houghts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in
the pocket keeps them wound up,--many times, I say, just as my brain was
beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication,
some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has
come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken
my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along
my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day
associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and
milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should
have been filling themselves full of fresh juices. My friends spared me
this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness
produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the
exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety
in what we know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it
pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near
objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones. Looking from
a right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly
backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not
appear to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at
hand as if they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole
landscape becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis
somewhere in the middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and
longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied
them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The
traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of
Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found "his
warmest welcome at an inn," has something to learn at the offices of
the great city-hotels. The unheralded guest who is honored by mere
indifference may think himself blest with singular good-fortune.

If the despot of the Patent Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in
his manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor. The coldest
welcome that a threadbare curate ever got at the door of a bishop's
palace, the most icy reception that a country-cousin ever received
at the city-mansion of a mushroom millionnaire, is agreeably tepid,
compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the