fectly clear that the chambermaid, to whom the Marquise had given the key of her room, had taken it. But she had had time to hide it; so it was never recovered, and no one was in any way responsible for the loss. The hotel proprietor has no anxiety about the honesty of his servants. If they do his work, visitors must look out for themselves.

gentleman is incautious, and sanguine enough to imagine that by putting his boots outside he will get them blacked, he will have to mourn his credulity on finding that he has lost them. One of the great accommodations of America is the so-called accommodation-train, which moves at the rate of about twelve miles an hour and carries a most rough-looking set of passengers; so much so that it ought to be called "accommodation for disagreeables." They are people who chew and spit, pick their teeth with a clasp-knife, eat with their fingers-for sandwiches are not an American institution— and in the accommodation train, as elsewhere, they, of course, must eat "chicken." All drink water from the same can, over which they slobber like cattle.

These "accommodation trains" will sometimes stop to hang a pick-pocket or rob a peachorchard, and it is not always certain that a man who has many enemies will reach his destination

when he travels by these accommodation trains. Several obnoxious citizens have disappeared therefrom, and have never been heard of again.

If you travel by night on one of the accommodation trains you had better, once for all, resign all expectation of making yourself comfortable, and try to console or amuse yourself with your neighbour's grotesque endeavours after comfort. If a gentleman and lady are travelling together, the latter usually reposes in the arms of the former, and thus presents a very interesting spectacle. Gentlemen who have no ladies to make cushions of them, dispose themselves in various attitudes for sleep.

An Englishman travelling by night stiffens himself in his seat, put his feet straight before him, crosses his hands, closes his eyes; all with the most scrupulous regard to propriety and decency. But an American sleeps in republican fashion, just as the fancy takes him. In the car we travelled in there was one man, who stretched on his back, hung his feet up in the place provided for the hats and umbrellas. Another condensed himself like a telescope, and crammed the whole of his body into a seat a yard and a quarter long. A third lay with his back and head on one seat, and his legs, stiff up at an angle of forty-five degrees, pointing like two telescopes to the skies.

We were also entertained during the night by a violent quarrel between the engines (or, as as they call them here, "en-gynes") of different trains. The rain came down in torrents and finally washed away part of the railroad, near the junction. As on most of the long routes, there was but a single line of rails-the up or down trains having to wait in a siding for the other to pass-we had therefore to announce to the other train our inability to come forward. The conversation which ensued was carried on by various shrieks and yells from the two engines, and if it had been a riot in Pandemonium demons howling defiance at one another-the noise could not have been more terrific. In the middle of the night, with gusts of rain and wind, thunder and lightning intermingling, it required no little nerve not to believe that these hideous sounds were the harbingers of some unutterable woe about to befall us, and that we were swiftly to be hurled into some Stygian pool. Our "en-gyne" kept up an excruciating wail, "We can't come across! We are going back!" The opposite "en-gyne went off into shrieks of fierce derision, "Come on! What are you afraid of?" and seemed to one to use very bad language. What do you mean

by keeping us here all night?"

Then a luggage

train came up, the "en-gyne" of which was a

down-right low fellow, and howled out rude taunts in blasphemous language, impossible to translate here. Finally, we got our difficulty settled. But a conversation between American "en-gynes" is the most fiendish "hullabalco" ever heard on the surface of the earth. The accommodation of sleep is, therefore, not to be thought of under these circumstances. There are, to be sure, what are called "sleeping-cars;" but although there is the "accommodation" of paying a few more dollars, I never found them productive of any more comfort.

CHAPTER XXIX.

DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI FROM MEMPHIS TO

VICKSBURG.

HIS part of the Mississippi, never very beautiful, even at the best, is one of

the dreariest and most monotonous on a sunless day in March, with an east wind blowing across its muddy expanse of waters and dismal waste of willows, and with dirty debris floating upon it, mingled with a sort of foam like soapsuds. Altogether, it looks as though it had been giving a good scrubbing and cleaning down to the American continent, and had used those few hundred miles of willows as scrubbingbrushes. The river is particularly dreary from Memphis to Vicksburg. There are endless flats of willow swamps, endless spongy banks of brown gingerbread, endless tracks of desolate land, often interspersed with trunks of trees, black and charred from having been burned to induce