German watering-places are dull places now that the gambling at them has been abolished, and even those who did not play at their tables have discovered this. I am at Wiesbaden. When a jade repents of her ways and takes to propriety, she is little given to overdo respectability. So it is with this and other examples of roulette and _trente et quarante_. The respectability of the Wiesbaden of to-day is positively oppressive. Its devotion {31} weighs upon the spirit. I remember being here nearly forty years ago. I was then a lad travelling on the continent with a bear-leader to enlarge my experience. The bear-leader and I never could quite agree what spot would prove the most improving. He wished to study still nature, I wished to study human nature. So, like Abram and Lot, we generally separated. He betook himself to the Carpathian Mountains, I sojourned here. Wiesbaden was then cosmopolitan. The tag-rag and bobtail of all nations resorted to it, and, if all of them were not quite _sans reproche_, they were all pleasant enough in their way. There was a vague notion that, somewhere or other, there were waters, but, where precisely they were, and what they cured, very few knew. The Kursaal was the centre of attraction, with its roulette and its _trente et quarante_.[10] From Paris, Labouchere and his tutor returned to England, and, after a month passed at Broome Hall with occasional visits to his beloved Evans', it was arranged that he should make a trip to South America, where his family had had for many years very important commercial interests and could give him some respectable introductions. He noted his impressions of his journey and arrival in America in the most approved early Victorian guide-book manner, but, in spite of an apparent effort to be, at the same time, both stilted and elegant in style, his natural originality peeps out here and there: