ller will not
oversleep himself, or smash the head of his postilion for not awaking
him at a frontier? How will you test readiness, endurance, politeness,
familiarity with 'Bradshaw' and Continental moneys?

I think I have hit on a plan for this, suggested to me, I frankly own,
by analogy with the clinical system. I would lay out the Green Park--it
is convenient to Downing Street, and well suited to the purpose--as
a map of Europe, marking out the boundaries of each country, and
stationing posts to represent capital cities. At certain frontiers I
would station representatives of the different nations as distinctly
marked as I could procure them: that is to say, I'd have a very polite
Frenchman, a very rude and insolent Prussian, a sulky Belgian, a roguish
Italian, and an extremely dirty Russian. Leicester Square could supply
all. It being all duly prepared, I'd start my candidate, with a heavy
bag filled with its usual contents of, let us say, a large box of
cigars, a set of fire-irons, twenty pots of preserved meats, a case
of stuffed birds, four cricket-balls, and a photograph machine, some
blue-books, and a dozen of blacking. I'd start him with this, saying
simply, "Vienna, calling at Stuttgart and Turin;" not a word more;
and then I'd watch my man--how he'd cross the Channel--how he'd cajole
Moossoo--and whether he'd make straight for the Rhine or get entangled
in Belgian railroads. I'd soon see how he dealt with the embarrassments
of the roads and relished the bad diet; and not alone would I test him
by hardships and hunger, fatigue and occasional upsets; but I'd try
his powers of self-resistance by surrounding him with dissolute young
_attaches_ given to blind hookey and lansquenet. I'd have him invited
to ravishing orgies, and tempted in as many ways as St Anthony; and
all these after long privations. Then, I'd have him kept waiting either
under a blazing sun or a deep snow, or both alternately, to test his
cerebral organisation; and I'd try him with impure drinking water and
damp sheets; and, last of all, on his return, I'd make him pass his
accounts before some old monster of official savagery, who would
repeatedly impugn his honesty, call out for vouchers, and d--n his
eyes. The man "who came out strong" after all these difficulties I would
accept as fully equal to his responsibilities, for it would not be alone
in intellectuals he had been tested: the man's temper, his patience, his
powers of endurance, his p