A steamer of the Morgan line, comfortable and pleasant as ever a steamer can be, carried us to Galveston--a place I had pictured to myself as much larger and grander. But the hotel--though my room did happen to look out on the county jail--was well kept; and some of the streets looked like gardens, from the oleander-trees lining them on either side. The trees were in full blossom, and they gave a very pleasant appearance to the houses, in front of which they stood. Some few of these houses looked like a piece of fairyland: nothing could have been built in better taste, nothing could be kept in more perfect order. Too many of them, however, showed the signs of decay and ruin, that speak to us with the mute pathos of nerveless despair from almost every object in the South. We planned a ride on the beach for the next day, which we all enjoyed, in spite of the somewhat fresh breeze that sprung up. The bride was anxious to gather up and carry home a lot of "relics"--a wish the bridegroom endeavored to gratify by hunting up on the strand a dead crab, a piece of ship-timber, and the wreck of a fisherman's net. Discovering that the driver was a German, I held converse with him in his native tongue, which had the pleasing effect of his bringing to light, from under the sand, a lot of pretty shells, which the delighted little bride carried home with her. The following day we started for Houston. Eight o'clock had been mentioned as the starting hour of the train for that locality, but the landlord seemed to think we were hurrying unnecessarily when we entered the carriage at half-past seven. There was no waiting-room at the starting-point that I could see, and we entered the cars, which stood in a very quiet part of the town (not that there was the least noise or bustle in any part of it), and seemed to serve as sitting and dining-rooms for passengers, who seemed to act generally as if they expected to stay there for the day. But we left Galveston somewhere toward noon, and since we were all good-natured people, and had become pretty well accustomed to the speed of the Southern railroads, we really, in a measure, enjoyed the trip. The people in the cars--many of the women with calico sun-bonnets on their heads, and the men in coarse butternut cloth--reminded me of the Texan emigrants one meets with in New Mexico and Arizona, where they drag their "weary length" along through the sandy plains with the same stolid patience the passengers exhibited here, listlessly counting the heads of cattle that our train picked up at the different stations on the road. The wide, green plains looked pleasant enough, but I wanted to stop at the little badly-built houses, and earnestly advise the inhabitants to plant trees on their homesteads, as the best means of imparting to them the air of "home," which they were all so sadly lacking. The cattle roaming through the country looked gaunt and comfortless--like the people and their habitations.