Wherever you go in all these vast States the hotels are almost all on the same plan. So are the railway carriages, and so are some other things. There does not exist either the cosy, comfortable English hotel or the foreign café. There is nothing in New York or anywhere else, so far as I saw, like the Boulevards in Continental cities. But there is every where the universal American hotel, the, lower hall of which is a kind of place of assembly for all the world, or at all events all the male world. That public life in the hotel hall is what the American men seem to like best. The reading-rooms and other public apartments are not very comfortable; but the barber's shop attached to every American hotel is luxurious. I do agree with Mr. Trollope in denouncing as the most horrible place in the world the ladies' room, which is always the stiffest, barest, and most uncomfortably gorgeous place that it is possible to conceive-not a book or a newspaper or a domestic comfort of any kind—a place into which a stranger can hardly dare to enter, unless he be a man of iron nerves; and if he does enter cannot make himself comfortable in any sort of way. It seems very strange that, with the experience of Continental travelling which the Americans have, after seeing the nice, comfortable drawing-rooms in Swiss and other hotels, they won't condescend to introduce something of the kind into their own. Then in their mode of feeding the Americans are certainly peculiar, and their ways are quite different from our ways. You never see such a thing as an English joint or an English dish put upon the table.

Nor, on the other hand, have you well-cooked dishes handed round in the French style. They have a style of their own, which is, that your meal is served in a large number of curious oval little dishes, which are put before you all mixed up together, without the smallest regard to time or tide, or hotness, or coldness, or anything else; and especially you have to this day what Mr. Trollope vividly describes, a waiter who stands over you as a sort of taskmaster, and makes you eat your meal, not at your convenience but at his. I do think it is a very great pity that the founders of the American Republic did not introduce a little Scotch cookery among their early institutions. I am very happy to say that more recent reforms have introduced one excellent Scotch food which we are too much inclined to discard ourselves. I mean oatmeal porridge. They generally give cream with it— a very commendable arrangement. In truth, I could have eaten oatmeal porridge in the States with great satisfaction, if I had not felt insulted by the constant practice there of calling it 'Irish oatmeal.' The Americans themselves seem to have a partiality to live upon oysters, which are there produced in enor mous quantity, and I believe of excellent quality, for I do not eat them myself. Their beef is generally good, but not always well cooked; the mutton not good. They have a most delightful variety of different kinds of bread, not only of wheat but of maize, corn, buckwheat, and other things. They drink a very great deal of tea and coffee, and a great deal of excellent milk; but what is unpardonable,

considering the excellent dairy facilities which they have, the butter is always salt and bad. When I speak of tea or coffee, however, I should say that coffee is the principal drink of the States, and is generally very well made. Tea is comparatively quite rare, and is almost always very badly made. I shall notice separately in connection with the drink ques tion the, to us, extraordinary absence of wine and other liquors from their meals.

The railway carriages are another American institution which are quite different from ours. They are very long and heavy conveyances, with entrances only from the ends, and seats ranged along each side. There seems to be no objection on principle to a variety of classes. On all the chief railways of the Northern States there are drawing-room cars, which practically take the place of first-class carriages. But the ordinary American railway carriage, which is the only carriage without distinction of class on a large proportion of railways, is such that it may be generally said that all are second-class. In these travelling in America is somewhat cheaper than travelling first-class in this country; and so far as my experience goes there is generally an entire absence of any rough and rowdy element, such as some have supposed must result from an amalgamation of classes. I am inclined to think the people who most suffer from the American system are those who travel third-class in this country. For them there is no cheap third-class, and consequently for them travelling is much dearer than in this country. There seem to be no railway porters in

America. People manage themselves and take care of themselves, and the railways run through the middle of streets and towns without any fencing. I asked, 'Are people not constantly run down and killed?' The answer I got was, "They sometimes are; but they learn to take care of themselves.' For travelling at night there are the Pullman cars, or other cars in the style of the Pullman. But here, too, it struck me, there was a too extreme uniformity and great absence of variety. The cars are very gorgeous and not very comfortable-sometimes very crowded and much overheated. The great steamers which run on protected waters and rivers are, I think, the most comfortable institutions in the way of travelling that exist in America or in any other country.

American The social the social

If you want to have an idea of the general state of society which exists in America I would put it to you in this way-if in this country you were to kill off all the country gentlemen, with all their wives and families, and make the farmers the owners of the land which they till, you would have something which you could hardly distinguish from America. towns are very much like English towns. arrangements of Kirkcaldy are very like arrangements of an American country town. But there is this great difference, in the outward aspect, that in an American town of this size you would have very large and very broad streets, lined with trees; and very nice villa-like houses, probably on the whole better than our houses. In that respect the American town is a

better and a nicer place than our towns-in dry weather, at any rate. But when it comes to rain, as the streets are all unpaved, they are exceedingly muddy. I have said that the country gentlemen element is altogether wanting; but the plutocrats, the money people, are quite as strong in America as in this country-perhaps stronger; that is socially, and in everything not regulated by the first principles of the American Constitution and system-these they cannot get over. In all other matters the plutocrats, it seems to me, rule the country even more than they do here. The rich people rule the press, and the and the press rules the country. I am afraid that is a good deal the case in most parts of the civilised world.

There is a popular idea that the Americans are so civilised that they object to marriage, and that for increase of the population the Americans must depend, not upon themselves, but upon the foreigners. I believe that this is quite a libel. The peculiar sects of which we hear so much are but a drop among the population. I myself saw none of them, but I did see a great many people who did not belong to these peculiar sects, and my decided impression is that the Americans marry earlier and trust to their wits to support a family more than we do; that they have large and rapid families, just such as we have; and there is not the least danger that the American population will die out. In nothing, I think, does Mr. Trollope so much libel the Americans as in the most odious character which he attributes to the average middle-class woman of America. He seems