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to form a large proportion of the servants, both male and female, and of porters and the like. We are disappointed in the fruit. The peaches are cheap, and in great quantities, but they are very inferior to ours in flavour, and the melons are also tasteless. The water-melons are cut in long slices and sold in the streets, and the people eat them as they walk along. The great luxury of the place is ice, which travels about the streets in carts, the blocks being three or four feet thick, and a glass of iced water is the first thing placed on the table at each meal. The cookery at this hotel is French, and first rate. We have had a few dishes that are new to us. The corn-bread and whaffles are cakes made principally of Indian-corn; and the Okra-vegetable, which was to us new, is cut into slices to flavour soup. Lima beans are very good; we have also had yams, and yesterday tasted the Cincinnati champagne, which we thought very poor stuff. _Fillmore House, Newport, Rhode Island, September 13th._--We left New York on Thursday afternoon, and embarked in a Brobdingnagian steamboat, which it would not be very easy to describe. The cabin is on the upper deck, so that at either end you can walk out on to the stern or bow of the vessel; it is about eleven feet high, and most splendidly fitted up and lighted at night with four ormolu lustres, each having eight large globe lights. We paced the length of the cabin and made it 115 paces, so that walking nine times up and down made a nice walk of a mile. The engine of the steamboat in America rises far above the deck in the centre of the vessel, so this formed an obstruction to our seeing the whole length, unless on each side of the engine, where a broad and clear passage allowed a full view from end to end; but instead of taking away from the fine effect, the engine-room added greatly thereto, for it was divided from the cabin, on one side, by a huge sheet of plate glass, through which the most minute workings of the engines could be seen. There was in front a large clock, and dials of every description, to show the atmospheric pressure, the number of revolutions of the wheel, &c. This latter dial was a most beautiful piece of mechanism. Its face showed six digits, so that the number of revolutions could be shown up to 999,999. The series of course began with 000,001, and at the end of the first turn the _nothings_ remained, and the 1 changed first into 2, then into 3, &c., till at
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