Our company was small, but it was sufficiently various. There were two specimens of the idle English gentleman, if such a term may be applied to the character. They were men in the prime of life, unmarried, handsome, moustached, with an air of high society, yet perfectly affable, and even agreeable, in their intercourse with their fellow-travellers. I hesitate in applying the term idle to these men, as they appear to be far from exemplifying true inactivity. They speak of having travelled and sported in many parts of the world. One is as familiar with the granitic wilds of Finland as with Donegal and Inverness. He spends whole summers of wild hardy life in the deserts near the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, shooting bears and hunting deer, lost to wheaten bread and every luxury for weeks at a time. His frame is sinewy and firmly knit; his habits in eating and drinking are as simple as possible. The other gentleman has been with his ship through every sea in the East and West. He has left England at the height of the gay season, to perform a journey of four months, commencing with Copenhagen, St Petersburg, and Stockholm, to terminate on the coasts of the Levant. Another of our party is a New Englander, with an air of quiet confidence as remarkable as that of the Englishmen, yet of a totally different character. He is a little of a humorist, and not at all offensive. A fourth is an elderly Lincolnshire farmer, homely, simple, good-natured, full of quaint remark, and not unwilling to be smiled at by his companions on account of his little peculiarities of manners and discourse. We have also a young English student, evidently not of the university caste, delicate in figure, of gentle manners, and possessed of considerable intelligence. Of females we have few, only one being of the genus _lady_, the sister of our bear-hunting friend; the rest are more practical in their character. One is a mother with a charge of young children, whom she is sadly ill-qualified for regulating or keeping in order. Incessantly these juveniles are chattering about something, or else crying and squalling. The mother goes about with a broken-hearted air, and a voice worn down to its lowest and saddest tones, either taking her children's querulousness resignedly, or chiding them crossly for what is chiefly her own blame. To attend even thus imperfectly to the group of little ones, takes the whole time and energy of this poor mother, and of an equally broken-spirited maid; for never does a minute pass when there is not something to be done for them, either in the way of attending to their personal necessities, or preventing them from clapperclawing each other, and saving them from the effects of their own recklessness. The thought occurred to me twenty times a day--verily the _storge_ is a most marvellous endowment of the mother's heart, enabling her, as it does, to submit placidly to what every other person would feel to be intolerable misery.