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CHAPTER LXI.

FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC.

At Richmond, U.S.A.-The Carnival at New Orleans-A Cock-fight-Chicago -Over the "Rockies "-San Francisco-The Palace Hotel-The Streets-Chinese Festivities-The San Francisco News Letter and Mr. Frederick

Marriott-Edward Sothern.

IN December, 1879, my wife and I paid our second visit to the United States. I was pretty well faggedout with continuous hard work; and my friends in Fleet Street thought that a few weeks' change would do me good. Why I selected the bleak, wintry month for the journey I shall tell my readers ere long. The authorities in Fleet Street only contemplated my making a trip to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, and Chicago; but I had ulterior views of a voyage of a far more ambitious nature. We

crossed the Atlantic in a Cunarder in a succession of storms I never did cross that ocean save in winter and in tempestuous weather-and found plenty of old friends in Manhattan to welcome us. I had a brief attack of illness at Christmas; but was soon convalescent, and after passing a week at Boston, we went to Philadelphia, where we were the guests of that most munificent and hospitable of hosts, the late Mr. G. W. Childs, the proprietor of the Public Ledger. At Washington we were received with much kindness by the British Minister

Plenipotentiary, Sir Edward Thornton; and soon afterwards my ulterior views as to travelling began to be developed. We determined to go down South; and made the best of our way by rail to Richmond, in Virginia. I took but one letter of introduction with me it was to the Governor of the State. His Excellency at once asked us to dinner, and invited a large party to meet us; and the next day we were free of the best society in the whilom Confederate capital—a society equally hospitable and refined. I believe the Southerners had an inkling of the fact that twenty years before this I had stood their friend in their great struggle with the North; but in this connection let me say that in New York I was not subjected to any kind of newspaper hostility owing to my bygone Copperhead tendencies. These tendencies were, indeed, humorously alluded to by an Irish journalist at a reception given me by the New York Press Club. "And," said the speaker, "if Mr. Sala" (pronounced "Sailer") "did sympathise with the Confeds., it was only the sympathy which one ought to feel for the under dog."

From Richmond, after a sojourn of some three weeks of unmingled pleasantness, we journeyed to Augusta, in the State of Georgia; to Charleston, in South Carolina; and ultimately to New Orleans, where I found the Carnival "in full blast." Again I had brought but one letter of introduction with me. It was to General Randall Gibson, one of the senators for the State of Louisiana; and through his prompt kindness every door of note in the Crescent City was thrown open

to us.

"Rex," the occult King of the Carnival, was most attentive to us: sending us day after day cards of invitation to balls and gala performances at the Opera and other theatres; and one day my wife received a magnificent bouquet of flowers with "Rex's" compliments. The Carnival was a very splendid one; but that which enchanted me most in New Orleans was the perfectly Parisian society which we found on one side of Canal Street and the as completely American community that existed on the other. In the French quarter you found French milliners and dressmakers, confiseurs, libraries full of French novels and newspapers, French restaurants, cafés, and guinguettes; and in the old French market on Sunday mornings we used to have an irreproachable French déjeuner à la fourchette, followed by the renowned "drip" coffee, which is so strong that it is said to stain the saucer into which it is poured. All over the city you find excellent French restaurants, where the claret is better and cheaper than that which you drink at hotels and restaurants in France; while at a place of entertainment on the way to Lake Pontchartrain they not only give you bouillabaisse as good as any that you can obtain at the Reserve by Marseilles, but show you an autograph-book, in which there is a terse eulogium of the fish stew in question in the handwriting of Thackeray, and signed by him.

I have one sad confession to make with regard to New Orleans. I went to a cock-fight; and the contest, I grieve to say, took place on a Sunday. Well, I had been a spectator, years before, of gallomachia at Algiers,

at Seville, and at Granada; and the combats were always held on the Sabbath. With great reluctance did we leave New Orleans. It was mid-February, but sunny and sultry in the Gulf of Mexico; but we had not forgotten that we were going back into winter, and therefore provided ourselves with a good stock of warm clothing; and we brought away with us a large branch of an orange-tree with six ripe oranges upon it; and carrying that golden bough, after a weary two or three days' journey, did we enter the city of Chicago, to find it enveloped in a mantle of snow. The great metropolis of pork and grain was then, as it is now, a wonderful city; but I should say that the majority of my readers have heard enough about Chicago in connection with its World's Fair to enable me to dispense with any prolusions on the subject. I may just remark that at the Chicago Club I met Mr. Robert Lincoln, the son of the murdered President, and who was subsequently MinisterPlenipotentiary to England. I should have mentioned, too, that at Washington we were indebted for much graceful hospitality to Senator Bayard, now United States Ambassador at the Court of St. James.

Leaving Chicago, we paid a visit to Cincinnati, which seemed to me to be almost as much a German as an American city; and there we made the acquaintance of a prominent Western journalist, Mr. Murat Halstead. I had still ulterior views; and to carry them out it was necessary that we should return to Chicago, where we had left our heavy luggage; in fact, we did leave much

of our belongings at the luggage-room of the Grand Pacific Hotel when we started on a journey still further west. Travelling by the Chicago and North-Western Railway, we reached Council Bluffs, once the home of Mrs. Amelia Bloomer: the lady who invented the peculiar feminine costume of which, in the modified form of knickerbockers, the English public is now witnessing a revival. Crossing the bridge over the river, we “detrained," as the French say, at Omaha, which, in 1879, was an insignificant town, with a few thousand inhabitants, and with only one habitable hotel-The Planters' House. We only stayed a day at Omaha, and then took the Central Pacific Railroad for Ogden, in the territory of Utah. We had a drawing-room car, splendidly furnished, and with two comfortable bedrooms and a kitchen and so well stocked were our larder and cellar that, with the exception of fresh eggs in the morning we had no occasion to purchase anything at the refreshment-rooms along the line. Crossing the Rocky Mountains was rather tedious; as the speed sometimes does not exceed fifteen miles an hour. But it is a long lane that has no turning; and in due time we found ourselves at Ogden; and then availed ourselves of a branch line to Salt Lake City, the Mormon capital. I have described all the incidents of this expedition in a book called "America Revisited." Coming back to Ogden, we began the descent of the Pacific Slope; found ourselves one morning at Sacramento City in glorious spring weather, with the birds singing and the camellias growing in the open air, and a few hours