, and I passed some of my
pleasantest time in America at his establishment, and never bid farewell
to him or his sons, or the company, without regret. There are some
hotels in New York upon the English system: the Globe is the best, and I
always frequented it; and there is an excellent French restaurateur's
(Delmonico's).

Of course, where the population and traffic are great, and the
travellers who pass through numerous, the hotels are large and good;
where, on the contrary, the road is less and less frequented, so do they
decrease in importance, size, and respectability, until you arrive at
the farm-house entertainment of Virginia and Kentucky; the grocery, or
mere grog-shop, or the log-house of the Far West. The way-side inns are
remarkable for their uniformity; the furniture of the bar-room is
invariably the same: a wooden clock, map of the United States, map of
the State, the Declaration of Independence, a looking-glass, with a
hair-brush and comb hanging to it by strings, _pro bono publico_;
sometimes with the extra embellishment of one or two miserable pictures,
such as General Jackson scrambling upon a horse, with fire or steam
coming out of his nostrils, going to the battle of New Orleans,
etcetera, etcetera.

He who is of the silver-fork school, will not find much comfort out of
the American cities and large towns. There are no neat, quiet little
inns, as in England. It is all the "rough and tumble" system, and when
you stop at humble inns you must expect to eat peas with a two-pronged
fork, and to sit down to meals with people whose exterior is any thing
but agreeable, to attend upon yourself, and to sleep in a room in which
there are three or four other beds; (I have slept in one with nearly
twenty,) most of them carrying double, even if you do not have a
companion in your own.

A New York friend of mine travelling in an Extra with his family, told
me that at a western inn he had particularly requested that he might not
have a bed-fellow, and was promised that he should not. On his
retiring, he found his bed already occupied, and he went down to the
landlady, and expostulated. "Well," replied she, "it's only your own
_driver_; I thought you wouldn't mind him."

Another gentleman told me, that having arrived at a place called Snake's
Hollow, on the Mississippi, the bed was made on the kitchen-floor, and
the whole family and travellers, amounting in all to seventeen, of all
ages and both sexes, turn