NEW YORK TO WASHINGTON.

IT was always a trouble to me in America, choosing where I should go next. It was not the embarras de richesse, but the embarras de pauvreté. One place was so marvellously like the other, that it was hard to decide why you should go to one place in preference to another. I always have had the keenest sympathy for the ass in the fable, who was unable to make up his mind between the two bundles of hay that hung on either side of him. Hay is excellent food and well deserves eating; but when bundle of hay number one is the exact counterpart of bundle number two, how is an irresolute ass to decide which best deserves munching? This was my own state of mind, I confess frankly, with regard to my route in America. The country is well worth seeing how well worth seeing I never knew till I had travelled over it; but still, one American town is just as well worth seeing as its neighbour, and not more. Columbus (Ohio) is extremely like Springfield (Indiana), and both are the very counterparts of Lafayetteville

(Missouri). All are worth visiting, but why should you give the preference to Springfield over Columbus, or to Lafayetteville over both? This is a dilemma which I could never get out of, and whose solution perplexed me from the day I entered the States to the day I left them.

The first time the problem presented itself to me in all its difficulty was on leaving New York. I had intended to go from thence to Boston; but the question was propounded to me, whether it was not better to go to Washington first instead. If the solution had been left to my unassisted powers of decision, I should probably be residing at this present moment in the Everett House, New York, making up my mind where to go next. Happily, I had two motives which decided the course of my journey. In the first place, it was cold-bitterly cold -in New York. Most European travellers visit America in the summer, and therefore their books convey no impression of the cold which prevails in winter. The winter of 1862 was an unusually mild one-so, at least, I was told by everybody; and New York, from its vicinity to the sea, is a comparatively warm city. All I can say is, that, till I came to New York, in the January of 1862, I never knew what cold was. The houses were beautifully warmed; but the contrast between the heat indoors and the frost out of doors only made the cold more painful. As to sleighing, experto crede, it is a mere mockery of pleasure. If you want to experience it, as an American writer said, you have only to stand

for an hour in a draught, with your feet in freezing water, and your numbed fingers tinkling a string of bells. At any rate, it requires a warmer-blooded being than myself to enjoy the pleasures of an American winter. New York was too cold for me already, and I dreaded the notion of a place like Boston, where New York was counted warm by comparison.

Moreover, the advance of the Grand Army of the Potomac was expected daily. It did not take place till weeks after I arrived in Washington; but, at that period, I had been too short a time in America to make allowance for the difference between promise and performance; and when I read, day after day, that the army was on the move, I was seized with a fear that I should be too late to catch a glimpse of the war.

So, from all these causes, I travelled southwards instead of northwards. It is not my intention, as I have said before, to write a diary of my journeys. And of this journey in particular I have little to say, except of one adventure that befel me, illustrative in many ways of American habits. I started by the mail-train for Philadelphia, where I arrived at two o'clock or thereabouts on a cold winter morning. With an Englishman's dislike to parting with my luggage, I had kept my baggage cheques with me instead of consigning them to the care of the freight agent who collects them en route. Whether I was sleepy-whether I had not made up my mind which hotel I should go to—or why, I forget; but

so it was. My impression is, that knowing nothing of the town, I had resolved to go to the hotel which sent up the best omnibus to the station. When I arrived, there was no omnibus, no private carriage of any kind, nothing but the street railroad car, waiting to convey passengers across Philadelphia to the Washington railroad. It is not the custom for passengers to look after their own luggage on American railroads, and it was with the greatest difficulty I got my trunks together in time to get a seat on the step of the car. I asked the conductor to recommend me to an inn, but found that the car did not pass any hotel on its route. The man was civil, as all American conductors are, but he could do nothing for me as he had to keep with the car; so he set me down at the corner of a street, and told me that if I followed it for four blocks, I should find an hotel. I don't know that I ever felt a more helpless individual than on that winter morning, at two o'clock, in the streets of Philadelphia. I had a most indistinct notion of which way I was to go. Whether four blocks meant four, or four hundred, or four thousand yards, I was unable to guess. There was not a soul about the streets, and I had a huge portmanteau, two large carpet-bags, a bundle of heavy wraps, and an umbrella, to transport with me. I sat upon my trunk for some time looking at my bags in the hopes that somebody might appear, but in vain. There was no hope, and so I roused myself to exertion. Necessity is the mother of invention. I carried my trunk

ten yards, then left it and returned for the bags, then for the wraps and umbrella as a light easy task, and so on ad infinitum. My rate of locomotion was extremely slow; and all along I was haunted by an equal fear of meeting a thief or a policeman. The former might have robbed me with the most perfect security; the latter would have arrested me for a thief who had stolen the luggage I was dragging about. However, in the main street of Philadelphia at two A.M., I met neither thief nor policeman, nor living soul; and after an hour's labour I reached an hotel, considerably the wiser in the art of American travel by the night's experience.

But while I am speaking of travelling in the States, let me say, once for all, what I have to say of railway travelling in America. Some lines are better than others. As a rule, the Western lines are inferior to the Eastern ones; and the Southern to either. Still, in their broad features, they are very much alike. The through fares are cheap. Thus, you can go from New York to Chicago, a distance of upwards of one thousand miles, for four pounds; but the way-fares are three-halfpence a mile. The arrangements about luggage are exceedingly good. As soon as you arrive at the station, you show your master; he takes off a string he holds in his hand a number of leather straps, attached to brass plates about the size of a crown piece, on which the name of your destination and a number is inscribed. These straps he

ticket to the luggage