ally a thing of terror to a man with Christian extremities, who essayed a walk on deck when the ship was rolling. To make their deformity more pronounced, they wore shoes a number too large for the feet, and shod with the broad bevelled Scotch sole. These were not Chicago people, else he might have understood it, but were scattered from Nahant to Yankton.

The rarest specimen of this to him strange civilization was a young New Yorker, who introduced himself and offered a cigar, which was declined, within ten minutes after the steamer left the wharf. He wore heavy padding in the shoulder points of his sack coat, so that he seemed at a distance a young Hercules. This fraud which Moran at first swallowed, in envy of its excellence, was betrayed when he stooped his genuine shoulders to draw from an inner pocket a large sized photograph of her whom he called his "duck," and whose bizarre beauty he begged the Southerner to admire.

In the course of a short turn or two of the forward deck this person informed Moran that he was rich, that he hated Mr. Hamilton Fish for being a gentleman, that he had been made a mason the night previous, and that if Moran, whose name even he did not as yet know, had the good luck to be a member of that venerable order, it would be agreeable to go over together the signs and pass-words of the craft.

What else was there to do, when the Custom House deadbeats threw their last empty bottle after the great ship, and gave their last huzza to the great diplomat of the deck, except to take refuge from this young bore in the company of a Galveston gambler, who asked him if he was not from the South, and remarked as his affirmative answer was given that the information was unnecessary as his manner indicated it.

And then came some fine fun, when the diplomatic pet coming to Moran's end of the deck was heard to sympathize with that rare band of thieves, the Southern Reconstruction Governors. Quick as thought the Texas man wanted to know if he endorsed Davis of his State, and the pet squirmed and twisted and smiled, and evaded the issue in a most diplomatic fashion.

Lest I break my promise about the dolphins and Mother Carey's chickens, my hero shall take sea-sick right here as Sandy Hook is passed, and necessitate the closing of this too long chapter.

CHAPTER XXIV.

A LETTER FROM ARCHIBALD MORAN TO ROBERT CLEBURNE.

VIENNA, August 15, 1873.

MY DEAR CLEBURNE:-Remembering as you do my promise to write from this place and give my impressions of the two months' run I have made over Western Europe, you will look, perhaps, for detailed information to guide the trip soon to be taken by yourself and sister.

This, on reflection, I find to be out of my power for lack of space, lack of the requisite knowledge, and from a conviction besides that you might be misled by following my wilful track of travel, and so lose other and better sights and sounds. Hence, you must be content with the most general impressions received in the hurry of transit, and now for the first time committed to paper.

In the first place I made a hasty run through Ireland from Queenstown to Dublin and thence came to Chester on the Dee, where I would rather pass my life than in any spot I have ever seen.

Naples is said to be the most charming site on the globe, but not to one of my temperament can its rich coloring afford that sense of bliss which Chester gave me in as marked degree as the water lilies of the Ouse soothed the troubled soul of poor Cowper.

I pass over Ireland here as quickly as I did over its surface. You know that I "take no stock" in the story of its wrongs, and believe it is saved from anarchy only by the rule of the English. It has fat cattle and big beds of peat; its grass is black green, and its beggars wear old beaver hats, strings of black cloth for cravats, and hold the left hand under the flap of a swallow-tailed coat made of brown linsey, whenever the train runs into a station where they are standing. It must be that an Irishman first gave to Comedy the notion of the "shabby genteel."

London is, of course, a world within itself. Stop at the Charing Cross hotel when you come over, for the reason that it is the best point

from which to make a beginning corner in your survey of that mighty Omphalos. The matter of food is, or ought to be, secondary with every man of sense to keeping his head right, and to go home every night in London by some cross street, is to confuse the geography learned during the day. On the other hand, if you sleep at some noted point and reach out each day in constantly widening circles from your base, one can soon experience the great pleasure of acquiring the topography of even the largest city with something of that exactness by which his native village can be called into existence by the mere act of will. So with London, in a three weeks' stay, I widened my circles till I reached out as far as Sydenham, eighteen miles, where is situated the Crystal Palace with the permanent trophies of the world's fair of 1851. The splendid aquarium at this place made me half believe in evolution.

Three months devoted to Buckle before leaving home, reading his every line over and over again, did not tend to keep down such foolish thoughts, as foolish we must consider them till they are utterly refuted or our pupils are dilated to see clearer.

I freely confess to Anglo-mania, and am, of course, too polite to vindicate at length my delusion, for there is delusion in all mania, and my love for England and all things English has long passed the bounds of desire or passion and is, I confess, abnormal and diseased. When I stand prepared to vindicate Cromwell's order to shoot all Irishmen found on the left bank of the Shannon, when I can overlook the bastardy which sprung from such a fellow as the Second Charles, remembering, as I must, Charles Fox and Sarah Lennox and those glorious Napier boys; when her very roughs and bullies are dear to me, knowing, as I do, that from such material Clive formed the army that won India for trade and will finally win it for the civilization of the Bible; when I make arguments for the little island that sound like Macaulay's vindication of London for having one hundred thousand thieves, to wit: that no other place on earth but London could support a hundred thousand thieves-you, of course, can call such talk nothing short of maniacal. And yet those thieves founded Australia. You will from all this not be surprised to learn that I liked Paris in every way less than London. I saw less for the mind to work upon and less pleasant employment for the eye even.

If this is a world of work, with pleasure thrown in, to fit us the better for business, surely to one of that opinion the daily stride of the great town on the Thames is a more impressive sight for the eye, even, than the afternoon turnout on the Boulevard Italiens, or the manufactures that are seen in the Palais Royal.

And death is positively too good for the man, unless he be French, who

can show sentiment in the Hotel des Invalides and lack it in the great Abbey, or assume to feel for Notre Dame the emotions which belong to St. Paul's and to St. Paul's alone. The French are only the Irish civilized. They have no mission to seek the uttermost parts of the planet and to bring them into harmony with the enlightened relations which exist in the upper meridians that lie on either side Greenwich. I can no more permit their charming politeness to subdue me from entertaining a slight opinion of their capacity for real world-reaching business than I can admire the generosity of their first cousin, the Irishman, who borrows my five dollars and spends it in treating me to champagne.

I know you will smile at all this and sincerely pity me, and throw the quick discharge of the Prussian Indemnity at my head; but I say that a people of thirty-five millions, who had been conquered as they were in thirty-five days, ought to have paid the price of their shame even quicker than they did. The nobility of the action stands out strongly, I grant you, as soon as the contrast is drawn with the things said and done prior to it.

You would do me great wrong to suppose that I do not value the obligations humanity owes to Voltaire and Montesquieu, who interpreted the mind of Britain to France and through France to the Continent, or that poor crazy Jean Jacques, who burned his delirious cries for a higher humanity in the brains of the Gallic Commune, has no place in my

esteem.

I tried hard to do credit to the beautiful country when I stood in the Place de la Concorde with the ruined Tuilleries behind me and that glorious stretch of street, the Champs Elysees (ending in the haughty arch of Napoleon, the bloody,) lying in front; but the ruins of Mont Valerien and the advertisement, 'Republique Francais," on every public building in the capital, notifying the people of the brand under which their latest political panacea was patented, forbid me to harbor sentiments of thorough respect for them or their country.

66

The guide books will tell you all about the pleasant run I made through Belgium, with its clean and well-paved roads, its smoking cauldrons from which are poured every cunning contrivance in iron and steel, its rows of aspens and Lombardy poplars bounding in squares and rectangles, the well-tilled fields, its multitudes of fat, shovel-hatted, scoundrelly priests, its pictures, which, when surveyed by the square mile, an honest traveller cannot find it in his heart to say he admires except in the gross, as one compliments a whole meadow full of Devons or Cotswolds; its beautiful cathedral at Antwerp, the rich valley of the Scheldt, seen from its spire, and what the guide books won't tell you I will add here, and that is of the indignation which, after the lapse of

three centuries, still rises in every reader of Motley, that the cursed trail of Philip the Second is still seen in the bigotry of the Belgian peasant, which good Leopold and Victoria's godmothership, and the near proximity of free, if feverish, France, has not been able to eradicate. The Rhine glories can be read best in Childe Harold. A whole train of historical associations are there awakened which make the picture pregnant with life.

In Munich I saw the frescoes of Schnorr, descriptive of the Niebelungen Lied, and I wake up at night scared by the murder in Haran's eye. I am, of course, a fool to think these frescoes the finest pictures in the world; just as I am a fool to think the Greek Slave a finer stroke of genius than the Venus of the Medecis, as I know I will think when I see the original of the last named. My reason is the same in both cases. The frescoes riveted my natural, honest notice in all the crowded mart of Munich art, and impressed me as accomplishing the feat of 66 holding the mirror up to Nature" beyond anything I saw in London, the Louvre, Antwerp, Brussels or Dresden. The Greek Slave looks like a nude female. None of the costly copies of the Florence Venus which the galleries that I have seen contain, do so accurately describe the perfect girl's form; for there is no notion of a woman to a Northern mind in either of them.

I will let you know when I get to Italy whether I "take back" any of this. In my next I will try to say something of the great exhibition here in which our country plays so beggarly a part, showing, as it does, chiefly sewing machines and soda fountains. There are, besides, some photographs, some false teeth, and a Chicago bar-room where a very vile julep is sold, as I can myself testify.

A New England school-house is the chief trophy of our civilization, and that has been utilized by our practical countrymen and loud-voiced country women as a post-office and lounging room, so that being constantly filled with natives it affords little chance for inspection by inquisitive strangers.

Adieu till I bore you again; meanwhile I am, as ever,

A. M.