the
most dreary monotony. The rain, which had begun to fall soon after their
arrival, continued to descend in torrents, and they found themselves
close prisoners in the sanded parlors of the miserable inn. They could
but compare this wretched place with the grand old forests and broad
prairies of the West, and Sukey began to sigh for home.

"Are you homesick already, Sukey?" asked Fernando.

"I am not homesick--blast such a place as this--give me a country where
it don't rain 365 days out o' the year, and I'm content, home or
abroad," growled Sukey.

Their situation was by no means pleasant. Their front window looked out
upon a long, straggling, ill-paved street, with its due proportion of
mud heaps and duck pools. The houses on either side were, for the most
part, dingy-looking edifices, with half-doors, and such pretensions to
being shops as the display of a quart of meal, salt, or string of red
peppers confers. A more wretched, gloomy-looking picture of woe-begone
poverty one seldom beheld.

It was no better if they turned for consolation to the rear of the
house. There their eyes fell upon the dirty yard of a dirty inn, and the
half-covered cowshed, where two famishing animals mourned their hard
fate as they chewed the cud of "sweet and bitter fancy." In addition,
they saw an old chaise, once the yellow postchaise, the pride and glory
of the establishment, now reduced from its wheels and ignominiously
degraded to a hen house. On the grass-grown roof, a cock had taken his
stand, with an air of protective patronage to the feathered
inhabitants beneath.

Sukey stood at the narrow window gazing out on the dreary and melancholy
scene, while he heaved an occasional sigh.

"If this is what you call gitten an education I don't want it," he
drawled at last. "I would rather go back to Ohio and hunt for deer or
black bear, than enjoy such amusement as this is."

"Oh, it will get better," said Fernando.

"It has great room for growing better."

"But it might be worse."

"Yes, we might be at sea."

Their landlady, a portly woman with two marriageable daughters, did all
in her power to make their stay pleasant. She praised Baltimore for its
beauty and health, its picturesqueness and poetry. It was surely
destined to be the greatest city in the United States.

When they were alone, Sukey pointed to the mud heaps and duck pools and
gravely asked:

"Do they show the poetry and picturesk of which she speaks? Is that