a crystal.  Wide yawning is the doorway;
countless are the columns ; lofty and aërial
the balconies; vividly verdant the
verandahs; and high up above the topmost
balustrade floats, self-assertingiy in the air, the
great banner of the Stars and Stripes. This
is an hotel with a vengeance, but run not
away with the impression that it is unique
—a solitary monster, like the Sphinx, the
Grand Hôtel du Louvre, or the Great
Western Hotel, Paddington. It has brothers,
and cousins, and children as capacious, if not
more so, than itself, on either side, and up
and down, as far as the eye can reach, in the
great transatlantic Boulevard—the Straightway.
The St. Boblink House is but one
among an army of colossal hotels. The
Parvarer House, the St. Hominy House, the
Golden Gate House, the Amalgamated
Squash Hotel, and other high- sounding
hostelries. The St. Boblink is a vast eating
and drinking factory; an Eastern caravanserai
opened up by American enterprise; an
emperor's palace let out in room lots at three
dollars a-day; a Vatican for voyagers.

People say that there are above two thousand
rooms in that same Vatican. I shouldn't
like to bet; but to guess, from the hordes of
travellers that the St. Bobliuk gives shelter
to, it would really seem as though his
Holiness the Pope had the smaller house of the
two. The ear of man has not heard how
many the St. Boblink would accommodate at
a pinch; and no one is in a position to dispute
the boast of Washington Mush, its landlord,
(now travelling in Europe with a secretary, a
courier, a tutor, a governess, and two ladies'
maids for his family), that he could take the
whole of Congress in to board; provide beds,
in addition, for the British House of Lords,
if they felt inclined to come over and see
the workings of the American constitution;
and find, without much trouble,
shakedowns into the bargain for the House of
Commons.

You may have rooms, and suites of rooms,
at the Saint Boblink, at a sliding scale of
prices. If you are inclined to do the
Sardanapalus, you can revel in splendour, and
ruin yourself if you like; but if you are but
a simple, sensible, single traveller, who has
travelled, perhaps, twelve hundred miles
with no more luggage than a valise, or a
shiny carpet-bag, you may board and lodge,
and enjoy your thousandth share of all the
luxuries in this hotel-palace for the moderate
sim of three dollars, or twelve shillings and
sixpence per diem. There are even cheaper,
and not much less splendid hotels; but the
Saint Boblink is a first chop—an A-one
house.

For your three dollars a-day you have the
run of all the public apartments, a noble
billiard room, where you may win or lose dollar-
bills of or to excitable southerners and senators
in want of excitement, to your heart's
content ; reading-rooms, where the ten thousand
newspapers of the Union, all printed on
the largest possible paper in the smallest
possible type, are spread on the green-
baize tables; smoking-rooms where you
may taste the flavour of real Havannahs,
or luxuriate in the mastication of the
fragrant pigtail; writing-rooms; audience-
rooms; cloak-rooms; lavatories, conversation-
parlours, and lounging-balconies. I don't
know whether they have fitted up a whittling-
room at the Saint Boblink yet; but I dare
say that convenience will be added to the
establishment on the return of Washington
Mush, Esquire, from Europe. At the same
time, perhaps, it would be as well to erect an
apartment devoted exclusively to the national
pastime of expectoration. At present, for
want of a special location, the whole palace is
one huge spittoon, which is inconvenient to
foreigners.

The bar-room of the Saint Boblink may be
imitated, but it can never be equalled in
Europe. No efforts of plastic art, of
upholstering ingenuity, of architectural cunning,
of licensed-victualling cunning could produce
such a result as is here apparent. The green
velvet spring couches, with carved oak arm-
rests, that artfully invite you to lounge; the
marble mantel-pieces and stove-tops that
seem to say, seductively, " come, raise your
heels above the level of your heads, and show
the European stranger a row of chevaux de
frise of black pants;" the rocking-chairs; the
dainty marble and bronze tables (transatlantic
reminiscences of Parisian cafés); the
arabesqued gas-burners; the cut-glass looking-
glasses, gilt frames, and Venetian blinds;
the splendiferous commercial advertisements
that so worthily usurp the place of stupid high
art pictures and engravings; for who would
not rather see " Fits, fits, fits," in
chromolithography, or " Doctor Turnipseed's
medicated mangelwurzel," or, " the Patent
Heracleidan Detective Padlock," sumptuously
framed and glazed, than Sir Edward Landseer's
"Deerstalking," or the Queen after
Winterhalter? But I do the bar of the
Saint Boblink injustice. There are some
engravings. The massive head of Daniel Webster
frowns upon the sherry-cobler drinkers;
proudly (in a print) in the muddy Mississippi,
defiant of snags and sawyers, steams along
the Peleg Potter steamer, huge, hurricane-
decked, many-portholed, high-pressured, and
hideous; her engines working in sight, as if
her boilers were impatient to burst, and had
come up from the engine-room to see how
many passengers there were, before bursting.
Then there is a grand view of the palace
itself—the Saint Boblink, as large as life (at
least on the scale of half an inch to a foot),
lithographed by Messrs. Saxony and Mayor.
The bar-room has almost made me forget the
bar itself; though surely one visit to it is
sufficient to stamp it in your remembrance
for ever. There, on that great marble field
of Bacchus are sold the most delicious thirst-