At home he might by this time be just through responsions by the help of cribs and manuals, having contracted in the process a rooted distaste for classical literature. Possibly he might have pulled in his college boat, and won a plated cup at lawn tennis, and all this at the cost of, say, £250 a year. As it is, besides costing nothing, he can cook a spare-rib of pork to a turn on a forked stick, hold a bull-calf by the tail, and is voluntarily wrestling (not without certain glimmerings of light) with _Sartor Resartus_. Which career for choice? How say you, Mr. Editor? Crossing the Atlantic, 4th September 1885. A mug-wump! I should like to ask you, sir--not as Editor, not even as English gentleman, but simply as vertebrate animal--what you would do if a stranger were all of a sudden to call your intimate friends “mug-wumps,” not obscurely hinting that you yourself laboured under whatever imputation that term may convey? I don’t know what the effect might have been in my own case, but that the story of O’Connell, as a boy, shutting up the voluble old Dublin applewoman by calling her a “parallelopiped,” rushed into my head, and set me off laughing. I haven’t been able to learn more of the etymology of the word than that it is said over here to have been first used in a sermon (?) by Mr. Ward Beecher, and now denotes “bolters” or “scratchers,” as they were called last autumn, or in other words, the Independents, who broke away from the party machine of Republicanism and carried Cleveland. More power to the “mug-wump’s” elbow, say I; and I only wish we may catch the “mugwumps,” “mug-wumpism,” or whatever the name for the disease may be, in England before long. One of the groups on the deck of the liner, amongst whom I first heard the phrase, was a good specimen of the machine-politician, a democrat of the Tammany Hall type. “You bet” I stuck to him till I got at his candid account of the campaign of last autumn, most interesting to me, but I fear not so to the general English reader, so I will only give you his concluding sentence:--“Well,” with a long suck at the big cigar he was half-eating, half-smoking, “I tell you it was about the thinnest ice you ever saw before we were over,--but, _I got to land!_” From what I heard on board and since, I believe the President is doing splendidly; witness his peremptory order for the great ranche-men to clear out of the Reserves which they had leased from the Indians, and fenced to the extent of some millions of acres; the righteousness of which presidential action is proved (were proof needed) by the threatened resistance of General B. Butler, one of the largest lessees. I can see too clearly looming up a determined opposition to the President’s Civil Service reform from politicians of both parties, mainly on the ground that he is “establishing a class” in these U.S.--a policy which “the Fathers” abhorred and guarded against, and which their