cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices.  My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in what we know as sea-sickness.  Where the horizon opened widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones.  Looking from a right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not appear to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied them.  We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated.  The traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found “his warmest welcome at an inn,” has something to learn at the offices of the great city hotels.  The unheralded guest who is honored by mere indifference may think himself blessed with singular good-fortune.  If the despot of the Patent-Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor.  The coldest welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the door of a bishop’s palace, the most icy reception that a country cousin ever received at the city mansion of a mushroom millionaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the more or less elevated circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on his dog’s-eared register.  I have less hesitation in unburdening myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met with more than one exception to the rule.  Officials become brutalized, I suppose, as a matter of course.  One cannot expect an office clerk to embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he receives for transmission.  Still, humanity is not always totally extinguished in these persons.  I discovered a youth in a telegraph office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not made.