sco. One of Leland's
carriages awaits us at the terminus. We are driven to the most
delightful hotel on the continent, and find our old friend, the
Occidental, altered in no respect save size, which the growing demands
of the Pacific New York, since the completion of our inter-oceanic line,
have compelled Leland to quadruple. We are on time,--six days and eight
hours exactly. Or, assuming the San-Francisco standard, we have gained
three hours on the sun, and, instead of taking a two-o'clock lunch, as
our friends are doing in New York, sit down to an eleven-o'clock
breakfast crowned with melons, grapes, and strawberries, in the sweet
seclusion of the Ladies' Ordinary.

Is not all this worth doing in reality?

SEA-HOURS WITH A DYSPEPTIC.

BY HIS SATELLITE.

I.--PRELUSIVE.

There are a good many fictions in the world. I will mention one:--the
propeller Markerstown. The bulletins and placards of her owners soar
high in the realms of fancy; like Sirens, they sing delightful
songs,--and all about "the A 1 fast-sailing, commodious, first-class
steam-packet Markerstown." Such is the soaring fiction: now let us look
at the sore fact. The "A 1" is, I take it, simply the "Ai!" of the Greek
chorus new-vamped for modern wear,--a drear wail well suited to the
victims of the Markerstown. As to sailing qualities:--we know, of
course, that all speed is relative. For a sea-comet, the Markerstown
would be somewhat leisurely, though answering well for an oceanic fixed
star, having no perceptible motion. One man on board--the Captain--was
accommodated: the kidnapped all suffered. Whether the Markerstown should
be reckoned as first-class or last-class is a question depending simply
on where the counting begins, and which way it runs. "Steam-packet" she
was indeed, though not in the most desirable way. Her steam was "packit"
(_Scottice_) too close for safety, but lay quite too loose for speed.
The kidnapped were all "packit," and "weel packit." How I came to be one
of them, and how by this mystic union I halved my joys and doubled my
griefs, as the naughty ones say of wedlock, will soon appear.

One brilliant fancy-flight I forgot to mention. The craft in question
was boldly proclaimed as "new." New, indeed, she might have been: so
were once the Ark, the Argo, the Old Temeraire, the Constitution, and
sundry other hulks of celebrity. Yet it is not mere rhetoric to say,
that, if the eyes of the second and third Presidents of thes