(eight cents) is double that of England.  The convenient “special delivery stamp” (ten cents) entitles a letter to immediate delivery by special messenger.  The tendency for the establishment of slight divergency in language between England and America is seen in the terms of the post-office as in those of the railway.  A letter is “mailed,” not “posted;” the “postman” gives way to the “letter-carrier;” a “post-card” is expanded into a “postal-card.”  The stranger on arrival at New York will be amused to see the confiding way in which newspaper or book packets, too large for the orifice, are placed on the top of the street letter-boxes (affixed to lamp-posts), and will doubtless be led to speculate on the different ways and instincts of the street Arabs of England and America.  A second reflection will suggest to him the superior stability of the New York climate.  On what day in England could we leave a postal packet of printed matter in the open air with any certainty that it would not be reduced to pulp in half an hour by a deluge of rain?

No remarks on the possible inferiority of the American telegraph and postal systems would be fair if unaccompanied by a tribute to the wonderful development of the use of the telephone.  New York has (or had very recently) more than twice as many subscribers to the telephonic exchanges as London, and some American towns possess one telephone for every twenty inhabitants, while the ratio in the British metropolis is 1:3,000.  In 1891 the United States contained 240,000 miles of telephone wires, used by over 200,000 regular subscribers.  In 1895 the United Kingdom had about 100,000 miles of wire.  The Metropolitan telephone in New York alone has 30,000 miles of subterranean wire and about 9,000 stations.  The great switch-board at its headquarters is 250 feet long, and accommodates the lines of 6,000 subscribers.  Some subscribers call for connection over a hundred times a day, and about one hundred and fifty girls are required to answer the calls.

The generalisations made in travellers’ books about the hotels of America seem to me as fallacious as most of the generalisations about this chameleon among nations.  Some of the American hotels I stayed at were about the best of their kind in the world, others about the worst, others again about half-way between these extremes.  On the whole, I liked the so-called “American system” of an inclusive price by the day, covering everything except such purely voluntary extras as wine; and it seems to me that an ideal hotel on this system would leave very little to wish for.  The large American way of looking at things makes a man prefer to give twenty shillings per day for all he needs and consumes rather than be bothered with a bill for sixteen to seventeen shillings, including such items (not disdained even by the swellest European hotels) as one penny for stationery or a shilling for lights.  The weak points of the system as at present carried on are