I have already taken occasion to indoctrinate my reader on the subject of what I deem the most perfect species of table d’hôte. May I now beg of him, or her, if she will be kind enough, to accompany me to the _table-monstre_ of Wiesbaden, Ems, or Baden-Baden? We are at the Cursaal, or Shuberts, or the ‘Hof von Nassau’ at Wiesbaden. Four hundred guests are assembled, their names indicative of every land of Europe, and no small portion of America; the mixture of language giving the impression of its being a grand banquet to the ‘operatives at Babel,’ but who, not satisfied with the chances of misunderstanding afforded by speaking their own tongues to foreigners, have adventured on the more certain project of endeavouring to being totally unintelligible, by speaking languages with which they are unacquainted; while in their dress, manner, and appearance, the great object seems to be an accurate imitation of some other country than their own. Hence Frenchmen affect to seem English, English to look like Prussians, Prussians to appear Poles, Poles to be Calmucks. Your ‘elegant’ of the Boulevard de Ghent sports a ‘cut away’ like a Yorkshire squire, and rides in cords; your Londoner wears his hair on his shoulders, and his moustaches, like a Pomeranian count; Turks find their way into tight trousers and ‘Wellingtons’; and even the Yankees cannot resist the general tendency to transmutation, but take three inches off their hair behind. Nothing is more amusing than these general congresses of European vagrancy. Characters the most original meet you at every step, and display most happily traits you never have the opportunity to inspect at home. For so it is, the very fact of leaving home with most people seems like an absolution from all the necessities of sustaining a part. They feel as though they had taken off the stage finery in which they had fretted away their hours before, and stand forth themselves _in propria_. Thus your grave Chancery lawyer becomes a chatty pleasant man of the world, witty and conversable; your abstruse mathematician, leaving conic sections behind him, talks away with the harmless innocence of a child about men and politics; and even your cold ‘exclusive’ bids a temporary farewell to his ‘morgue,’ and answers his next neighbour at table without feeling shocked at his obtrusion. There must be some secret sympathy--of whose operations we know nothing- -between our trunks and our temperaments, our characters and our carpet- bags; and that by the same law which opens one to the inspection of an official at the frontier, the other must be laid bare when we pass across it. How well would it have been for us, if the analogy had been pushed a little further, that the fiscal regulations adopted in the former were but extended to the latter, and that we had applied the tariff to the morals, as well as to the manufactures, of the Continent.