Never was there such a summer on this side of the Tropics. How is it possible to exist, with the thermometer up to boiling point! London a vast caldron--the few people left in its habitable parts strongly resembling stewed fish--the aristocratic portion of the world flying in all directions, though there are three horticultural fetes to come--the attachés to all the foreign embassies sending in their resignations, rather than be roasted alive--the ambassadors all on leave, in the direction of the North Pole--the new governor of Canada congratulated, for the first time in national history, on his banishment to a land where he has nine months winter;--and a contract just entered into with the Wenham Lake Company for ten thousand tons of ice, to rescue the metropolis from a general conflagration. --Went to dine with the new East India Director, in his Putney paradise. Sir Charles gives dinners worthy of the Mogul, and he wants nothing of the pomps and pleasures of the East but a harem. But, in the mean time, he gathers round him a sort of human menagerie; and every race of man, from the Hottentot to the Highlander, is to be found feeding in his Louis Quatorze saloons. This certainly variegates the scene considerably, and relieves us of the intolerable topics, of Parliament, taxes, the last attempt on Louis Philippe, the last adventure of Queen Christina, or the last good thing of the last great bore of Belgrave Square; with the other desperate expedients to avoid the inevitable yawn. We had an Esquimaux chief, who, however, dwelt too long on the luxury of porpoise steaks; a little plump Mandarin, who indulged us with the tricks of the tea trade; the sheik Ben Hassan Ben Ali, who had narrowly escaped hanging by the hands of the French; and a New Zealand chief, strongly suspected of habits inconsistent with the European _cuisine_, yet who restricted himself on this occasion to every thing at the table. At length, in a pause of the conversation, somebody asked where somebody else was going, for the dog-days. The question engaged us all. But, on comparing notes, every Englishman of the party had been everywhere already--Cairo, Constantinople, Calcutta, Cape Horn. There was not a corner of the world, where they had not drunk tea, smoked cigars, and anathematised the country, the climate, and the constitution. Every thing was _usé_--every soul was _blasé_. There was no hope of novelty, except by an Artesian perforation to the centre, or a voyage to the moon. At last a curious old personage, with a nondescript visage, and who might, from the jargon of his tongue and the mystery of his costume, have been a lineal descendant of the Wandering Jew, asked, had any one at table seen the Thames?