force of this tremendous blow by any
more remarks. The force of blundering can go no further. Would a Chinese
playwright or painter have stranger notions about the barbarians than
our neighbors, who are separated from us but by two hours of salt water?

MEDITATIONS AT VERSAILLES.

The palace of Versailles has been turned into a bricabrac shop of late
years, and its time-honored walls have been covered with many thousand
yards of the worst pictures that eye ever looked on. I don't know how
many leagues of battles and sieges the unhappy visitor is now obliged
to march through, amidst a crowd of chattering Paris cockneys, who are
never tired of looking at the glories of the Grenadier Francais; to
the chronicling of whose deeds this old palace of the old kings is now
altogether devoted. A whizzing, screaming steam-engine rushes hither
from Paris, bringing shoals of badauds in its wake. The old coucous
are all gone, and their place knows them no longer. Smooth asphaltum
terraces, tawdry lamps, and great hideous Egyptian obelisks, have
frightened them away from the pleasant station they used to occupy under
the trees of the Champs Elysees; and though the old coucous were just
the most uncomfortable vehicles that human ingenuity ever constructed,
one can't help looking back to the days of their existence with a tender
regret; for there was pleasure then in the little trip of three leagues:
and who ever had pleasure in a railway journey? Does any reader of this
venture to say that, on such a voyage, he ever dared to be pleasant?
Do the most hardened stokers joke with one another? I don't believe it.
Look into every single car of the train, and you will see that every
single face is solemn. They take their seats gravely, and are silent,
for the most part, during the journey; they dare not look out of window,
for fear of being blinded by the smoke that comes whizzing by, or of
losing their heads in one of the windows of the down train; they ride
for miles in utter damp and darkness: through awful pipes of brick, that
have been run pitilessly through the bowels of gentle mother earth, the
cast-iron Frankenstein of an engine gallops on, puffing and screaming.
Does any man pretend to say that he ENJOYS the journey?--he might as
well say that he enjoyed having his hair cut; he bears it, but that is
all: he will not allow the world to laugh at him, for any exhibition
of slavish fear; and pretends, therefore, to be at his ease