Our travelling party had been thrown together less by choice than accident; and for our commander-in-chief we had unfortunately selected as wild a young Irish officer as was ever turned loose from Cork to fight his fortunes in the world. Fitz-Freke, as he called himself, had no single qualification for being our "guide, philosopher, and friend," except a boasted familiarity with the way. He had travelled it very often, and indeed seemed to hang somewhat loosely to his regiment, which was stationed at Montreal. Before we had half finished our first day's drive, we had begun to wish furloughs and half-pay had never been invented; and I am sorry to add, that his affectionate recollections of his family in Cork led him quite too frequently to the bottle. Poor Freke! we profited by his good-humour, yet abused his forbearance under rebuke; and I must own in justice, that when we at last parted company, and were to see no more of him, we were all ready to protest that he was, after all, as downright a worthy as ever buttoned an Irishman's heart beneath a buff waistcoat. Leaving Albany before the day began to be hot, we went rapidly through the green levels upon its right bank, and crossed the river at Troy. Here we were conducted to Mount Ida, and by a geographical miracle made an easy transition to Mount Olympus, from which the view is extensive, but by no means celestial. Freke seemed to think there was some reason to suspect a hoax; but as his classical information was not of the most accurate description, I am not sure but he still labours under the impression that he has stood where the three goddesses displayed their charms to Paris; and smoked a cigar where that botheration siege was as interminably contested, as were ever those consequent hexameters of Virgil and Homer, which he adorned with dog's-ears and thumb-prints, under the diurnal ferule of his tutor. In passing through the streets, we were gratified to observe that, in spite of Diomede and Ulysses, Troy still retains its "Palladium of liberty, and independent free press;" and though we could discover no relics of the famous wooden-horse, I notice in the accounts of later tourists that an "iron horse" may now be found there in harness, which daily brings strangers into the heart of the city without any incendiary effect. Such is the change of manners and times since the days of the pious Æneas!