There is a surly old fellow, who won’t have the windows open, though the pale woman beside him mutely entreats it, with her smelling-salts to her nose. Yonder is an old bachelor, listening to a sweet little blue-eyed girl, who, with untasked faith in human nature, has crept from her mother’s side, and selected him for an audience, to say--“that once there was a kid, with two little totty kids, and don’t you believe that one night when the old mother kid was asleep,” etc., etc. No wonder he stoops to kiss the little orator; no wonder he laughs at her naïve remarks; no wonder she has magnetised the watch from his pocket “to hear what it says;” no wonder he smooths back the curly locks from the frank, white brow; no wonder he presses again and again his bachelor lips to that rosy little mouth; no wonder, when the distant city nears us, and the lisping “good-by” is chirruped, and the little feet are out of sight and sound, that he sighs,--God and his own soul know why! Blessed childhood--thy shortest life, though but a span, hath yet its mission. The tiniest babe never laid its velvet cheek on the sod till it had delivered its Maker’s message--heeded not then, perhaps--but coming to the wakeful ear in the silent night-watch, long after the little preacher was dust. Blessed childhood! It is funny, as well as edifying, to watch hotel arrivals; to see the dusty, hungry, lack-luster-eyed travelers drag into the eating-room--take their allotted seats--enviously regard those consumers of dainties who have already had the good fortune, by rank of precedence, to get their hungry mouths filled; to see them at last “fall to,” as Americans only know how. Heaven help the landlord! Beef-steak, chicken, omelette, mutton-chops, biscuit and coffee--at one fell swoop. Waiters, who it is to be hoped, have not been kept breakfastless since early daylight, looking on calm, but disgusted. Now, their appetites appeased, that respectable family yonder begin to notice that Mr. and Mrs. Fitzsnooks and Miss Fitzsnooks opposite, who are aristocratically delicate in their appetites, are shocked beyond the power of expression. They begin, as they wipe their satisfied lips with their table-napkins, and contemplate Miss Fitzsnooks’s showy breakfast-robe, to bethink them of their dusty traveling-dresses; as if--foolish creatures--they were not in infinitely better taste, soiled as they are, than her gaudy finery at so early an hour--as if a man was not a man “for a’ that”--ay, and a woman, too--as if there _could_ be vulgarity without pretension--as if the greatest vulgarity was not ostentatious pretension.