are
moving South. The waiters at this hotel are all darkies.

_December 21, 1866._--Philadelphia is a most difficult town just now for
pedestrians, the door-steps being all of white marble glazed with ice,
and sliding on the pavement may be had in perfection. Spent the best
part of the day in slipping about, trying to deliver letters of
introduction. The system of naming the streets of Philadelphia and of
numbering the houses is extremely ingenious, and answers perfectly when
you have made yourself acquainted with it; but as it takes an ordinary
mind a week to find it out, the stranger who stops four or five days is
apt to execrate it. All the streets run at right angles to one another,
so that a short cut, the joy of the accomplished Londoner, is
impossible. It is a chess-board on which the bishop's move is unknown.
Nothing diagonal can be done. The city is ruled like the page of a
ledger, from top to bottom with streets, from side to side with avenues.
It is all divided into squares. When you are first told this, a vision
arises of the possibility of cutting across these squares from corner to
corner. Not a bit of it: a square at Philadelphia means a solid block of
houses, not an open space enclosed by buildings. When you have wandered
about for some time, the idea suggests itself that every house is
exactly like the house next to it; although the inhabitants have given
up the old uniformity of costume, the houses have not; and without this
elaborate system of numbering, the inhabitants of Philadelphia would
never be able to find their way home.

Nevertheless, if that is the finest town in which its inhabitants are
best lodged, Philadelphia is the finest town in the world. It lodges a
much smaller population than that of New York in more houses. In no
other large town are rents comparatively so cheap. Every decent
workingman can afford to have his separate house, with gas and water
laid on, and fitted with a bath.

We have been making a study of the negro waiters. Perhaps cold weather
affects them; but the first thing about them that strikes you is the
apathetic infantine feeble-mindedness of the "colored persons" lately
called niggers. I say nothing of the seven colored persons, of various
shades, who always sit in a row on a bench in the hall, each with a
little clothes-brush in his hand, and never attempt to do anything;
I allude to those who minister to my wants in the coffee-room with
utterly unknown dishes. I