America is seen in the terms of the
post-office as in those of the railway. A letter is "mailed," not
"posted;" the "postman" gives way to the "letter-carrier;" a
"post-card" is expanded into a "postal-card." The stranger on arrival
at New York will be amused to see the confiding way in which newspaper
or book packets, too large for the orifice, are placed on the top of
the street letter-boxes (affixed to lamp-posts), and will doubtless be
led to speculate on the different ways and instincts of the street
Arabs of England and America. A second reflection will suggest to him
the superior stability of the New York climate. On what day in England
could we leave a postal packet of printed matter in the open air with
any certainty that it would not be reduced to pulp in half an hour by
a deluge of rain?

No remarks on the possible inferiority of the American telegraph and
postal systems would be fair if unaccompanied by a tribute to the
wonderful development of the use of the telephone. New York has (or
had very recently) more than twice as many subscribers to the
telephonic exchanges as London, and some American towns possess one
telephone for every twenty inhabitants, while the ratio in the British
metropolis is 1:3,000. In 1891 the United States contained 240,000
miles of telephone wires, used by over 200,000 regular subscribers. In
1895 the United Kingdom had about 100,000 miles of wire. The
Metropolitan telephone in New York alone has 30,000 miles of
subterranean wire and about 9,000 stations. The great switch-board at
its headquarters is 250 feet long, and accommodates the lines of 6,000
subscribers. Some subscribers call for connection over a hundred times
a day, and about one hundred and fifty girls are required to answer
the calls.

The generalisations made in travellers' books about the hotels of
America seem to me as fallacious as most of the generalisations about
this chameleon among nations. Some of the American hotels I stayed at
were about the best of their kind in the world, others about the
worst, others again about half-way between these extremes. On the
whole, I liked the so-called "American system" of an inclusive price
by the day, covering everything except such purely voluntary extras as
wine; and it seems to me that an ideal hotel on this system would
leave very little to wish for. The large American way of looking at
things makes a man prefer to give twenty shillings per day for all he
needs and co