It was on board the _Scamandre_, French Mediterranean mail-steamer, that Mr Albert Smith left Malta on an August evening of the year 1849, bound for Constantinople. The weather was fine and the sea smooth as a lake, and there could be no reasonable apprehension of shipwreck even for the crazy French vessel, whose last voyage, save on rivers or along coast, this was intended to be. But although somewhat rickety, of very moderate speed, and not particularly clean externally, the interior accommodations of the Scamandre were by no means bad. And the cabin passengers presented an amusing medley of nations and characters. There were French milliners, striving to pass themselves off as governesses, an elderly French actress from the St James's theatre, a brace of Marseilles bagmen, an enterprising Englishman bent upon smuggling muskets into Hungary, a young Irish officer who had thrown up his commission in the British service to campaign with Bem and Kossuth, and who must have arrived at his destination just as the war reached its end. There was also Mr Sophocles, an intelligent Greek professor from an American university, on his way home after twenty years' absence, and sundry persons unnamed, making about twenty in all, and Mr Smith himself, who, we venture to say, was not the least active and efficient in beguiling the tedium of a week's voyage in a slow steamboat, and who gives us an extremely amusing account of his fellow-passengers and their proceedings. Travelling quite as a citizen of the world, without pretension or care for luxuries, now footing it across the Alps with knapsack on shoulder, then a deck passenger from Genoa to Naples, availing himself of the smooth when it offered, but taking the rough readily when it came, sleeping sometimes on boards for want of a bed, with the knapsack aforesaid for a pillow--Mr Smith seems to have carried through the whole of his ramble those best of travelling companions, imperturbable good humour, and a determination to be pleased with everything and everybody. It is accordingly with all possible indulgence that he views the little foibles of his fellow-passengers per Scamandre, and there is not an atom of acid in the dry humour with which he parades them for the entertainment of his readers. Indeed, before the week's voyage is over, we begin to feel quite intimate with the motley company--to view with indulgence Mademoiselle Virginie's barefaced flirtations with the French commissary, and to sympathise with the good-tempered American, who, having had the misfortune to engage his berth in the first-class cabin--a sort of extra-magnificent place, whose chief distinction from the second class consists, as on German railways, in a heavy additional charge--preferred now and then dining with the less aristocratic inmates of the second cabin, "to know what was going on." There is no place like shipboard for betraying people's habits and peculiarities: everybody is more or less in deshabille; and such