The waiter who belonged to the head before mentioned turned out to be a most excellent young man, and, in his assiduous exertions to make himself agreeable to apparently the first British traveller he had ever beheld, danced about like an electrified frog. Indeed, we were grateful enough for this very sprightliness of his, for it acted as a corrective to the depressing effect of the entire establishment, which was pervaded by an air of dull, forlorn gloom. The walls appeared to be constantly in tears. The long cavernous passages and mysterious corridors were made doubly dark by the sulky gleam of a consumptive "short ten." The lofty bedrooms were provided with beds which had too close a resemblance to four-post hearses, and their furniture in general had too much of the faded grandeur of other days. The old wooden staircases creaked audibly before we began to walk upon them, as if some invisible ghost of a dead housemaid were waiting to show us up to bed, and when we ventured upon them we found they were leaning alarmingly on one side. We endeavoured as well as we could to keep in the middle, but they were so unsteady that their movement produced a sensation like that of mild intoxication or incipient sea-sickness. We were not without dread lest, supposing the balustrades showed equal signs of weakness, we might, if we did not hug the wall and coast along it very carefully, be shovelled neck and crop into the abyss below. Can anyone wonder, therefore, that in such a place we were grateful for the sprightliness of our waiter, whose good spirits and lively antics prevented us from indulging in depressing thoughts? Variety of any kind is pleasing. Who has not heard of the gentleman who got into such a depressed condition of mind from attending the debates in the House of Lords and the burlesques at the London theatres, that, with the view of obtaining a little beneficial change, he took occasional walks in Brompton Cemetery, attended executions at the Old Bailey, or paid frequent visits to an anatomical museum? It was the same gentleman who was said always to carry an umbrella with an ivory death's-head as the handle, who had a velvet coat made from a piece of his wife's pall, and who took to singing the songs of Claribel.