e
imitation of some other country than their own. Hence Frenchmen affect
to seem English, English to look like Prussians, Prussians to appear
Poles, Poles to be Calmucks. Your 'elegant' of the Boulevard de Ghent
sports a 'cut away' like a Yorkshire squire, and rides in cords; your
Londoner wears his hair on his shoulders, and his moustaches, like
a Pomeranian count; Turks find their way into tight trousers and
'Wellingtons'; and even the Yankees cannot resist the general tendency
to transmutation, but take three inches off their hair behind.

Nothing is more amusing than these general congresses of European
vagrancy. Characters the most original meet you at every step, and
display most happily traits you never have the opportunity to inspect at
home. For so it is, the very fact of leaving home with most people seems
like an absolution from all the necessities of sustaining a part. They
feel as though they had taken off the stage finery in which they
had fretted away their hours before, and stand forth themselves _in
propria_. Thus your grave Chancery lawyer becomes a chatty pleasant
man of the world, witty and conversable; your abstruse mathematician,
leaving conic sections behind him, talks away with the harmless
innocence of a child about men and politics; and even your cold
'exclusive' bids a temporary farewell to his 'morgue,' and answers his
next neighbour at table without feeling shocked at his obtrusion.

There must be some secret sympathy--of whose operations we know
nothing--between our trunks and our temperaments, our characters and our
carpet-bags; and that by the same law which opens one to the inspection
of an official at the frontier, the other must be laid bare when we pass
across it. How well would it have been for us, if the analogy had been
pushed a little further, that the fiscal regulations adopted in the
former were but extended to the latter, and that we had applied the
tariff to the morals, as well as to the manufactures, of the Continent.

It was in some such musing as this I sat in a window of the 'Nassau,'
at Wiesbaden, during the height of the season of----. Strangers were
constantly arriving, and hourly was the reply 'no room' given to the
disconsolate travellers, who peered from their carriages with the
road-sick look of a long journey. As for myself, I had been daily
and nightly transferred from one quarter of the hotel to another--now
sleeping in an apartment forty feet square, in a bed