Polytechnic; this, however, is mere speculation, and we only suggest it for the sake of those who are inclined to study her habits more closely. Let the knowledge at present suffice that to Lent she belongs, and in Lent appears - nec scire fas est omnia.

THE RETURN OF THE TOURISTS.

If we are not the most cultivated and æsthetic people in the world, it is certainly not for want of travelling. Hordes of barbarians have been arriving daily among us from the South of Europe in obedience to the law which requires them to spend in town the three months of the season. Many persons, no doubt, are under the impression that Italy belongs to the Italians, and that the language spoken there is Italian. A visit to that country during the past spring would have speedily undeceived them. At Turin or Bologna the traveller might have imagined himself to be at Swindon or Peterborough; the scene is one of wild confusion; troops of English and Americans precipitate themselves upon the trains, careless of the claims

of previous occupants; hats they sit upon, coats they displace, umbrellas they ignore. Italians, conscious of their strange and dépaysé appearance, shrink into the background. The timid traveller wishes for annihilation as he hears a group of six Americans, all under twenty-five years of age, and all apparently unconnected by any ties of relationship, asseverating that "now is the time to make a rush." Daughters flit to and fro in dusty dresses. Fathers hurry forwards and backwards, struggling with bundles containing a stick for every day in the month, the waifs and strays from which would enable them to be traced from city to city. Newly-married

couples clinging to each other's hands and their travelling-bags, dropping first one and then the other, are trying to find their courier, who is trying to find them. The refreshment-room is full to overflowing, and the Northern tribes gaze with avidity and astonishment at a sight for which their own wildernesses have so little prepared them. The officials, taught by experience that they have no business on the scene, placidly look on sometimes muttering unintelligible words in a language in which they are never

addressed, and which no one professes to understand. Temporary companionship with these excited hosts does not explain the cause of their migrations. Their appetites are superb, so that health cannot be the object in view. Art can have but little to do with it, for they can only just distinguish brick from stone. It may possibly be a natural thirst for information, for in one corner of the carriage an Englishman is asking what the Apennines are, and whether the inhabitants have been engaged in any war during the last twenty years, which gives rise to much interesting speculation. In another corner a girl is reading Baedeker aloud, not with great rapidity, as a succession of twenty-eight tunnels interrupts the enunciation of as many words. All these heterogeneous elements find themselves at the close of the day in the same hotel, an hotel which they have called into existence, and which, were it not quite insupportable, would deserve the praises lavished upon it. All kinds of conveniences abound; electric bells which ring a quarter of an hour after they are desired, and indulge in spontaneous vagaries in the dead of night; servants who, in their wish

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to perfect themselves in the pronunciation of the English language, refuse to speak their own and are wholly incomprehensible. The courtyard is a den of omnibuses from which discordant sounds are ever rising; every half-hour fresh loads arrive, disgorging more barbarians and brass-bound trunks, which become more involved in inextricable confusion; the family courier is explaining that nine packages are to be taken upstairs, and seven left below, and spends the rest of the evening in ineffectual attempts to sort the sixteen. The hotel is "famed for its good table-d'hôte," and eighty greedy persons give up in consequence the seclusion of their own rooms to sit in the gilded barn where dinner is served. The object is to get rid of the unwary guests in as short a time as possible, and the foolish conversationalist may easily find himself three dishes in arrear, causing no inconsiderable detriment to his digestion in endeavouring to hurry through a cold Mediterranean fish, a hash of brains, and mutton that is not mutton, in the five minutes which are allowed him. How many ruined constitutions may not accuse the master "of a recently