You see, I landed on a Sunday. It was likewise wet--a nasty, drizzling, misty morning, fit to give you the blues with its many disagreeables and make you bless Mackintosh, while cursing Pleiads. Now, either of these two conditions--I do not refer to the act of benediction or its reverse, but to the fact of its being Sunday and wet--would have been sufficient to detract from the attractive merits of any English town; how much more, therefore, from those possessed by the great cosmopolitan metropolis of Transatlantica? This city is in bad weather a hundred- fold more desolate than London, in an aesthetic sense, and that is saying a good deal; and, on a Sunday, through the absence of any Sabbatarian influences and the working of teetotal tastes, it is more outwardly dull and inwardly vicious than any spot north of Tweed-- Glasgow, for example, where the name of the illustrious Forbes Mackenzie is venerated! To commence with, during the early morning we had warped into dock at Hoboken, the Rotherhithe--and, in some respects, Rosherville--of New York, being situated on the opposite side of the river; and here, the _Herzog von Gottingen_ lay, with her bowsprit jammed into a coal shed and her decks, aforetime so white and clean, all bespattered with dirt, and encumbered with hawsers and cables. These latter coiling and uncoiling themselves here, there, and everywhere, like so many writhing sea-serpents, and, tripping you up suddenly just when you believed you had discovered a clear space on which you might stand without imperilling your valuable life. Besides, the crew were engaged in getting up luggage from the lower hold by the aid of a donkey engine, which made a great deal of clattering fuss over doing a minimum amount of work--in which respect it resembled a good many people of my acquaintance, by the way. It was not pleasant to have the iron-bound cover of a heavy chest poked into the small of one's back without leave or licence, and the entire article being subsequently deposited on one's toes! No, it was not. And, to make matters worse, the escape steam, puffing off in volumes from the waste pipe in a hollow roar of relief at being no longer compelled to earn its living, was condensing an additional shower for our benefit--that was not more agreeable, in consequence of being warm--as if the drizzling rain that was falling was not deemed sufficient for wetting purposes! After settling matters with the Custom House, and crossing the ferry from Hoboken, myself and all my goods packed in a hackney carriage hung on very high springs--like the old "glass coaches" that were used in London during the early part of the century, although, unlike them, drawn by a pair of remarkably fine horses--my drive through the back slums of New York to one of the Broadway hotels was not of a nature to dispel my vapours.