The great audacity of Dr Mayo's fictions preclude surprise at the boldness of his tropes and similes. The tails of his lions lash the ground "with a sound like the falling of clods upon a coffin;" their roar is like the boom of a thirty-two pounder, shaking the trees, and rattling the boulders in the bed of the river. Of course, allowance must be made for the vein of humorous rhodomontade peculiar to certain American writers, and into which Dr Mayo sometimes unconsciously glides, and, at others, voluntarily indulges. His description of the conjuring tricks of the Framazugdan jugglers comes under the latter head. "Some of them were truly wonderful, as, for instance, turning a man into a tree bearing fruit, and with monkeys skipping about in the branches; and another case, where the chief juggler apparently swallowed five men, ten boys, and a jackass, threw them all up again, turned himself inside out, blew himself up like a balloon, and, exploding with a loud report, disappeared in a puff of luminous vapour. I could not but admire the skill with which the tricks were performed, although I was too much of a Yankee to be much astonished at anything in the _Hey, Presto!_ line." A countryman of Mr Jefferson Davis is not expected to feel surprise at anything in the way of sleight of hand, or "double shuffle;" and there was probably nothing more startling to the senses in the evaporation of King Shounsé's conjuror, than in the natural self-extinction of the Mississippian debt. It is only a pity that Jonathan Romer did not carry his smart fellow-citizen to the country of the _Pholdefoos_, a class of enthusiasts who devote their lives to a search for the germs of moral, religious, and political truth. Mr Davis would have felt rather out of his element at first, but could not have failed ultimately to have benefited by his sojourn amongst these singular savages.