it was the "thing," at one of the gigantic barracks, and have undergone the purgatory of an ill-dressed, worse-served dinner, washed down by villanous wines at monstrous prices, and put on the table by a set of uncouth, unkempt, untutored savages, who were a disgrace to the name of waiters. And how often have I endeavoured slily to seduce my hosts away from the Barmecide gorgeousness of the barracks to the sober but satisfying delights of the Brevoort.

Let us be just, however. There is one large hotel-one of the largest indeed-in New York, and conducted on the American (or gregarious table d'hôte) system where a stranger may really be comfortable. This is the New York Hotel in Broadway, close to Eighth Street. The cuisine here is excellent, and the chef, M. Louis, a real cordon bleu, whose simulated, páté de foie gras (in particular) runs the genuine Strasburg article very hard. If a traveller does not choose to stay in the hotel itself he may obtain very comfortable sleeping-rooms and private parlours at a succursal to the New York, (the St. Julien House hard by, which is wholly let out in bachelor chambers,) taking his meals at the N.Y. The proprietor of this hotel, Mr. Hiram Cranston-a very prominent member of the great Democratic party, is in every sense of the word a Gentleman, and enjoys the esteem, not only of those with whom he is intimately connected, but even of his political opponents. I had letters to Mr. Cranston from several persons of weight and position in Europe, both English and American, and had I chosen to live in his hotel could have passed an exceedingly pleasant life; but I was deterred from making it my abode, in the outset, by one serious

consideration. Noscitur a sociis is a maxim which obtains very strongly in the States. A man is known not only by the company he keeps, but by the hotel he frequents. Thus, the Astor House is an Administration and commercial hotel; the St. Nicholas is a Californian house; the Fifth Avenue is Shoddy; the Metropolitan financial and moderately democratic; the Everett, ditto; the Prescott, Western; the Brevoort, anti-slavery, but aristocratic; the Clarendon, aristocratic, and without any politics at all. The New York labours under the misfortune of being incurably Copperhead, and at least nine-tenths Secesh. Mr. Cranston is as loyal a man as any in New York, but he sympathises. The great Cuban and Mexican dons go to the New York; the great Southerners. who have escaped Lafayette by the skin of their teeth are sheltered there. Mr. Cranston has not been molested, for every one knows him to be an honest man who wishes every kind of good to la chose publique; but, as I have hinted, he does not pander to the prevailing tyrant nor shut his doors to the oppressed party. The arrival of every stranger in New York and the particular hotel he has selected are facts duly chronicled in the evening papers. Wishing to steer a middle course, and not wishing to be irremediably branded as a malevolent Copperhead, I did not go to the New York, and for some period even kept aloof from Hiram Cranston, and from a social circle which I had subsequently occasion to discover was the most genial and the least prejudiced in the whole States. As it turned out I might have saved a great deal of money by going in the first instance to the N.Y., and paying my two and a half dollars a day for board-two and a half in gold, be it under

stood, which means from five to six in greenbacks. It did not matter in the long run whether I stayed at a Copperhead house or a Black Republican one. I was not the less to the New York press a "bloated miscreant," a "malignant buffoon," a "fat cockney," a "lying scoundrel," a "debased libeller," and a " hired emissary of the British oligarchy."

Although on this wet morning I had no more claim than I usually have to be "classical," and although I don't fancy that newspaper reporters, as a rule, are given to patronising the Brevoort, Mr. Albert Clark, fortified by the card of introduction I had brought with me from a friend in Paris, was kind enough to take me in; and within another hour I had bathed, dressed, breakfasted off kippered salmon, mixed tea, and dry toast, which would have done bonour to the "Tavistock" in Covent Garden, or to the "Old Ship" at Brighton -(most cosy of British hostelries, I salute ye both!)—breakfasted, too, in a coffee-room, which, for handsome appointments and perfect neatness, might vie with any similar apartment in a Pall Mall club, and was ready (the rain. having ceased) for a pedestrian excursion down Broadway. What else my Diary tells me should be said about New York hotels, New York streets, and New York society, will be found in another chapter.

CHAPTER III.

A CHRISTMAS IN CANADA, TO WHICH

ARE ADDED THE

MISERIES OF ROUSE'S POINT, AND AN ACCOUNT OF THE
TYRANNY OF MYERS.

YES; there is something in "the flag." There is magic in a coloured rag, after all. I no longer question the brilliance of the stars, the iridescence of the stripes, which, in a kind of patriotic delirium tremens, the American sees perpetually dancing before their eyes. Look at the sun till you wink, and then try to read a book or a newspaper, and each page will be blurred in a glorious prism. Our curious cousins are, as is well known, in the habit of continually contemplating their Bird of Freedom, whose home is in the rising, not the setting, sun. The eagle may look at the blazing orb with impunity; but the human biped, surveying the eagle, is apt to grow dazed with much staring at the sun-wrapt bird. Hence he beholds the flag in everything; in the blackguard ribaldry of the "New York Gorilla," the sentimental bloodthirstiness of the "New York Black Joke," and the equable and consistent mendacity of the "New York Ananias' Journal "--with which is incorporated "Sapphira's Miscellany "-joint editors, Hon. T. Mendez Pinto, Major Longbow, and Baron Munchausen. When our curious cousins' children come home for

VOL. I.

H

the Christmas holidays, the first thing they do is to climb on the shoulder of the black servant, and nail up "the flag" outside their papa's hall door. "The flag," in miniature, appears on joints of meat, and on the cupola crusts of applepies. In Boston they made "the flag" up into roller-blinds for the windows of their trim and cosy-looking houses. When the news of the first overt act of secession, the firing on Fort Sumter, arrived at New York, I am told that the horses in the street cars all carried "the flag" in their ears, and that the Wall-street brokers wore the flag" in their button-holes. In a Penitentiary School at Deer Island, Boston, passing through one of the class-rooms, I saw that the teacher had chalked on a black board, for the little criminals to learn by heart, a piece of poetry beginning, " Our Flag- I stayed to read no more. This is, all over, American. We give our felons and paupers beef and pudding on Christmas Day. Our cousins make the Fourth of July their saturnalia, and on that day their prisoners and captives are regaled with a banquet of bunkum, in which the pièce de résistance is “the flag." Of course it appears on all the cornets of sweetmeats, and on the covers of all the candies which by hecatombs are sold at this season of the year. Somewhere" down town" in New York I have heard there is an ingenious bar-keeper—a real "professor "-who, for fifteen cents, and by the aid of dexterous manipulation, in parabolic curves, from one glass to another, of brandy, lemon-peel, syrup, sugar, and crushed ice, will contrive to give you a configuration of the American flag in the form of a "drink." This patriotic beverage, this glorified cocktail, this eye-opener in excelcis, has not yet come