Portman Square, by a reference to the time-bill
of the East Lincolnshire Railway, in
Bradshaw; and another, I found helplessly
turning over a volume which he had
purchased at Dover, as a complete tabular
compendium of cab and omnibus fares, and which
I discovered to be "Paterson's Roads,"
published in the year 1812. Gradually, too, I
grew alive to the tactics of those aliens
unacquainted with the English vernacular, who
endeavoured to seduce a cabman to conveying
them to their domiciles, by holding up two
fourpenny pieces, and saying, "Leycesterr
Squarr, you go?" an offer invariably repulsed
with contemptuous indignation.

Leicester Square itself I found foreign, of
course; but to my astonishment, not much
more foreign than usual. Had I not known
that they were here, and must be here, I
should have been disheartened. The same
delightful aroma of the Virginian weed
prevailed as of yore; and the same delightfully
mysterious gushes of French cookery were
wafted upwards from the kitchens of the
Sablonière. Yet I did not perceive any very
great augmentation of the usual "outlandish"
denizens of the square. I had seen the same
flying corps of French touters any time since
the Revolution of July. I had seen the same
fat alien, with no waistcoat on, smoking, in the
first floor of the Hôtel de l'Europe, every day
since I was a little child. The knot of
moustachioed men in white hats gathered round
the "Prince de Galles" were no strangers to
me; neither was the colossal alien at the door
of the foreign cigar-shop, from whose lips the
short black pipe, filled with caporal, seems as
seldom removed as he himself from the threshold
of that emporium of tobacco. HE has been
there since the days of June '48, to my
knowledge. They whisper that he was a Cabinet
minister in the early days of the Republic, and
that he travels in the wine trade, now. As
for the old French oaths,—the refrains of the
old German Lieds—the fag-ends of the old
Italian bravuras—they were familiar to me as
"household words;" and the greatest stranger
I could descry was Mr. Wyld's Great Globe,
opposite to which I found a meek native of
Frankfort, who had the infallible guide-book
open at an engraving of the Colosseum, before
which panoramic famed building he conceived
himself to be standing.

Away, then, somewhat dispirited, into the
adjacent Haymarket and Piccadilly, where
long strings of omnibuses showed me their roofs
surmounted by strings as long of foreigners,
displaying the soles of their international
boots to the passers-by. They were borne
away from me speedily, and I followed them
to the Exhibition; where, by this time, it had
occurred to me that I might find a considerable
number of aliens.

Considerable, certainly, but not by any
means the number I expected. The fezzes
still in a woful minority. No signs of the
bernouse, the snowy camise, or the shaggy
capote yet. Sunburnt Lancashire faces,
Manchester wide-awakes, Agricultural red cotton
pocket-handkerchiefs, decidedly in the ascendant.
Here and there the eccentric chapeau,
or the enticing bonnet, with the inevitable
beard or moustache, show me the male and
female alien passing; but I am not jostled, not
mobbed by them. The "Coom alongs," and
"Lookee eares," are a thousand to one of
the "Dites doncs" or the "Corpo di Baccos."

In the French department, I found a fair
muster of the volubility, the gesticulation of
the Grande Nation; but nothing to speak of—
a mere drop of water in the sea. Round the
"Greek Slave," a compact mass of hard, dry
men, with turn-down collars, straight hair,
black satin waistcoats, and tall hats on the
backs of their heads, who were triumphantly
dividing their glances between Mr. Power's
statue and Mr. Catlin's "Wild Indian," and
artfully spitting between the crevices of the
flooring meanwhile. These were Americans,
I knew; and my teeming fancy immediately
shaped forth glorious visions of thousands of
Transatlantic visitors, gathered together in
the rather scantily-furnished American department.
Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and
Massachusetts, were perchance to be found
rallying round the daguerreotypes: Louisiana,
Iowa, and Texas, might be wandering in the
regions of India-rubber: and New York and
Rhode Island not found wanting at the stand
of old Dr. Jacob Townshend's Sarsaparilla.
So impressed was I with this idea, that I
contemplated an extended survey of this portion
of the World's Fair; but I was deterred, and
indeed several subsequent attempts to
investigate the United States section cut short by
two insurmountable obstacles. The first was
the hideous aspect of the India-rubber Diver,
which (having my nerves as well as other
people) I never could prevail on myself to pass;
the second, a dreadful individual, in this same
India-rubber department, who was always
cracking a ferocious and gigantic India-rubber
whip, which suggested to me such horrifying
thoughts of negro slavery (the villain used to
crack it with a vindictive relish, and exercise
it on a huge black caoutchouc cushion, dreadfully
like negro flesh)—such freezing pictures
of cotton fields, and "cash for negroes," and
"run away from the subscriber"—such awful
tableaux of barracoons, and slave-shackles,
and King Tom or Peter selling God's
image and his own for rum and muskets to
the Christian captain of that tight Brazilian
craft, the "Nostra Senhora de Caridad,"—such
frightful ideas, in a word, of lashings and
gashings, paddling, pickling, bowie-kniving,
and revolvering, that I never had courage to
pursue my American researches farther, and
could never regain my equanimity without at
least half-an-hour's inspection of Mr. Hope's
jewels, or the comical creatures from Wurtemburg.

On the whole, therefore, my impressions
regarding the numbers of foreigners in the