them to move on, and threatened them | blood into the bargain; but no one else, with shipwreck. These poor people were under a spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illumi nated steamers running many knots, and heralding their approach by strains of music. The contrast between these pleas ure embarkations and our own grim vessel, with her list to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring description which we count too obvious for the purposes of art.

were so many and so ravenous that, i romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indithough I tried at every opportunity, the ana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day. There was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and colored by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.

Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the western continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance further on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waitingroom to seek a dinner for myself.

I mention this meal, not only because it was the first of which I had partaken for about thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first introduction to a colored gentleman. He did me the honor to wait upon me after a fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but of a pleasant, warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with manners so patronizingly superior that I am None can care for literature in itself at a loss to name their parallel in Enwho do not take a special pleasure in the gland. A butler perhaps rides as high. sound of names; and there is no part of over the unbutlered, but then he sets you the world where nomenclature is so rich, right with a reserve and a sort of sighing poetical, humorous, and picturesque, as patience, which one is often moved to the United States of America. All times, admire. And again, the abstract butler races, and languages have brought their never stoops to familiarity. But the colcontribution. Pekin is in the same state ored gentleman will pass you a wink at a with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with time; he is familiar like an upper-form Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London as- boy to a fag; he unbends to you like sociations of red-brick, Sloane Square and Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He the King's Road, is own suburb to stately makes himself at home and welcome. and primeval Memphis; there they have Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved their seat, translated names of cities, himself to me throughout that supper where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee much as, with us, a young, free, and not and Arkansas; * and both, while I was very self-respecting master might behave crossing the continent, lay, watched by to a good-looking chambermaid. I had armed men, in the horror and isolation of come prepared to pity the poor negro, to a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like put him at his ease, to prove in a thouan Indian arrowhead under a steam fac-sand condescensions that I was no sharer tory, below anglified New York. The in the prejudice of race; but I assure you names of the States and Territories them- I put my patronage away for another selves form a chorus of sweet and most occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.

Please pronounce Arkansaw, with the accent on the first.

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of etiquette:

er.

if one should offer to tip the American persed and drunk them up, leaving an waiter? Certainly not, he told me. Nev-atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureIt would not do. They considered ness from horizon to horizon, the mists themselves too highly to accept. They had still been there, and we knew that would even resent the offer. As for him this paradise was haunted by killing and me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant damps and foul malaria. The fences conversation; he, in particular, had found | along the line bore but two descriptions much pleasure in my society; I was a of advertisement; one to recommend tostranger; this was exactly one of those baccos, and the other to vaunt remedies rare conjunctures Without being against the ague. At the point of day, very clear-seeing, I can still perceive the and while we were all in the grasp of that sun at noonday; and the colored gentle- first chill, a native of the State, who had man deftly pocketed a quarter. got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."

Wednesday. A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. This had early been a favorite home of my imagination; I have played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched. My preference was founded on a work which appeared in Cassell's Family Paper, and was read aloud to me by my nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him. The idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet, was one which my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Cru soe and others to escape from uninhabited islands.

The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she was at no pains to conceal. But being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry all her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was such a rattle by nature, and so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell me the story of her life. I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and But Ohio was not at all as I had pic- a variety of particular matters that are tured it. We were now on those great not usually disclosed except to friends. plains which stretch unbroken to the At one station, she shook up her children Rocky Mountains. The country was flat to look at a man on the platform and say like Holland, but far from being dull. if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me All through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and she explained how she had been keeping Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them company with this Mr. Z., how far matters from the train and in my waking moments, had proceeded, and how it was because of it was rich and various, and breathed an his desistance that she was now travelling elegance peculiar to itself. The tall corn to the West. Then, when I was thus put pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in possession of the facts, she asked my in themselves, and framed the plain into judgment on that type of manly beauty. I long, aërial vistas; and the clean, bright, admired it to her heart's content. gardened townships spoke of country fare was not, I think, remarkably veracious in and pleasant summer evenings on the talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but, and built castles in the air out of her past; I am afraid, not unfrequented by the yet she had that sort of candor, to keep Devil. That morning dawned with such me, in spite of all these confidences, a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a steadily aware of her aversion. Her partchill that was not perhaps so measurable ing words were ingeniously honest. by instrument, as it struck home upon am sure," said she, "we all ought to be the heart and seemed to travel with the very much obliged to you." I cannot blood. Day came in with a shudder. pretend that she put me at my ease; but White mists lay thinly over the surface of I had a certain respect for such a genthe plain, as we see them more often on a uine dislike. A poor nature would have lake; and though the sun had soon dis-slipped, in the course of these familiar.

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glish tongue; and finally, in despair, he rose and left me. I felt chagrined; but my fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself as far as that was possible upon the bench, I was received at once into a dreamless stupor.

ities, into a sort of worthless toleration | like one who has conceived a doubt; next, for me. he tried me in German, supposing perWe reached Chicago in the evening. Ihaps that I was unfamiliar with the Enwas turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the station of a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city. I remember having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought it would be a graceful act for the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But there was no word of restitution. I was that city's benefactor, yet I was received in a third-class waiting-room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at my own expense.

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in Chicago. When it was time to start, I descended the platform like a man in a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after car, as I came up with it, was not only full but overflowing. My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas. When at last I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my conscious ness dwindled within me to a mere pin's head, like a taper on a foggy night.

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman, somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the doz en, as they say. I did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if something depended upon that. I heard him relate, among many other things, that there were pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught the words, I do not think I properly understood the sense until next morning; and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it. What else he talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly explanatory; but no more. And I suppose I must have shown my confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me

The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the suburbs after a diner fin, and was bent on entertainment while the journey lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant, who had come through from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than myself. Nay, even in a natural state, as I found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying him on different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman flounced into a temper, swore an oath or two, and de parted from that car in quest of livelier society. Poor little gentleman! I suppose he thought an emigrant should be a rol licking, free-hearted blade, with a flask of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments of digestion.

Thursday. I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. Another long day's ride followed, with but one feature worthy of remark. At a place called Creston, a drunken man got in. He was aggressively friendly, but, according to English notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train. For one stage he eluded the notice of the officials; but just as we were beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came the conductor. There was a word or two of talk; and then the official had the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It was done in three motions, as exact as a piece of drill. The train was still moving slowly, although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand, while the other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. It was the first indication that I had come among revolv ers, and I observed it with some emotion. The conductor stood on the steps with

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the Pacific Transfer He burst into a shout of laughter. station near Council Bluffs, on the east-"Ah!" said he, "you do not know about ern bank of the Missouri River. Here we America. They are fine people in Amerwere to stay the night at a kind of cara-ica. Oh! you will like them very well. vanserai, set apart for emigrants. But But you mustn't get mad. I know what I gave way to a thirst for luxury, sepa- you want. You come along with me." rated myself from my companions, and And issuing from behind the counter, marched with my effects into the Union and taking me by the arm like an old acPacific Hotel. A white clerk and a col-quaintance, he led me to the bar of the ored gentleman whom, in my plain Euro-hotel.

pean way, I should call the boots, were "There," said he, pushing me from him installed behind a counter like bank-tell- by the shoulder, "go and have a drink!" ers. They took my name, assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my packages. And here came the tug of war. I wished to give up my packages | into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.