"PANAMA, October 19.

"We all got safely across by eleven o'clock, and we are to stay in this quaint old place till to-morrow morning; because the steamer does not sail till then, and Tayler says I shall see quite enough of my state-room before I have done with it. So I am talking Spanish with the chamber-girl. I have had my first real disappointment. I was quite sure of a letter from Etta here; and, indeed, thought there might be more than one. But none can be found. Tayler has been to the English consul. Of course, a thousand things may have prevented. What I hope is, that she is in Switzerland. If Herbert only could get a fortnight's holiday for that, it would be so nice for both of them. What is provoking is, that one English mail has been taken down by mistake to Lima, and will not be back here till Monday, when we shall be far away. Ah, well! as you say, dear Auntie, what difference in a little paper, more or less, when I know my darling prays God for me twenty times a day, as I for her, and sees nothing but to say what her own Gretchen would think of it: Herbert says, you know, she buys her gloves to match my dresses!"

Then the letter became, in its next chapter, a sea letter, with the sea changes not unfamiliar to the reader of a Pacific voyage, happily ended at Melbourne on the day of November; and then the wonders and perplexities and fun of new housekeeping in a strange land filled its last page, leaving room only for these postscripts:

"DEAR AUNTIE: Who do you think is in the other part of the house? The things kept coming, and looked very queer and English. And when the carriage came with the people to our portico, you know, I could not help looking to see what my neighbor looked like, and when the coachman handed the lady down, who should she be but Etta!

Always, your darling

"GRETCHEN."

"DEAR AUNTIE: Is it not splendid? "Your own, own darling

"ETTA."

THE MODERN SINDBAD.

THIRTY-ONE STATES IN THIRTY DAYS.

[MR. GREENFELL's journal was originally published in the Atlantic Almanac. A Western editor, while approving the promptness of the travellers, expressed his regret that persons of such intelligence should have taken so few notes, or published so few. Doubtless this is to be regretted; but as Mr. Adams has well said, the moment people do anything which is worth telling, the doing consumes so much time that they have none left to write it down. It is for this reason that the task of writing devolves so often on people who have nothing to tell. The ease of travel in our times enables men of family to see strange lands without leaving their families at home. And it enables men who are in the midst of large business arrangements, by selecting what in business we call the dull season, to absent themselves from home for a few weeks, and in those few weeks to view, or as it is better called, to do, a continent. The mind looks back with sympathy, indeed, on the ignorance of the people a century ago, when John Carver took two years and a half to go from Boston to Detroit, from Detroit to Marquette, from Marquette to St. Paul, and from St. Paul back to Boston. If he had only invested in a single copy of Appleton's or the Official Railway Guide, he would have learned how to do it in a fortnight, and could have taken his family with him, most of the time in a palace car.

Another obliquity of ancient travel has been relieved by the invention of the time-table and the perfection of the Waltham watch, used, as may be learned from our advertising sheet, on all

railroads in all habitable worlds. Sindbad the Sailor, besides great sufferings on the seas and on the lands, endured the greater misery of having to spend much of his time at stations. Whenever, by some unusual fortune, he did turn up at a point known to commerce, it inevitably proved that the ship for Balsora had sailed the day before, and that but one ship sailed in a year. So Sindbad had to adjust himself for the remaining three hundred and fifty-three days (the Mussulman calendar being lunar) to his journal and to his whittling. Supposing this happened to him seven times in each voyage, he must have spent forty-nine Mussulman years minus forty-nine days (say, on a rough calculation, forty-seven Christian years, four months, and twenty days) at these places, where they had no Atlantic Almanacs at the newsrooms, not even a Beadle's Dime Series, or New York "Observer"; and where, therefore, fortunately for us, he was obliged to make up his own serials, or die of ennui. Let it be mentioned, in passing, that if all people knew what good fun it is to make up your own novels, there would be but little market for the wares of those who write for the journals. It may be perhaps surmised that this will be the cause for the demise of the novel and the tale of the present generation, which may die out from the literature of another as completely as Amadis and Esplandian and Metis and Galien have died from this. Such loss of time at waystations may be considered now as substantially unknown; and the traveller who leaves Soho Square on the 10th of June for his holiday, informing his junior partner that he shall be back on the 5th of August, is as sure that he shall keep that promise as he is that any other promise of Greenfell & Co. will not go to protest.

This preface is unnecessarily long for the introduction of the work which we have the honor to lay before the world. In point of fact, Mr. Greenfell had made his plans with such precision for the holiday which he had arranged for his wife and family, that he missed no single connection, and was able to visit thirty-one States of this continent in the course of thirty days, of which he

spent three in Washington. He has favored us with the sketch of his observations and those of his family, much more condensed than Sindbad's, if not so marvellous. That one can leave home and return to it in safety, and make observations so philosophical upon a country so dissimilar in its institutions to his own, may certainly be regarded as one of the peculiar triumphs of our modern civilization.

We have not materially abridged the journal. We trusted that work to the regular law of journals of travel, which, like streams of other sweet sirups, generally run fine by degrees and beautifully less. As for removing from the journal the air of condescension which an American shows in England, and an Englishman in America, of his very nature, we have found that impossible. It seems worth while to print it as it stands, as an illustration of the breadth and depth of the information which is gained under our modern systems of travel, so much more reliable than Sindbad's, although the published narratives may not be to the full as entertaining.

Mr. Greenfell landed at Halifax, and by the Carlotta steamer came to Portland on the 24th of June. We omit the sea journal, and the accounts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, that we may begin with Maine.]

MR. GREENFELL'S JOURNAL.

I. THE NORTHERN STATES.

THE STATE OF MAINE

Is generally named first among the States of New England, which are generally named first among the United States. This State, or a part of it, was the matter of discussion settled by the Ashburton treaty.