“Well, we have a few. There was one from New York a little while ago, but he had to go back home. He said he was no match for our Melbourne rogues at all.” It was well that I escaped scot-free. On the steamer in which I returned there was a poor third-class passenger who had lost his all in such a way. He was fool enough to let the man treat him to a drink, and that little drink proved rather a costly affair. All his hard-earned savings had disappeared. CHAPTER XVI. INTERVIEWING THE PRESIDENT. It is about time, I wrote one day in America, I set my face homeward. When on the prairie I was beginning to speculate whether I should ever be fit to make an appearance in descent society again. Now, it seems to me, the question to be asked is, Whether I have not soared so high in the world as to have lost all taste for the frugal simplicity of that home life, where, in the touching words of an American poet I met with this morning, it is to be trusted my Daughters are acting day by day, So as not to bring disgrace on their papa far away. Here, in Washington, I am made to pass for an “Honourable,” in spite of my modest declarations to the contrary, and have had the honour of a private interview with the greatest man in this part of the world—the President of the United States. One night, when I retired to rest, I found my bedroom on the upper storey—contiguous to the fire-escape, a convenience you are always bound to remember in the U.S.—had been changed for a magnificent bedroom, with a gorgeous sitting-room attached, on the first floor, and there loomed before me a terrific vision of an hotel bill which I supposed I should have to pay: but then, “What’s the odds so long as you are happy?” The question is, How came the change to be made? Well, the fact is, I had a letter to a distinguished politician, the Hon. Senator B—, and he, in his turn, sent me a packet addressed to the Hon. J. E— R—; and all at once I became a great man myself in the hotel. In a note Mr. B— sent to the President he informed him that I had been for thirty years a correspondent of certain papers; and in another note to officials he has the goodness to speak of me as “the Hon. Mr. R—, a distinguished citizen and journalist of England.” Certainly, then, I have as good a right to the best accommodation the hotel affords as any other man, and accordingly I do take my ease in my inn, and not dream, but do dwell, in marble halls, while obsequious blackies fan me as I eat my meals, which consist of all the dainties possible—the only things a fellow can eat this hot weather. I am glad I have put up at Ebbet House, Washington, where I am in clover. Like Bottom, I feel myself “translated.” At Baltimore, the only night I was there, I did not get a minute’s sleep till daylight, because the National Convention of Master Plumbers was holding its annual orgy just beneath, and I seriously believed the place would be burned down before the morning. In the