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ever, to a first-class hotel breakfast in the United States. After striped bass, broiled, fried oysters, stewed oysters, stuffed clams, scrambled eggs, Massachusetts sausages, buckwheat cakes, Graham bread, and milk toast, with perhaps some Havana oranges or Catawba grapes as a wind up-stay, I have left out the tender loin steak with fried potatoes, and the hominy boiled and fried, and the pig's feet breaded—it is hard, indeed, to be in an uncharitable mood with any of your species. And harder still was it this morning to feel morose or "deliberate ugly" in view of the beautiful wintry weather, and Broadway crowded with gay dresses and pretty faces. Ah! those charming wearers of fur mantles and Paris bonnets-bevies of minx and sable-backed ducks who flutter through the great promenade of New York from Union Square down as far as Canal Street. The little children are home from school, too, just now, and Young America, in knickerbockers, in braided caftans, in Algerian burnouses, in scarlet gipsy cloaks, in hats and caps of every form and feathers of every hue, in cloth gaiters and Hessian boots, and frilled pantalettes, the darlings in long fair ringlets and frizzled ringlets, in muffs and boas, and capes and tippets-Young America is amazing in Broadway; laughing, racing, jumping, romping, rushing hither and thither, dragging its parents and guardians whithersoever it listeth, and generally productive of solace and delight to the beholder. The Americans notoriously and habitually spoil their children. They give them whatever they ask for; candies, toys, books, dolls, fine clothes, and little Union flags to wave about in their games. In very few American families out of New England-where, to be sure,

some of the vigour of the Puritanic manners yet obtains— is there anything like discipline or subordination to be found among the younger branches. The corridors of every hotel are full of pretty, fair-haired, noisy, delightful children. They crow and scream, and playfully essay to kick in the panels of your door. Then out may come a nurse, and more rarely a parent, who scolds them soundly and threatens "switching," at which the children laugh, for they know that the threat has no fundamental basis. The American ladies are very angry with Mr. Anthony Trollope for having stated, in an otherwise admirably candid and observant book, that the children in the States are fed upon pickles. Whether such condiments form an integral portion of their diet I do not know; but I trust I shall not be blamed for hinting that a few of the most uproarious juveniles in the Union might be the better for a little "switching." Such merry but indomitable young dare-devils I never saw. But, plead the American mammas, it is useless as well as mischievous to correct them. If punished never so slightly, they fall into hysterics, or have the sulks.

However, this being Christmas time, the children have a prescriptive and indefeasible right to be as noisy as ever they please. Who shall gainsay them so late in December? Not I, for one, who have been wandering up and down Broadway trying to conjure up, from the throng of laughing lineaments around, something to remind me of one dear little face thousands of miles away-a face that by this time, I trust, is beginning to beam very sunnily over the Christmas goodies. Happy faces are beaming, too, here in abundance; there is

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Christmas, thank God, all the world over.

And if you feel

strange or lonely, what can you do better than look up in the night at this wonderfully clear American sky, and watch the twinkling stars? And when you have made out the old familiar friends, and recognise Charles's Wain, driving for ever and ever, with equal pace, through the great highway— the same Wain you saw in your Cockney Camberwell—you know and are thankful that the same kind Father is there to protect those dear to you at home, and to watch over you, a wanderer.

With a sky Italian in its dark blue tint, with the sun shining, with the streets crowded, with the shops teeming with toys and confectionery and holiday presents, and with cartloads of evergreens to deck churches and houses lumbering by, there are but two little drawbacks to your pleasurable enjoyment of the season. The first is in being told that at New York, for some reason or other difficult of explanation, Christmas Day is not held as so bright, glorious, and convivial a festival as the 1st of January. On Christmas Day, I believe, all good folks go to church, and there are family dinners; but New Year's Day is the real time for jollification, for paying visits, and drinking hot punch and making presents. The second drawback is in the constantly recurring remembrance that the country is at war. The gay and impulsive people of New York have run away with the delusion that all signs and symptoms of the existence of civil strife have been banished from their sumptuous streets; but a stranger, a foreigner, cannot be half an hour in Broadway without becoming disagreeably aware of the fact that at nearly every

hundred yards a great, insatiate monster is fuming for men to come and be killed. The natives have grown accustomed to the banners flaunting across the roadway, with inscriptions calling for "Thirty thousand more volunteers," or vaunting the enormous bounties promised to recruits by the committee of supervisors. Their ears are dulled to the monotonous croak of the horse-leech's three daughters, crying out, "Give, give." They fail to see the slatternly soldiers lounging on the steps of the recruiting offices, or the busy agents and brokers hunting up recruits in bars and groggeries, in front streets and back streets, on wharves and on ferry-boats, wherever they can lure, wherever they can catch them. The foreigner cannot help seeing this. It is not strange, perhaps, that the sight should jar on him. It is no business of his, of course. It is impertinent in him to object to war, even in the abstract, or to remind his neighbours that Christmas is a time for friendliness and forgiveness, and that the shepherds in the dawn, who saw the first Christmas Day, sang their carol when all the world was hushed and tranquil, and universal peace reigned over sea and land.

CHAPTER V.

NEW YEAR'S DAY IN NEW YORK.

NEW YEAR'S DAY is, in New York, about the most unfavourable day in the year for making up a mail to Europe. It is, at least, unpropitious when it falls on a Friday, and the steam-ship of the Inman line leaves Pier Forty-four, North River, on the ensuing Saturday, as it will to-day at noon. You should make up your mail, it may be argued, on Thursday; but how are you to do that if you only left Niagara on Wednesday night and the New York Central and Hudson River lines wouldn't keep their time? Besides, there is that "latest intelligence," so anxiously expected, so tardy in arrival. Ere you close your letter, an "extra" of the New York Plugugly and Staten Island Shoulder-hitter may announce that Charleston has fallen, that the miserable inhabitants have grown weary of spending their Christmas by Gilmore's Greek fire, and that the "flag" waves over Sumter; that Richmond has arisen in its might, torn Jeft Davis, as the ungrateful Hollanders tore their Grand Pensionary, to pieces, and rushed into the Union again, on the amalgamated platform of peace between North and South and war to the bitter end with Great Britain. Such things are quite possible, albeit not very probable, in this astound

VOL. I.

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