any part into their constitution, and for the unusual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out, and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned. The Benches are too short for anything but a young child. Where there is scarce elbow room for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie. Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills about the Transfer Station, the company's servants, have conceived a plan for the better accommodation of travellers. They prevail on every two to chum together. To each of the chums they sell a board and three square cush ions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin cotton. The benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the approach of night the boards are laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and long enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor's van and the feet to the engine. When the train is full, of course this plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to every bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree. It was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired official now bestirred himself. He made a most active master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty of each. The greater the number of happy couples the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds. His price for one board and three straw cushions began with two dollars and a half; but before the train left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased mine, it had fallen to one dollar and a half. The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some ladies, I showed myself too eager for union at any price; but certainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the honor without thanks. He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man, I think from Yankeeland, looked me all over with great timidity, and then began to excuse himself in broken phrases. He didn't know the young man, he said. The young man might be very honest, but how was he to know that? There was another young man whom he had met already in the train; he guessed he was honest, and would prefer to chum with him upon the whole. All this without any sort of excuse, as though had been inanimate or absent. I began to tremble lest every To one should refuse my company, and I be left rejected. But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed, small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly smartness in his manner. be exact, he had acquired it in the navy. But that was all one; he had at least been trained to desperate resolves, so he accepted the match, and the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and pocketed his fees. The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train. I am afraid to say how many baggage-wagons followed the engine, certainly a score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the families, and the rear was brought up by the conductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his caboose. The class to which I belonged was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families. But our own car was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight or nine, who had the whooping-cough. At last about six, the long train crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri River to Omaha, westward bound. It was a troubled, uncomfortable evening in the cars. There was thunder in the air, which helped to keep us restless. A man played many airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, until he came to "Home, sweet Home." It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen. I have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet Home," you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness. It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment was interrupted. An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard and about as much appearance of sentiment as you would expect from a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop that "damned thing." "I've heard about enough of that," he added; "give us something about the good country we're going to." A murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer took the instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then struck into a dancing measure; | one elbow crooked about the railing, and and, like a new Timotheus, stilled imme- made a shift to wash his face and neck diately the emotion he had raised. and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet. The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern platform, singing "The Sweet By-and-by" with very tuneful voices; the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for, the train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale. Their charge began with twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what I had paid for mine at the Transfer. This is my contribution to the economy of future emigrants. A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washing-dishes, tin coffeepitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash, or beans and bacon. Early next morning the newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nick name on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I have never seen tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used these instruments, one after another, according to the order of their first awaking; and when the firm had finished, there was no want of borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the cars. Before the sun was up, the stove would be brightly burning; at the first station, the natives would come on board with milk and eggs, and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest hour of the day. There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside; a breakfast in the morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and supper from five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely less than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes, waiting for some express upon a side track among miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to time. For haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through on sufferance, running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren; should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they cannot, in consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or so. Civility is the main comfort that you miss. Equality, though conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as to an emigrant. Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of "All aboard!" recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train stole from the station without note of warning, and you had to keep an eye upon it even while you ate. The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect both wanton and petty. Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an emigrant. I asked a conductor one day, at what time the train would stop for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated the question, with a like result; a third time I returned to the charge, and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away. I believe he was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another person made the same inquiry, although he still refused the infor mation, he condescended to answer, and even to justify his reticence in a voice loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to tell people where they were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as what o'clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he could not afford to be eternally worried. book, and so once or twice he came upon me unawares. On these occasions he most rudely struck my foot aside; and though I myself apologized, as if to show him the way, he answered me never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear the next time it would have come to words. But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder, and a large, juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the newsboy, who had observed that I was looking ill and so made me this present out of a tender heart. For the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale, and came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up. perhaps their most bewildering character to one newly landed. It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train; and I am told I looked like a man at death's door, so much had this long journey shaken me. I sat at the end of a car; and the catch being broken, and myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with my foot for the sake of air. In As you are thus cut off from the supe- this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy rior authorities, a great deal of your com- from his box of merchandise. I made fort depends on the character of the news-haste to let him pass when I observed that boy. He has it in his power indefinitely he was coming; but I was busy with a to better and brighten the emigrant's lot. The newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs. Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight. It happened thus: he was going his rounds through the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming to a party who were at seven-up, or cascino (our two games), upon a bed-board, slung down a cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking one man's hand to the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment the whole party were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to "get out of that directly, or he would get more than he reckoned for." The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off, and was less openly insulting in the fuIt had thundered on the Friday night, ture. On the other hand, the lad who but the sun rose on Saturday without a rode with us in this capacity from Ogden cloud. We were at sea there is no to Sacramento, made himself the friend other adequate expression on the plains of all, and helped us with information, of Nebraska. I made my observatory on attention, assistance, and a kind counte- the top of a fruit-wagon, and sat by the nance. He told us where and when we hour upon that perch to spy about me, should have our meals, and how long the and to spy in vain for something new. train would stop; kept seats at table for was a world almost without a feature; those who were delayed, and watched that an empty sky, an empty earth; front and we should neither be left behind nor yet back, the line of railway stretched from unnecessarily hurried. You, who live at horizon to horizon, like a cue across a bilhome at ease, can hardly realize the great-liard-board; on either hand, the green ness of this service, even had it stood alone. When I think of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the benefactor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, be is doing a man's work, and bettering the world. I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy. I tell it because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the American, which is THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA. It plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crownpiece, bloomed in a continuous flowerbed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board. The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our regard. It seemed miles | vast an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter, till the man runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty plains. in length, and either end of it within but a step of the horizon. Even my own body, or my own head, seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others. Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers; aous existence. One person at least I saw noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land. To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken prison-line of the horizon. Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon. But the eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil. It is the settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of variety. Upon what food does it subsist in such a land? What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off from books, from news, from company, from all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most varied specta cle that he can hope. He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer to the one object within view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance. We are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers, and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings. But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a wall-paper with a vengeance -one quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness. His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the visible world; it quails before so Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicada, summer and winter, cattle, wife, and fam ily, the settler may create a full and vari upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk. She was largely formed; her features were more than comely: she had that great rarity a fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a strong impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom. And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at least it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely civilized. At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to pass the milk-jug. This other was well-dressed and of what we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish man, high-spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first speaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone: "There's a waiter here!" he cried. "I only asked you to pass the milk," explained the first. From The Athenæum. A LETTER OF LEIGH HUNT'S. 19, Warwick Crescent, July 3, 1883. THE following letter, when applied for many years ago, for the purpose of being included in the " Correspondence of Leigh Hunt," was unfortunately missing, and its faulty possessor could only engage that, whenever recovered, it should at once be given for publication. A few days since it was found again by accident; and, on the whole, there seems no better way of redeeming a promise than by entrusting its subject to the care of a journal always worthily appreciative of the genius and character of Leigh Hunt. ROBERT BROWNING. Hammersmith, Dec. 31. est and least absorbing without speedily getting into a kind of fluster of interest and emotion, with heated cheeks and a tightening sense of the head; and, in proportion to this interest, this effect increases so that I am forced in general to write by driblets, and the worst of it is I write even then a great deal too much, just as I fear I talk, and have to cut it all down to a size so inferior to the outbreak, that you would at once laugh and pity me if you saw the quantity of manuscript out of which my book, or even my article, has to be extricated. It was always so with me more or less, and now it is worse than ever. Age increases the written gabble.. See it is upon me now! So I stop short. New Year's Day, 1857. God bless you, dear people, you and be mixed up with your well-being; and your son, I mean, and such others as may Year" which more may He keep to you the "happy New or less must surely have come to you all, whatever shadow may be in it for the loss of the admirable friend who has secured it to you. These are the first words I have written this year; and they must needs be a little solemn. But here am I nearly at the close of my second page and have not yet said my little brain-sparing say on "Aurora Leigh." I say, then, that it is a unique, wonderful, and immortal poem; astonishing for its combination of masculine power with feminine tenderness; for its novelty, its facility, its incessant abundance of thought, DEAR ROBERT BROWNING (for " Brown-imagination, and expression; its being an ing" seems too familiar to be warranted exponent of its age and a prophetic teacher by my amount of intercourse and "Mr." of it; its easy yet lofty triumph over every sounds too formal for it (albeit its very formality has justly procured it metrical acceptance with Mrs. Browning), therefore I hope that by addressing me as "Leigh Hunt" in return you will author ize the tertium quid to which I have recourse in my perplexity), species of commonplace; and its noble and sweet avowal, after all, of a participation of error, its lovely willingness to be no loftier, or less earthly, than something on an equality with love. I cannot express myself thoroughly as I would - I must leave that to the poet, worthy of I received the new edition of the poems the poetess, who sits at her side; my own and the new poem itself, and read the lat- poetry, of the inner sort, being of very ter through instantly, almost at one sit rare occurrence (if it ever occur at all), ting; but I had work waiting for me at and the rest of it never being moved to the time, was obliged to return to the vindicate its pretensions to the title, exwork, had letters come upon me besides, cept at foolish intervals by foolisher critand so could not write to give thanks, and ics who have no poetry in them of any say what I wished about the book as kind, and who undertake to judge of quickly as I desired. And what am I to things out of the pale of their percepsay now? I dare not begin to think of tions. Therefore, you see, I beg to say uttering a fiftieth part of what I would that there is modesty at the bottom of all say; for you must know that I can never this apparent claim to the right of being write upon any subject beyond the brief-loud and eulogistic on great works, and that |