America as comfortable as in Europe, my answer would be, that that depends on circumstances. An American car is not equal to an English first-class carriage in luxury, or cleanliness, or society. On the other hand, it is comfortable as compared with our second-classes, and luxurious as compared with our third. Indeed, I should say about American railways as I should about most American institutions :--If you are able to drive about in hansom cabs, to travel always in first-class express trains, and to give a shilling to the porter at the station, then, as far as comfort of locomotion goes, you had better stop at home. If, on the contrary, you belong to the great public, to whom sixpences and shillings are an object, who rarely travel first-class, except in an excursion train, and who have been known, under the rose, to go third-class in parliamentary trains, then you are better off, far better off, in American travelling than you are in English. The million, in fact, fares better in the New World than it does in the Old.

Of the country through which my route lay, I say little. In the first place, I travelled through most of it at night; in the second, I shall say what I have to say of American scenery when I come to my journeyings in the West, where the characteristics peculiar to American scenery are infinitely more marked than in the East. The whole country, indeed, of Pennsylvania reminded me more than anything of England run to seed. The fields were more sprawling, the houses were more

loosely built, the roads were rougher, and the towns were more straggling; but otherwise the resemblance was very close. If you can conceive our midland counties flattened out, magnified indefinitely, and diffused loosely over an area of tenfold their own, you will picture Pennsylvania to yourself.

It was upon the banks of the Susquehanna river that I came first upon the track of the war. Between Pennsylvania and Maryland, between the free North and the slave South, the great deep river, wider than the Rhine at Dusseldorf, rolls as a frontier line. The topheavy looking steam-ferry, which, in defiance of all one's preconceived ideas of the laws of equilibrium, carries train, cars, rails, passengers, luggage and all, with scarcely a break of continuity, from one bank to another, transports one not only into a new State, but into a new country. The whole aspect of the scenery changes : the broad, thriving, cheerful expanse of carefully tilled fields, dotted over with the villa-like farm-houses, gives place to long, straggling, red-brick towns, half villages, half cities; to broken-down fences; to half-ploughed, hopeless-looking fields, where the negro labourers are toiling listlessly; to dreary tracks of mud, which stand where roads ought to be; and to wide stony spaces of meagre brushwood. The restless activity I witnessed everywhere north of the Susquehanna was exchanged for a sort of fussy idleness. By the house doors, and in the streets through which the train passed slowly,

there stood men hanging about idly, loitering languidly, with their hands deep-buried in their trouser-pockets, watching tumble-down carts struggling spasmodically across the deep-rutted roads, and loafing visibly.

In this dull winter-time, too, Maryland looked all the drearier for the traces of the war, visible on every side. I passed along the same line again in the first burst of the early summer, when the war had moved on far away southwards; and, except for the look of poverty and decay, which even the rich summer foliage could not hide, I should scarce have recognised it for the same country. Hitherto I had hardly been able to realize, from the outward look of things, that the Union was in the midst of a civil war; but here in Maryland the evidence was only too palpable. At Havre de Grace, the river station on the southern side of the Susquehanna, we passed the first camp, and the dingy greyish blue-coated Federal soldiers came running alongside the train to ask for stray papers from New York. Then, at each station as we passed further south, the train became fuller and fuller with soldiers, and the small roadside camps grew more and more frequent. In Baltimore the streets swarmed with troops, and south of this again, on to Washington, we seemed to pass through a conquered country. In the grey glimmer of the evening we could see the white tents of the camps pitched on the hill-slopes that overhang Baltimore. Every roadside station was occupied with troops; at

every bridge and crossing there were small outposts stationed; and along the line at short distances there were sentinels at watch to protect the rails. The nearest forces of the enemy lay some fifty miles away across the Potomac, and with the vast Federal army before Washington, it could not be against the Confederates that these precautions were taken. It is true that the maintenance of this single track of rails, the one means of communication between New York and Washington, was of vital importance, and, therefore, no precaution was too great to take, if necessary. On the other hand, the maintenance of the same line north of the Susquehanna was of equal importance, and yet there it was left unguarded. The inference is a very obvious one-Pennsylvania is a Free State, and loyal; Maryland is a Slave State, and therefore disloyal.

It was thus, as I entered Washington, that the bearing of the slave question upon the war was practically brought home to me. Before, then, I speak of Washington, it is time to say something of that great issue.

THE FREE NEGRO.

It is strange to me, looking back on my sojourn in the States, to think that I could have written some sixty pages without coming on the question of the everlasting Nigger. It was the fashion amongst English critics, at the time I left England, to state that the whole Secession question had no direct bearing on, no immediate connexion with, the issue of slavery. As to the letter, there was some small truth in this assertion; as to the spirit, there was none. Many of my readers, probably, have visited at some time or other a friend labouring under a mortal disease. Neither he nor you, perhaps, spoke of it; every allusion to illness of any kind was studiously avoided; you talked, and laughed, and gossipped, as though the idea of death had never crossed your minds; and yet both you and he felt all along that this idea was ever present-that it was the key to every word you uttered, the burden of every spoken phrase and unspoken thought. When the cholera was raging in Venezuela, the panic-stricken half

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