precisely the
thing for Hyde Park; and the "proud Hungarian"
on the box-seat reminds me too forcibly
of the "Everythingarian," who in cosmopolitan
sawdust continues the traditions of equitation
handed down by the late Andrew Ducrow.

When, only last March, I was looking from a
balcony overhanging the Puerta del Sol, in
Madrid, and used to hear, at about three in the
afternoon, the clangour of trumpets from the
guard-house at the Casa de la Gobernacion
opposite, as the carriages of the royal family,
with their glittering escort, drove by to the
Prado or the Retero, I would question myself as
to whether I felt any longing for the absolute                                                              possession of one of those stately equipages. I
don't think I did. They were too showy and
garish for my humble ambition. If a slight
feeling of longing came over me, it was for the
coach which conveyed the junior branches of the
royal family. Imagine, if you please, a spacious
conveyance all ablaze with heraldic achievements,
and crammed to the roof with little
infantes and infantas; Mr. Bumble on the coach-
box; and the beadles of St. Clement's Danes,
the ward of Portsoken, and the Fishmongers'
Company, hung on behind, abreast—for long
laced coats and huge laced cocked-hats are the
only wear of flunkeydom in Spain. Harnessed
to this astounding caravan were six very sleek,
very fat, and very supercilious-looking mules. To
the beadles before and the beadles behind must
be added the beadle of the Burlington Arcade, on
the offleader, as postilion. Yea, more. The beadle
of the Royal Exchange trotted on an Andalusian
jennet as outrider. A squadron of lancers
followed, to take care that the infantes and infantas
were not naughty, or that the naughtier
Progresistas didn't run away with them. On the
whole, I don't think I longed much for this
sumptuous equipage. There is another coach,
in the royal stables at Madrid, much more in
my line—a queer, cumbrous, gloomy litter,
with a boot as big as a midshipman's chest. It
is a very old coach—the oldest, perhaps, extant,
and nearly the first coach ever built, being the
one in which Crazy Jane, Queen of Castile and
Aragon, used to carry about the coffined body
of her husband, Charles of Anjou.

There is yet another coach in my line—the
Shillibeer line, I mean—which may be hired for
a franc an hour at a certain city on the Adriatic
sea, opposite Trieste. There are about four
thousand of those coaches in the city—a very
peculiar city, for the sea is in its broad and its
narrow streets, and the seaweed clings to the
door-steps of its palaces. How I have longed to
have one of those coaches for my own private
riding; say in the Surrey Canal or on the
Serpentine! The Americans have got one in the
lake in their Central Park; but the toy once
placed there has been forgotten, and it is dropping
to pieces. It is the only coach of which
use is practicable in Venice. It is black, and
shiny, and hearse-like, and its roof bristles
with funereal tufts, and the carving about
its doors and panels is strictly of the undertaker's
order of decoration. It is called a
gondola.

But where would be the use of a gondola in
London? The Surrey Canal is not in a fashionable
district, and the Serpentine has no outlet.
The chief purpose of your own carriage, I