of motion' is not to be preserved amidst the extempore rollings of an ungovernable ship. Indeed, within the last twentyfour hours, I have had to perform feats of agility more fit for a monkey than one of my own sex and species. Par example: getting down from a bed as high as copybook-board, and, what really is awful, with the sensation of groping about with your feet and legs for a floor that seems to have no earthly existence. I may add, the cabin-door left ajar, and exposing you to the gaze of an obtrusive cabin-boy, as he is called, but quite big enough for a man. O, je ne jamais !

"As to the Mer Maladie, delicacy forbids the details; but as Miss Ruth says, it is the height of human degradation; and to add to the climax of our letting down, we had to give way to the most humiliating impulses in the presence of several of the rising generation, dreadfully rude little girls who had too evidently enjoyed a bad bringing up.

"To tell the truth, your poor Governess was shockingly indisposed. Not that I had indulged my appetite at dinner, being too much disgusted with a public meal in promiscuous society, and, as might be expected, elbows on table, eating with knives, and even picking teeth with forks! And then no grace, which assuredly ought to be said both before and after, whether we are to retain the blessings or not. But a dinner' at sea and a school dinner, where we have even our regular beef and batter days, are two very different things. Then to allude to indiscriminate conversation, a great part of which is in a foreign language, and accordingly places one in the cruel position of hearing, without understanding a word of, the most libertine and atheistical sentiments. Indeed, I fear I have too often been smiling complacently, not to say engagingly, when I ought rather to have been flashing with virtuous indignation, or even administering the utmost severity of moral reproof. I did endeavor, in one instance, to rebuke indelicacy; but unfortunately from standing near the funnel, was smutty all the while I was talking, and, as school experience confirms, it is impossible to command respect with a black on one's nose.

"Another of our cardinal virtues, personal cleanliness, is totally impracticable on ship-board; but without particularizing, I will only name a general sense of grubbiness; and as to dress, a rumpled and tumbled tout ensemble, strongly indicative of the low and vulgar pastime of rolling down Green

wich-hill! And then, in such a costume to land in Holland, where the natives get up linen with a perfection and purity, as Miss Ruth says, quite worthy of the primeval ages!~ That surely is bad enough, but to have one's trunks rummaged like a suspected menial, - to see all the little secrets of the toilet, and all the mysteries of a female wardrobe, exposed to the searching gaze of a male official, —O shocking! shocking!

"In short, my dear, it is my candid impression, as regards foreign travelling, that, except for a masculine tallyhoying female, of the Di Vernon genus, it is hardly adapted to our sex. Of this at least I am certain, that none but a born romp and hoyden, or a girl accustomed to those new-fangled pulley-hauley exercises, the Calisthenics, is fitted for the boisterous evolutions of a sea-voyage. And yet there are creatures calling themselves women, not to say ladies, who will undertake such long marine passages as to Bombay in Asia, or New York in the New World! Consult Arrowsmith for the geographical degrees.

"Affection, however, demands the sacrifice of my own personal feelings, as my Reverend Parent and my Sister are still inclined to prosecute a Continental tour. I forgot to tell you, that during the voyage Miss Ruth endeavored to parlez françois with some of the foreign ladies, but as they did not understand her, they must all have been Germans.

"My paper warns to conclude. I rely on your superintending vigilance for the preservation of domestic order in my absence. The horticultural department I need not recommend to your care, knowing your innate partiality for the offspring of Flora; and the dusting of the fragile ornaments in the drawing-room, you will assuredly not trust to any hands but your own. Blinds down of course the front-gate locked regularly at 5 P. M.,-and I must particularly beg of your musical penchant, a total abstinence on Sundays from the piano-forte. And now adieu. The Reverend T. C. desires his compliments to you, and Miss Ruth adds her kind regards, with which believe me,

My dear Miss Parfitt,
"Your affectionate Friend and Preceptress,

"PRISCILLA CRANE...

"P. S. I have just overheard a lady describing, with strange levity, an adventure that befell her at Cologne. A foreign postman invading her sleeping-apartment, and not only delivering a letter to her on her pillow, but actually staying to receive his money, and to give her the change! And she laughed and called him her Bed Post! Fi donc! Fi donc!"

WELL,

CHAPTER IV.

there is the letter

"And a very proper letter, too," remarks a retired Seminarian, Mrs. Grove House, a faded, demure-looking old lady, with a set face so like wax, that any strong emotion would have cracked it to pieces. And never, except on a doll, was there a face with such a miniature set of features, or so crowned with a chaplet of little string-colored curls. "A proper letter! and decorum!"

what, with all that fuss about delicacy

Yes, miss. At least proper for the character. A schoolmistress is a prude by profession. She is bound on her reputation to detect improprieties, even as he is the best lawyer who discovers the most flaws. It is her cue, where she cannot find an indecorum, to imagine it; just as a paid spy is compelled, in a dearth of high treason, to invent a conspiracy. In fact, it was our very Miss Crane who poked out an objection, of which no other woman would have dreamt, to those little button-mushrooms called Pages. She would not keep one, she said, for his weight in gold.

"But they are all the rage," said Lady A.

66

Everybody has one," said Mrs. B.

"They are so showy!" said Mrs. C.

"And so interesting!" lisped Miss D. “And so useful," suggested Miss E.

"I would rather part with half my servants,” declared Lady A., "than with my handsome Cherubino !"

"Not a doubt of it," replied Miss Crane, with a gesture of the most profound acquiescence. "But if I were a married woman, I would not have such a boy about me for the world,

no, not for the whole terrestrial globe. A page is unquestionably very à la mode, and very dashing, and very pretty,

and may be very useful,

but to have a youth about one, so

beautifully dressed, and so indulged, not to say pampered, and yet not exactly treated as one of the family, I should certainly expect that everybody would take him —

"For what, pray, what?"

It is a statistical fact, that since 1814 an unknown number of persons, bearing an indefinite proportion to the gross total of the population of the British empire, have been more or less "abroad." Not politically, or metaphysically, or figuratively, but literally out of the kingdom, or as it is called, in foreign parts.

In fact, no sooner was the continent opened to us by the Peace, than there was a general rush towards the mainland. An alarmist, like old Croaker, might have fancied that some of our disaffected Merthyr Tydvil miners or underminers were scuttling the island, so many of the natives scuttled out of it. The outlandish secretaries who sign passports, had hardly leisure to take snuff.

It was good, however, for trade. Carpet-bags and portmanteaus rose one hundred per cent. All sorts of guidebooks and journey works went off like wildfire, and even Sir Humphrey Davy's " Consolations in Travel" was in strange request. Servants, who had “ no objection to go abroad were snapped up like fortunes, and as to hard-riding “ curriers,” there was nothing like leather.

It resembled a geographical panic, and of all the country and branch banks in Christendom, never was there such a run as on the banks of the Rhine. You would have thought that they were going to break all to smash, of course making away beforehand with their splendid furniture, unrivalled pictures, and capital cellar of wines! However, off flew our countrymen and countrywomen, like migrating swallows, but at the wrong time of year; or rather like shoals of salmon, striving up, up, up against the stream, except to spawn Tours and Reminiscences, hard and soft, instead of roe. And would

that they were going up, up, up still, for when they came down again, Ods, Jobs, and patient Grizels! how they did bore and Germanize us, like so many flutes.

It was impossible to go into society without meeting units, tens, hundreds, thousands, of Rhenish tourists, - travellers in Ditchland, and in Deutchland. People who had seen Nimagen and Nim-Again, who had been at Cologne, and at Koëln, and at Colon, at Cob-Longs and Coblence, at Swang Gwar and at Saint Go-er, -at Bonn, at Bone, and at Bong!

Then the airs they gave themselves over the untravelled! How they bothered them with Bergs, puzzled them with Bads, deafened them with Dorfs, worried them with Heims, and pelted them with Steins! How they looked down upon them, as if from Ehrenbreitstein, because they had not eaten a German sausage in Germany, sour-krout in its own country, and drunk seltzer-water at the fountain-head! What a donkey they deemed him who had not been to Assmanshauser,

what a cockney who had not seen a Rat's Castle besides the one in St. Giles's! He was, as it were, in the kitchen of society, for to go "up the Rhine was to go up stairs !

Now this very humiliation was felt by Miss Crane; and the more that in her establishment for Young Ladies she was the Professor of Geography, and the Use of the Globes. Moreover, several of her pupils had made the trip with their parents, during the vacations, and treated the travelling part of the business so lightly, that in a rash hour the Schoolmistress determined to go abroad. Her junior sister, Miss Ruth, gladly acceded to the scheme, and so did their only remaining parent, a little, sickly, querulous man, always in black, being some sort of dissenting minister, as the "young ladies" knew to their cost, for they had always to mark his new shirts in cross-stitch, with the Reverend T. C. and the number- the “Reverend” at full length.

Accordingly, as soon as the Midsummer holidays set in, there was packed — in I don't know how many trunks, bags, and cap-boxes-I don't know what luggage, except that for each of the party there was a silver spoon, a knife and fork, and six towels.

"And pray, sir, how far did your Schoolmistress mean to

go?"