dollars a day in greenbacks; that is, about sixteen shillings, at the then price of gold. [Sidenote: _Menu of an American Hotel._] One frequently hears the severity of their winters urged as a reason for not travelling in the United States at that season of the year. My own experience of the unusually severe winter of ’67-68 would go some way towards proving that those who press this consideration do so under a misapprehension. It is possible that by a singular run of good luck I may have always been at a warm place when the weather was cold elsewhere, but it is literally true that during that winter I never once had occasion to put on an overcoat, excepting when I was in Canada at its breaking up. I left New York early in January; went through the South, where I gathered ripe oranges from the trees on which they were hanging; ascended the Mississippi; crossed the prairies and plains to the Rocky Mountains, at the foot of which I found the thermometer, at Denver, standing at 70°; recrossed the prairies to Chicago; and during the whole of this time, whether on foot, or in a railway car, or on or in a coach, did not on any occasion find the weather disagreeable on account of the cold, though I frequently found it in railway cars and in hotels very much warmer than was agreeable. By what I have just said I do not mean that I never fell in with weather that was thermometrically cold, for I walked over the Mississippi on the ice at St. Louis, but that it never felt disagreeably cold. It so happened that whenever the thermometer was low, the air was still, and the sun bright. During this winter it only rained twice, and never snowed but once, at the places at which I happened to be staying. It rained once at Washington, and once at New Orleans, and it was snowing on my return across the prairies to Chicago. On my outward journey over them they were entirely free from snow. Of course if I had remained during the whole of this time at any one place in the northern part of the Union, I should have seen some bad weather. My conclusion, however, is that the traveller may so arrange his tour even for the winter as to be put to very little annoyance by the cold or wet. [Sidenote: _The Queen’s Book in America._] Everybody in New York had read the Queen’s book; in every society I found people talking about it; and I never heard it mentioned without expressions of interest and approval, always uttered without any qualifications, and with unmistakable heartiness. They said it made royalty appear to them in a new and more human light, in which they had never regarded it before. They spoke of her as the head of the Anglo-Saxon race, almost as if they had as much part in her as ourselves. I believe that her Majesty’s work has had a greater number of readers, and that a greater number of copies of it have been sold, in the United States than in the United Kingdom.