Novels. The Americans can't help their moths, nor their flies, nor their worms, nor their mosquitoes; and I am glad to remark, in conclusion, that from two most noxious inflictions American houses are singularly free. You scarcely ever meet with a bug or a flea. The traveller who put up at the inn at Stoney Stratford would have had no excuse for his non sequitur in the States. I have been in scores of American hotels, and lived in furnished lodgings, but fleas or bugs, or "chintzes," as Mr. Trollope declared American euphuists were wont to call them, never assailed me. When

I went to Cuba and Mexico I was half bitten to death.

CHAPTER XI.

SCHENECTADY.

MR. ALFRED TENNYSON waited for the train at Coventry. He hung with grooms and porters o'er the bridge. He watched the three tall spires, and shaped the city's ancient legend into an immortal rhyme. I had to wait for a train an hour and forty minutes at Schenectady, in the State of New York, in August, '64, but how can the humblest of prose writers hope to make anything worthy of record out of that railway leisure which the Laureate turned to such glorious account? There is a bridge at Schenectady, constructed apparently from lucifer matches and half-inch deals tied together with twopenny twine, and very dirty and ruinous, as most public works in the States seem to be; but there was little to be got by hanging o'er it. Schenectady being with all respect I say it--but a one-horse kind of a place, there were no grooms about; and as for the porters they were, failing the arrival of any travellers at Givens's Hotel, tranquilly liquoring up and talking politics in the underground bars of the city. I suppose Schenectady is a city; but, at any rate, it is but an act of politeness to call it one.

There were no tall spires to watch. Schenectady is not

barren of ecclesiastical edifices, but the majority are barnlike. The Basilica-I don't know what persuasion it is dedicated to-is of wood, and whitewashed. The foundations are pine logs, and it could be moved down town or into the next county, I apprehend, within half-a-dozen hours. The only steeple I saw was a wooden one, which appeared to have begun architectural life as a beanstalk, then to have made up its mind-by breaking out in niches-to try the pigeoncote line of business, then to have striven hard to be a factory chimney, failing which it had gone into the church, and whitewashed itself. As regards any ancient legends belonging to Schenectady, they must have faded out with its aboriginal inhabitants. Here, within two or three generations, perchance, there were wigwams. The Sachem said, "let us dig the hatchet and go forth and cut up that nation;" the young brave speared trout and hunted moose, the medicine-man worked his charms, the squaws wove baskets and embroidered moccasins, the calumet was lit, and the war paint daubed on. It may have been so, but I am perfectly ignorant as to the period when Schenectady was " organised," and the last Indian tribe was elbowed forth into the wilderness, perplexed by the inventions and distracted by the questions of that irrepressible Yankee, who is always "wanting to know," and always "fixing up" new devices.* Legends

* Our own "Patent Journal" can show from week to week a suggestive record of English ingenuity, but I question whether any such hebdomadal catalogue would equal the following, taken from one number of a New England paper:-In one week, and to citizens of New England alone, there were issued from Washington patents for " improvements in sewingmachines, for attaching buckles and straps for thread tension and thread delivery, for bullet ladles, for quartz crushers, for recovery of the acid used

there may have been in the old time of "stone canoes," "happy hunting-grounds," and "enchanted elks;" but they have given place, now, to placards and wall-stencillings relating to Sozodont, to the Night Blooming Cereus, the Bloom of a Thousand Flowers, Kimball's Ambrosia, Van Buskirk's Stomach Bitters, and other quackeries. Nothing is left of the Cherokees, but disgusting mural advertisements of "Cherokee Medicines;" and the "Mohawk Bank of Schenectady," a pert, spruce, brown stone building, with a plate-glass window occupying nine-tenths of its façade, is all that remains to remind you of the savage Redskins, who once owned the soil, and who would have experienced infinite delight, I should imagine, in bursting into the bank, burning the bird's-eye maple fixings, scalping the president, disembowelling the directors, and sticking themselves all over with the greenbacks in the till. For they will stick. The Prussian soldiers say, that if you fling a loaf of pumpernickel against a wall, the nasty pasty dough will stick there; and So, if you press a ten or a twenty-five cent note on the back of your hand, and breathe upon it, it will, after a while, adhere as firmly as a postage stamp; so much glue, as well as grease, has it picked up in its travels.

There was a very large refreshment-room at the Schenec

in refining petroleum, for splitting leather, for whitening wool, for spring clasps, for steam traps, for tackle for fore and aft sails, for a balanced elevator, for friction clutches and pulleys, for lubricating the braces of spinning-frames, for shaping the heels of boots and shoes, for the manufacture of watch-keys, for sausage-fillers and stove-pipe elbows, for cupboard latches, for dog-chains, for butt-hinges, for photographic frames, for ice-cream moulds, for artificial eyes, for crinoline skirts, and for cesspools."

tady Station, where "warm meals at all hours" were advertised. I looked over the tariff, and found that "boiled dinner" cost forty cents. What is a boiled dinner? Soup, fish, turkey and oysters, vegetables, and suet dumplings, or merely corned beef and hominy? Had I been hungry, or had the weather been cooler, or had there been fewer flies about, I would have ventured upon some boiled dinner; but with the white furnace heat, and the maddening swarms of insects, dinner, either boiled, baked, broiled, stewed, or fried, was a thing not to be dreamt of. You home-staying people, you can't know anything of active entomology until you spend a summer in the United States. The island of Cuba is pretty fertile in things that flap with wings, and crawl with an unchristian number of legs; but the heat in Havana is a quiet, drowsy heat, and during the daytime, at least, the insects sleep, and don't trouble you. I shall never forget finding a scorpion, which is about the size of, and looks very like, a young lobster unboiled, snugly nestled, and sleeping the sleep of the just, in a suit of white linen just come home from the tailor's at Havana. There is another little insect, too, which, if you are incautious enough to cross the room bare-footed, is given to burrowing a hole in the ball of your great toe, building a nest there, laying half a million of eggs or so, and then slily vamosing; but he is the quietest little creature alive. You notice not his coming or going, and you are without signs of his presence for the best part of a week, when your toe begins to swell, your blood is poisoned, and unless you pay Don José Sangrado y Sganarella, chief medico to the Captain-General, many ounces of gold for