dandies of Schenectady in a trotting waggon so bright and shiny with varnish, and whose big wheels revolve so rapidly as to remind you of a cock-pheasant getting up-whir! there is a blaze of splendour, and then the astonishing vision is gone; a knot of young town hobbledehoys, or "gawks,” in felt hats and grey suits, chewing, swearing, and indulging in horseplay at the street corner; two young ladies, one apparently nineteen, the other twenty, coming home from school, with their satchels full of books and their japanned tin lunch-boxes swinging to straps-they go to school to a master, and he ferules them till they are fourteen or fifteen; the never-failing, weasel-faced, ferret-eyed newsboy vending his quires; many more hotels than you would imagine there were guests for, all dirty, all full, all with piazzas in front, in which are seated men in their shirt-sleeves, loafing, reading newspapers, and spitting, and with their feet perched on the rails before them-a pair of soles, in fact, looking out of every other window; the "City Bakery," where I observe they sell wax dolls; the "Photographic Hall," to judge from the frame in front of which every inhabitant of Schenectady had had his or her portait taken half a dozen times; the "Daguerrian Rooms," a rival establishment, with a life-size photograph of the negro boy who carries about the operator's show-boardsyoung Sambo grinning hugely, as though in delight at being photographed for nothing; a wounded soldier, on crutches; an idiot, more than half "tight," who hangs about the bars and the railway-station; some flaming woodcuts, announcing the approaching advent of a Hippotheatron-in plainer English, a horse-riding circus-with that admired equestrian and

favourite, Miss Carrie Smithers; any number of white stencilled laudations of " Sozodont" and "Plantation Bitters," "Brandreth" and "Herrick's" Pills, and "Old Doctor Ragabosh, the world-celebrated female's physician;" ice-cream saloons-in winter devoted to the sale of oysters. This is what I saw in an hour and forty minutes. This is Schenectady, and any other American town you like to mention. Qu'en pensez-vous ?

A word or two more.

Milliners' shops are far more numerous than they would be in a town of the same extent in Europe; and both the newspapers and the coloured plates of the fashions are brought down to the very latest dates. Our cousins must know how the world wags, how stocks rule, and how sleeves are worn- or die. I cannot see any public buildings. The railway station is a scandalous shed, the bridge is in a disgraceful state, and this is the case pretty nearly all over the Union. Liberal almost to lavishness in their private transactions, the Americans are in their corporate and municipal capacity most laughably stingy. With the exception of the whited sepulchres in Washington, and the Girard Asylum in Philadelphia, there is not a public building in any American city which can cope with those in second-rate Mexican towns; whereas private edifices of great magnificence abound throughout the North. Our cousins "don't see" the fun of building for the public weal or for posterity. That the Central Park at New York should ever have been laid out and the ornamental bridges built is a marvel which I should like Mr. Calvert Vaux to explain. Habitually our cousins wont spend a cent to beautify their

cities; or, if any money is voted or raised for such a purpose, some ingenious lobbyer steals it in medio, and the scheme is dwarfed and dwindles down to the meanest proportions.

I went into a stationer's shop at Schenectady to buy a note-book. The stationer, for a wonder, was civil and talkative. "Is that Queen Victoria you've got at your buttonhole?" he asks. I told him that it was a Spanish quarterdoubloon, bearing the effigy of Charles the Fourth. “Ah!" he continued, "it does one's eyes good to see a bit of gold in these times; but I should like a look at Queen Victoria's face anyhow." Being bound for Canada, I happened to have some English gold in my pocket; so I took out a sovereign and showed it him. It was an Australian one. He looked at it intensely. "Sydney Mint," he mused aloud. "Ah! Queen Victoria reaches a long way." He gave me back my piece, and I was departing, when he called me back. "You need not mention it," he said in a half-whisper, "but I'm a countryman of that great man yonder. Yes, sir." I looked up, and saw framed and glazed a portrait of Robert Burns. In his "Yes, sir," there was the drollest possible fusion of the Yankee and the Scottish twang. Why did not he wish his nationality to be mentioned? Had he taken out his papers, and was he a leading politician in Schenectady, of the anti-Britisher stripe? I can call to mind no more mournfully anomalous position, under present circumstances, than that of a Briton who has become an American citizen, but whose heart is not with the North. No compromise, no neutrality, is permitted him. If he be true to his adopted country he must vilify and denounce his native land. Affec

VOL. I.

S

tion for England is treason to the Union. If I were that Scotch stationer at Schenectady, I would turn all my greenbacks into gold—never mind the loss on the exchange—and go back to the land of Burns.

As I trudge towards the station, I hear a locomotive in the distance, screaming and bell-ringing, I see a railway train puffing and sporting along the open street, with the children. playing almost underneath the wheels:-another characteristic of American towns. I pass a mean little wooden building, which might be the office of a wharfinger in a small way, or a steamboat ticket-collector, or a coal agent. But a tattered American banner hangs over the portal. There are the usual posters up, "Now, gentlemen, if you wish to join a heavy artillery regiment, fall in." "Boys, attention. Highest bounties given." This is an enrolment office and recruiting rendezvous. Ensign Plume is within, sitting at a table, twisting his goatee, and chewing for want of thought; and Sergeant Kite has just taken two promising-looking "boys into an adjoining grog-shop to drink. Even in this slowgoing little Schenectady we are not destitute of signs of that America which is in the Midst of War.

CHAPTER XII.

A VISIT TO THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC.

THE reading world of England must by this time have become acquainted with the strange and marvellous adventures of Mr. Guy Livingstone's boots, for who does not read Mr. Guy Livingstone's books? This deservedly popular author's account, in "Border and Bastille," of the perils and the absolute misfortunes he encountered through the purchase in London of a pair of military jackboots, has been widely read and much admired in the United States. It is clear that Mr. Livingstone's boots, and those boots alone, brought him to grief. But for those confounded nether encasements, he would never have attempted to force the Federal lines, and never have been lodged in the Old Capitol prison. Bombastes Furioso defied to mortal combat whoever should dare to displace his boots; but it was through putting his boots on, and not by taking them off, that the clever English novelist, who is best known by the title of his best work, fell into the hands of the Northern Philistines, and was by them cast into the doleful durance of that Old Capitol-once a Senate House, and once a boardinghouse which has, since the new era of freedom, and the new order of things, been converted into a state prison.