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 blessed 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 millionaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to
that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the more or less elevated
circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your
name on his dog's-eared register. I have less hesitation in unburdening
myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met
with more than one exception to the rule. Officials become brutalized, I
suppose, as a matter of course. One cannot expect an office clerk to
embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a
telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he
receives for transmission. Still, humanity is not always totally
extinguished in these persons. I discovered a youth in a telegraph
office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in
conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as
if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not made.

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars with
sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole side of the
car maybe made transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a
traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State. Its dull red dust
looks like the dried and powdered mud of a battle-field. Peach-trees are
common, and champagne-orchards. Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by,
feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs. I had a mighty
passion come over me to be the captain of one,--to glide back and forward
upon a sea never roughened by storms,--to float where I could not
sink,--to navigate where there is no shipwreck,--to lie languidly on the
deck and govern the huge craft by a word or the movement of a finger:
there was something of railroad intoxication in the fancy: but who has
not often envied