taking her eternal footbath in the distance.
But this would be but a blurred, unfaithful
photography, and worthless. Let us be truthful
or we are nothing. The Spanish campaign
is yet to come. Nor can I tell you
what the hotels in the Tyrol are like (though
I have been told those at Ischl are charming);
nor can I perorate on the great, bare,
ruinous Khans of Asia Minor. When my
uncle—Colonel Cutcherry—comes home from
Madras I will collate his experience as to the
capacities of the Overland Route hotels at
Cairo and Alexandria, and you must
wait till I have entered the college of
the Propaganda, and till I have been sent to
China as a missionary, till I am enabled to
describe, in the manner of Father Huc, the
hotels of the middle kingdom. I must no
longer tarry in Europe (though due in an
English hotel soon) for my boat is on the
shore, and my bark is on the sea; yet, before
I go, here's a double health to a continental
hotel I have ungenerously passed over.
I allude to the Grand Laboureur, and that,
for once, in my fantastic roving commission,
is its veritable name. I have nothing but
what is favourable to say of that sumptuous
traveller's joy. Good dinners, clean beds,
excellent services, moderate prices,—all are to
be found at the Great Labourer, and he his
worthy of his hire.

I have been purposely silent on the subject
of the hotels of Constantinople, because they
are in a transition state, like Turkey itself,
at present. It is to be hoped that the
mighty influx of military visitors, and the
T. G.'s who will be sure to keep on flocking
thereto for some years to come, will work
wonders of improvement in the hotels of
Byzantium. The Old Pera Hotel, kept
generally by an equivocal Levantine, or an
unmistakeable Maltese, was decidedly of the
bad-dear, dirty, and uncomfortable.

My boat being on the shore, it is necessary
that you should enter it with me in order to
reach my bark on the sea; for we have a journey
of three thousand five hundred miles to
make before we can reach an hotel, without a
description of which these papers would be
maimed and imperfect. I will trouble you
also to disburse a matter of thirty guineas
(exclusive of wines and liquors) for a stateroom
on board the Great Bear of Michigan,
mail steamer; furthermore to hurry down
to Liverpool by express, get on board the
tender, tell your friends to expect you back
in about six months, and prepare yourself for
a ten days' sojourn on the briny ocean; for
you, and I, and her Majesty's mails are all
bound, in the spirit, to New York.

The steamer in which you make the easy,
rapid passage, is, in truth, and in almost
every respect, a great floating hotel in itself.
The steam-boat company having had the
ingenuity to divine that a sea-voyage, even of
ten days' duration, is despairingly tedious,
have come to the conclusion that the best
methods of wiling away the time lie in eating,
drinking, and smoking; and have most
wisely afforded the amplest accommodation
for the indulgence of these three pastimes.
The passengers add a little gambling by
way of rider to the staple amusements.
With an excellent library, a spacious
promenade, a luxurious table, a snug
bedchamber, and congenial society of both sexes,
he must be a misanthrope or a hypochondriac
indeed who could find a trip in an
Atlantic-steamer tedious. It has not
unfrequently occurred to me that, if I had
money, I might do much more foolish things
than pass a year sailing backwards and
forwards between New York and Liverpool;
and I can imagine a traveller, inimical
to change and fond of sitting down when he
finds himself comfortable, as reluctant to quit
the steamer at the end of the voyage, as the
life-long prisoner was to leave the Bastile.
Talk of a ship being a prison with the
chance of being drowned. I should like
Doctor Johnson to have sat at the
sumptuous table of the Great Bear of Michigan
on a champagne day. He would have taken
wine with Captain Wobble, I warrant.

There has been a rough day or two, and
you have been sea-sick in a gentlemanly way,
and you have touched at Halifax and Boston
and you enter, at last, the incomparable Bay
of New York. You see the pilot-boats, the
groves of masts, the sunny islands; you are
boarded by the news-boys, you hear all the
shouting, smell all the cigar-smoke, pass the
custom-house, and land. A ragged Irishman
immediately reminds you that Donnybrook
Fair is immortal; fights a pitched battle
with seven other Irishmen raggeder than
himself, dances a jig on your luggage, and
hustles you into a villanous cab, for
which, at your journey's end, he makes
you pay very nearly as much as suits
his own sweet will, abusing you
terrifically if you dispute his fare. Only take
one cab in New York, and you will be
perfectly convinced of the existence of thorns in
a rosebush. He rattles you through broad
streets: you catch glimpses of immense
buildings of white marble and coloured
bricks, of a blue cloudless sky, of slim young
ladies dressed in bright colours, of news-boys
smoking cigars, of vast storehouses, of
innumerable repetitions of the ragged Irishman,
of bearded men, of tarry sailors, of ugly
churches, of flaunting flags, of tearing fire-
engines with red-shirted firemen. You don't
know whether you are in Paris, or in Dublin
or in Liverpool, or in Wapping, or in
America; and you are set down at last at the great
New York Hotel—the SAINT BOBLINK HOUSE.

The Saint Boblink House is a mighty edifice
of pure white marble. Saint Boblink ismuchtoo
noble a saint to be canonised in compo. The
windows sparkle like gems in a queen's
diadem, and seem as numerous as the facets in