"The railway left me at Cumberland, and handed me over to the stage-coach. Probably you do not know what a stage-coach is in this country. It is a wooden box placed on four wheels, and intended to convey travellers along roads which the locomotive has not yet favoured with its visits. But what a box, and what a road! We were nine, packed together like herrings in a barrel, jolting through the ruts and bounding over the stones as if we had been afflicted with St Vitus's dance. Add to these comforts the delightful society of seven graceful Americans, chewing, spitting, and (in order to be more at their ease) _taking off their boots_. A timid, delicate young girl, seated in one of the corners of this infamous box, suffered in silence, and the next morning we found her in a swoon. For my part, I passed the night in tossing to one side or the other an enormous dirty body which constantly fell back upon me, and two enormous legs which seemed determined to crush mine. Assuredly, if a severe penance can, according to expiatory dogmas, cleanse us from our sins, my soul ought, after these twenty-four hours of coaching, to be as pure as that of the newborn child; and if ever I meet an Indian fakeer in quest of a new torture wherewith to propitiate the goddess Siwa, I will send him to America, to travel by the Cumberland stage." Madame de Merlin, certainly a very amiable and hardy traveller, slow to feel small annoyances or to censure foreign habits, is unable to conceal her disgust at some of the practices which so shocked M. Marmier. She went out to New York in the same vessel with Fanny Elssler, and was present at her first appearance in that city. "The enthusiasm," she says, "was immense; I thought myself at Rome, and had difficulty in recognising the nation that talks by measure and walks by springs. But soon these men, with hat on head and coat off, lying down upon their seats, and who, after placing their heavy-nailed shoes on the ground, carelessly rested their woollen-stockinged feet on the back of their neighbours' chairs, reminded me that I was in the United States." On entering the railway between New York and Philadelphia, the Countess found it--