We understand it is a cabinet secret, that the Pasha has ordered a fresh party of hunting soldiers to proceed up the river, as far as the White Nile, to search for another young hippopotamus—a female! We may, therefore, look forward to the unrivalled fame of possessing a royal pair—“sure _such_ a pair” as were never yet seen in any collection of Natural History—to say nothing of the chance of a progeny. These are national questions,—why should they be cabinet secrets? We are certainly a strange people—we English. Our indefatigable energies and matchless wealth often exhibit themselves in eccentric fancies. No wonder, foreigners—philosophers and all—are so much puzzled what to make of us. They point to the unaided efforts of a Waghorn, and to his widow’s pension-mite—and then they point to our hippopotamus! Truly, it is not easy to reply to the inference, and impossible to evade it. We have had a Chaucer and a Milton, a Hobbes, and a Newton, a Watt and a Winsor; and we have had other great poets, and philosophers, and machinists, and men of learning and science, and have several of each now living among us: but any amount of a people’s anxious interest, which the present state of popular education induces, is very limited indeed compared to that which is felt by all classes for a Tom Thumb, a Jim Crow, or our present Idol. Howbeit, as the last is really a great improvement on the two former fascinating exotics, it is to be hoped that we shall, in course of time, more habitually display some kind of discrimination in the objects of our devotion. CHIPS. RAILWAY COMFORT