known in the most
out-of-the-way rooms; for the run upon all the decent hotels is so
great, that courtesy is scarce needed to insure custom. Not that they
are uncivil; but the confusion caused by an arrival is so great, and the
mass of travellers are so indifferent to the comfort or the attention
which one meets with in a decent hotel in this country, that, acting
from habit, they begin by roosting their guests, like crows, at the top
of the tree.

To obviate this inconvenience, I would suggest, for the benefit of
future travellers, the plan I found on many occasions so successful
myself, in my subsequent journeys; which is, whenever you are
comfortably lodged in any hotel, to take a letter from the proprietor to
the next you wish to stop at. They give it you most readily, and on many
occasions I found the advantage of it. They all know one another; and in
this way you might travel all through the Union.

Dinner is over--the events of the day have been discussed 'mid fragrant
clouds, and we are asleep in the capital of the State of New York.

We were obliged to be astir early in the morning, so as to be in time
for the railway; consequently, our lionizing of the city consisted
chiefly in smoking a cigar at the front-door. The town is prettily
situated on the banks of the Hudson, and at its confluence with the Erie
canal. It is one of the few towns in the Republic which enjoys a
Royalist name, having been called after the Duke of York and Albany,
and is a very thriving place, with a steadily increasing population,
already amounting to sixty thousand; and some idea of its prosperity may
be formed from the fact of its receiving, by the Erie canal, annually,
goods to the value of near six millions sterling. Some years ago it was
scourged by an awful fire; but it has risen, like a phoenix, from its
ashes, and profited materially by the chastisement. The chief objection
I had to the town was the paving of the streets, which was abominable,
and full of holes, any of them large enough to bury a hippopotamus, and
threatening dislocation of some joint at every step; thus clearly
proving that the contract for the paving was in the hands of the
surgeons. On similar grounds, it has often occurred to me that the
proprietors of the London cabs must be chiefly hatters.

Our descent from the hotel to the railway station was as lively as that
of a parched pea on a red-hot frying-pan, but it was effected without
any injury requiring t