r
all the old bones gathered up during the last eighteen centuries,
unless to start a bone-mill and sell the dust at a remunerative
profit.

After all, the more I saw of Stockholm the more the blues began to
creep over me. It is depressingly slow in these far Northern cities;
so slow, indeed, I don't wonder every thing has a mildewed and
sepulchral aspect. The houses look like slimy tombs in a grave-yard;
the atmosphere, when the sun does not happen to shine--which is more
than half the time--is dank and flat, and hangs upon one's spirits
like a nightmare, crushing out by degrees the very germ of vitality. I
am not surprised that paralysis and hip-disease are frightfully
prevalent in Stockholm.

Give me California forever--the land of sunshine and progress. I have
seen no country like it yet. When I think of old times there, a
terrible home-sickness takes possession of me. So help me, friends and
fellow-citizens, I'd sooner be a pack-mule in California with a raw
back, and be owned by a Mexican greaser, employed week in and week out
in carrying barrels of whisky over the Downieville trail, fed on three
grains of barley per day, and turned out to browse on quartz rock and
sage-bushes every night--I'd rather be a miserable little burro,
kicked and cuffed by a Mariposa Chinaman--I'd rather be a dog and bay
the moon in the city of Oakland, or a toad and feed upon the vapors of
a dungeon at San Quentin--I'd rather be a lamp-post on the corner of
Montgomery Street, San Francisco, and be leaned against, and hugged,
and kissed alternately by every loafer out of the Montgomery
saloon--I'd rather be any of these than a human being compelled to
live permanently in Europe, with a palace in every city, town, and
village, and an income of fifty thousand dollars a day to defray
expenses; so don't be surprised if I should turn up again one of these
fine mornings on the Pacific coast. The only difficulty at present
is--a collapse in the financial department.

CHAPTER XXV.

WALKS ABOUT STOCKHOLM.

If you expect any very lively or striking pictures of Stockholm from a
tourist like myself, whose besetting trouble in life is a
constitutional melancholy, I am afraid you will be disappointed. It is
beyond doubt one of the most agreeable cities in the North, and, so
far as public institutions are concerned, affords a fine field of
research for the antiquarian and the naturalist. Any enterprising
gentleman who desires to improve