be the more degraded and rowdy portion of the community, who find a more congenial atmosphere in those sinks of vice inseparable from large towns.  This migratory spirit has caused them to exhibit their energy and enterprise in those countless miles of rail and telegraph, which bring the citizens of the most distant States into easy communication with Washington and the Eastern cities.  The difficulty of procuring labour is no doubt one cause of the very inefficient way in which many of these works are performed; and it also disables them for executing gigantic works with the speed and certainty that such operations are completed in England.  The miniature Crystal Palace at New York afforded a convincing proof of what I have stated; for although it was little more than a quarter of the size of the one in Hyde Park, they were utterly foiled in their endeavours to prepare it in time.  In revenge for that failure, the Press tried to console the natives by enlarging on the superior attraction of hippodromes, ice-saloons, and penny shows, with which it was surrounded, and contrasting them with the “gloomy grandeur” of the palace in London.  Gloomy grandeur is, I suppose, the Yankee way of expressing the finest park in any city in the world.

Among other remarks on Americans, I have heard many of my countrymen say, “Look how they run after lords!”—­It is quite true; a live lord is a comparative novelty, and they run after him in the same way as people in England run after an Indian prince, or any pretentious Oriental:  it is an Anglo-Saxon mania.  Not very long ago, a friend of mine found a Syrian swaggering about town, feted everywhere, as though he were the greatest man of the day; and who should the Syrian nabob turn out to be, but a man he had employed as a servant in the East, and whom he had been obliged to get bastinadoed for petty theft.  In England we run after we know not whom; in America, if a lord be run after, there is at all events a strong presumption in favour of his being at least a gentleman.  We toady our Indian swells, and they toady their English swells; and I trust, for our sake, that in so doing they have a decided advantage over us.

I have also heard some of my countrymen observe, as to their hospitality, “Oh! it’s very well; but if you went there as often as I do, you would see how soon their hospitality wears off.”  Who on earth ever heard such an unreasonable remark!  Because a man, in the fulness of hospitality, dedicates his time, his money, and his convenience to welcome a stranger, of whose character and of whose sociability he knows nothing whatever, is he therefore bound to be saddled with that acquaintance as often as the traveller chooses to visit the American Continent?  Is not the very idea preposterous?  No man in the world is more ready to welcome the stranger than the American; but if the stranger revisit the same places, the courtesy and hospitality he receives must, in justice, depend upon the impression which his company