travel on Cook’s tickets when you come; and I do this without embarrassment, for I get no commission. I do not know Cook. (But if you would rather travel with a courier, let me recommend Joseph Very. I employed him twenty years ago, and spoke of him very highly in a book, for he was an excellent courier--then. I employed him again, six or seven years ago--for a while. Try him. And when you go home, take him with you.) That London hotel was a disappointment. It was up a back alley, and we supposed it would be cheap. But, no, it was built for the moneyed races. It was all costliness and show. It had a brass band for dinner--and little else--and it even had a telephone and a lift. A telephone is a wire stretched on poles or underground, and has a thing at each end of it. These things are to speak into and to listen at. The wire carries the words; it can carry them several hundred miles. It is a time-saving, profanity-breeding, useful invention, and in America is to be found in all houses except parsonages. It is dear in America, but cheap in England; yet in England telephones are as rare as are icebergs in your place. I know of no way to account for this; I only know that it is extraordinary. The English take kindly to the other modern conveniences, but for some puzzling reason or other they will not use the telephone. There are 44,000,000 people there who have never even seen one. The lift is an elevator. Like the telephone, it also is an American invention. Its office is to hoist people to the upper stories and save them the fatigue and delay of climbing. That London hotel could accommodate several hundred people, and it had just one lift--a lift which would hold four persons. In America such an hotel would have from two to six lifts. When I was last in Paris, three years ago, they were using there what they thought was a lift. It held two persons, and traveled at such a slow gait that a spectator could not tell which way it was going. If the passengers were going to the sixth floor, they took along something to eat; and at night, bedding. Old people did not use it; except such as were on their way to the good place, anyhow. Often people that had been lost for days were found in those lifts, jogging along, jogging along, frequently still alive. The French took great pride in their ostensible lift, and called it by a grand name--_ascenseur_. An hotel that had a lift did not keep it secret, but advertised it in immense letters, _“Il y a une ascenseur,”_ with three exclamation points after it. In that London hotel--But never mind that hotel; it was a cruelly expensive and tawdry and ill-conditioned place, and I wish I could do it a damage. I will think up a way some time. We went to Queenboro by the railroad. A railroad is a--well, a railroad is a railroad. I will describe it more explicitly another time.