Day, if you be of the male sex, is an atrocious and unpardonable social offence. You are bound, under penalty of excommunication and ostracism from polite society, to pay your New Year's visits. Therefore, to avoid the five hundred friends and their five hundred drams at five hundred barswhere each of your friends generally finds five other friends of his, so that the number of drinks ultimately reaches two thousand five hundred-the most prudent course you can pursue is to make your calls in a hackney-coach.

The close carriage, however, does not by any means offer a guarantee for your reaching your hotel again with a clear head. At every house you stop you are invited to eat and expected to drink. What the Mayor is doing at the City Hall, thousands of citizens are doing at their own houses. Arrayed in your Sunday best if you like, but not in evening dress, you ring at a door; a black servant with a very large silver waiter in his larger white-gloved hands responds to the call, grins in a familiar manner, takes your card or not, precisely as the rush of visitors may make encroachments on his time, and allows you ingress to the drawing-room. Then you find the lady of the house-any number of ladies of the house-in full dress, gloved, laced, and blazing in diamonds. You bow, sit, wish and are wished a happy new year, utter the first nonsense that comes into your head, seek the gentleman of the house-any number of gentlemen of the house -slide into a banqueting parlour, and find yourself lunching and hobnobbing for the fifth, the tenth, or the twentieth time, just as the case may be, or your visiting list may be extended or contracted. You will discover that most of the ladies you

visit have a dozen pretty sisters, and the gentlemen, upon an average, rejoice in twenty-five cousins. Then there is a floating population of uncles and aunts, and nephews and nieces, and any number of small children, who don't count. You are not required to stay long on these visits; you must make room for the fresh arrivals. You are not expected to talk about Shakspeare and the musical glasses. A fixed grin of seasonable joyousness is, perhaps, the best mould into which you can cast your countenance. It occasionally happens that when a gentleman with a lengthy visiting list reaches home at sundown, he is unable to do anything but grin-save, perhaps, stumble. He has had enough; he has had too much of visiting, I mean. At some houses, where there may have been but one lady, he has seen two. His mind is a radiant chaos of oysters pickled, oysters stewed, and oysters fried-of pheasants and ducks and quails-of chicken and lobster salad-of every wine the vintages of France and Germany and Portugal can produce—of a little rare old Cognac, and peculiar Bourbon perhaps. He is happy, but speechless.

This kind of thing goes on all day and nearly all night long. How the ladies can endure the fatigue I cannot understand; but they do endure, and seem to delight in, it. They don't drink Moselle; they know not Bourbon; they have not the consolation of Cabanas and Imperials. They sit and smile and shake hands, martyrs to the cause of hospitality. Visits are paid as late as ten o'clock at night, and then there are suppers, and dancing parties, and concerts, and other festivities.

This is New Year's Day in New York. It is the closest of holidays. The theatres are open, and crowded by the million; but all the shops are hermetically sealed, and the Upper Ten Thousand stay at home, light up their houses from garret to basement, and feast their friends. The additional consumption of gas must be enormous. In the streets you don't meet any ladies-only gentlemen, trotting from house to house paying visits. The exercise is exhilarating; the refection perilous. But you must go through with it, or be ostracised.

The compositors and pressmen won't work on New Year's Day; and on the morning of the 2nd of January there are no newspapers. Everybody, it is to be presumed, has been paying visits. Everybody has been jolly. A few may wake up with headaches. New Year's Day in New York is not the less one of the cheerfullest and most humanising celebrations extant among a noble but perverse people, who have repudiated the greater part of the traditional observances to which Europeans pin a reverent and affectionate faith. I wish-abating the plethoric eating and drinking-that it were always New Year's Day in New York, and in the whole of this magnificent empire of Democracy turned crazy. It does me good to see a people habitually melancholy, reserved, or in their most humorous temper grimly saturnine, become for once in a way as merry as grigs and as jolly as sandboys. If they would only laugh a little more, and chew the cud of politics and pigtail a little less, these worthy cousins of ours; if they would only banter each other somewhat, instead of interchanging eternal assertions of being a

chosen, perfect, and peculiar people, like the Jews of oldthey would not, in all probability, be quite so angry with foreigners, who cannot help smiling at their grotesque characteristics—exactly as those foreigners have been in the habit of smiling at what they deemed absurd at home-but who are glad to admit their manifest power and to recognise their many generous and sterling qualities.

CHAPTER VI.

NIAGARA IN WINTER.

NIAGARA! Fearful word; ominous and overwhelming always to the literary mind. I have looked upon it for months as a monstrous bill, for ever coming due, and which I have over and over again renewed, but for which I can procure now, even at the most exorbitant rate of interest, no more days of grace. It has got to be done," as our cousins say. The watery Sphynx has, for the last time, thundered forth her tremendous conundrum, and I must answer it or be devoured. Of course I shall be devoured-demolished, and annihilated. I shall go over the Falls of Incapacity, be smashed to pieces at the base of the Table Rock of Stupidity, be carried down to the Rapids of Censure, to turn up, after many days, mangled and dismembered in the Whirlpool of Criticism. How can I ever hold up my head again in print after attempting Niagara? Had I not better walk the back streets-as Beau Brummell advised his friend with the illmade coat to do-until the thing has blown over? Had I not better start at once for San Francisco, and avail myself of those free passes to the Great Salt Lake City-"pass the bearer and one wife"-with which a friend was recently good enough to present me? Had I not better stuff my ears with