trunks mended, and embarks his
family on the first available steamer.

Mrs. B's spring of action is that the Breeds have started, or that the
McBrides went last year. Fashion pries us out of our comfortable
domesticity, our cozy home-keeping ruts, which we exchange for the
miseries of inns and the perils of voyaging; precisely as custom,
gathering at length the force of law, "moves" a hundred thousand
hapless New Yorkers, more or less, every May, with smash of household
goods, cost, loss, hurry, flurry, and worry--they exchange houses as in
the children's game everybody changes "chairs" or "corners" to see who
will get the worst of it. This is a species of May travelling with all
its curses and none of its compensations.

Presently our European voyagers will be sending home the tale of their
misadventures. They fell among the London servants--soft and sweet to
the face, perfect devils behind your back; stealing all your provisions
under pretence of perquisites, and drinking enough beer in a week to
last an American a year; whereas, if you yourself so much as send for a
glass of ice-water at the hotel, the butler grumbles at the messenger,
"Those Americans lap water like dogs!" At Paris our pilgrims fall a
prey to landlords who charge the price of new furniture for every
microscopic scratch on a chair, besides cheating them out of a thousand
francs extra rent, as a parting token, on the ground that the laws
require a certain notice of quitting.

A more agreeable theme will be the people our travellers meet. Whoever
goes from another American city to New York is struck by the strange
faces he sees--phizzes and figures that make Hans Breitmann commonplace
and Nast a portrait painter instead of a caricaturist. Could one have
suspected such oddities in human shape, such outlandish rigs? The New
Yorker going to London is still more surprised at the queer-looking
specimens he sees there, surpassing the fancy of Dickens and
Cruikshank: plenty of Bagstocks, Peggotys and Skewtons; perfumed old
beaux, with enormous gloves, too long in the fingers, and with an
eyeglass held muscularly in one eye socket by screwing up the face; and
all sorts of people belonging to the last century, and magically coming
out of bandboxes a hundred years old.

So, at least, writes Augustus from London; and presently, as if whisked
off by an enchanter, we hear of the youth in Naples, "the noisiest city
in Europe," he says, where all the people chat