on this side the grave there is no new thing. We must make the best of the old material or give up thinking and reading, and the seeing of sights. Yet what a fallacy underlies the surface meaning of these words. Is not everything new to the eyes that can see and the ears that can hear? Are there not joys and wonders about us by the thousand which, being so blind and deaf, we seldom seize or value?

Oh, jaded reader, go stand in a garden as I did to-night and watch the great cold moon creep up beyond the latticed trees, while the shadows grow before her feet. Listen to the last notes of the thrush that sways on the black bough of yonder beech, singing, with a heart touched by the breath of spring, such a song as God alone could teach her. And there, in the new-found light, look down at those pale flowers. Or if you prefer it, stand upon them, they are only primroses, that, as Lord Beaconsfield discovered, are very good in salad.

To drop the poetical-and the ultra-practical, which is worse-and take a safer middle way, I cannot for my part believe that this old world is so exhausted after all. I think that there is still plenty to be seen and more to be learned even at that Ramsgate of which I spoke just now. Therefore I will try to describe a few of the things I saw last winter as I saw them, and to chronicle their meanings as I caught and understood them, hoping that some will yet be found for whom they may have interest.

"Upon a certain foggy winter morning we stood at Charing Cross Station en route for Italy, Cyprus, and Syria, via the St. Gothard, &c."

This, surely, is how I should begin, for it is bold to break away from the accepted formula of books of travel consecrated by decades of publication.

Still let me do so, and before we leave it, look round the station. It is a horrible, reeking place, Heaven

The

knows, on such a morning as this of which I write. most common of sights to the traveller also, and one of the most unnoticed. And yet how interesting. In a sense even it is majestic. The great arching roof, a very cave of the winds; the heavy pencils of shadow flung across its grey expanse; the grimy, pervading mist; the lumps of black smoke edged with white propelled laboriously upwards; the fierce, sharp jets of steam; the constant echo of the clanging noises; the sense of bitted force in those animate machines that move in and out, vanishing there into the wet mist, appearing here in the soot-streaked gloom. Then the population of this vast unfriendly place, the servants of the great engines, and those whom the engines bear on their way to many lands. They come, they go, those multitudinous forms; they are seen, they disappear, those various faces, each of them, if you watch, dominated by some individual notegrief, joy, expectancy, regret, ennui even, as may chance.

That train steams out, and those who clustered round it have melted like last night's snow. Some it has borne away; some, friends and spectators, having waved their last farewell, are departed upon their affairs. Now a new train arrives; other crowds appear, drawn from the vast reservoir of London, and with variations the scene repeats itself. This time we take an active part in the play, and presently steam out into the billows of black mist and are lost behind the curtain of the swinging rain. There beneath us runs the inky Thames, sombre, mysterious-looking even, and to the eye, notwithstanding its creeping squalor-though why this should be so it is hard to say-endued with a grandeur that is not the property of many a nobler stream.

Next appear countless, sordid houses, the crowded, monotonous homes, if homes they can be called, for which tens of thousands of Englishmen abandon the wholesome country-side and the pure air of heaven, because for those who can get it here in London the

wage is higher. They are done with. Now in their place is stretched the open English landscape, wet and wretched, its green fields showing almost grey beneath the embracing, ashen sky, the trees mere black blots, the roads yellow lines of mud. Yet in its own way it is beautiful, all of it, as the face of Nature is ever beautiful to those who love her, and knowing her moods, can sympathise with them and catch something of their meaning.

So through these familiar things onward to the sea.

"Moderate" was the report of the Channel weather at Charing Cross, which, as the Station-master explained mysteriously, might mean a good deal. In fact we find it blowing a gale, for the spray drives right over the train on to the unhappy passengers as they splash towards the boat quivering and livid, some of them, with anticipatory qualms. But the history of a bad crossing may well be spared. The boat did get out and it was accomplished -at a price-that is all.

If I were asked to devise a place of punishment for sinners of what I may chance to consider the direst degree, a first-class continental hotel is the purgatorial spot to which I would commit them-for a century at a time. Yes, and thither they should travel once a month (with a family) in the waggon-lit of a train de luxe with all the steam-pipes turned on. And yet there are people who like hotels. I have known some wanderers even who inhabit them from choice. Americans, too, are very happy there. Strange it is that folk can be so differently constituted. Rather would I dwell -for a life choice-in a cottage in the country on a pound a week than free in those foreign, gorgeous hostelries, where every decoration strikes you like a blow, surrounded by hard servility on fire for unearned fees, fed with messes such as the soul loathes, and quailing beneath the advancing shadow of a monstrous bill. The subject is a large one-it should be treated fitly in a

book. "Hotel life and its influence on human character " would do for the title.

I think that I must have been somewhat unfortunate in my experiences of continental travel-a kind of railway Jonah. The last time that I made this Italian journey, for instance, at two minutes' notice my fellowvoyagers and I, in the exact dead of night, were dragged from our sleeping-berths, and on the top of the Alps in the midst of the snows of winter, were transferred to an icy railway-carriage with such of our belongings as we could grasp. One lady, I remember, in her hurry, lost a valuable sable cloak. The reason alleged for this performance was that the wheels of our sleeping-car had become heated, but the conductor informed me that the real cause was a quarrel between the directors of two lines of railway. Thrice in succession, it would appear, and at this very spot had the wheels become "heated," and the travellers torn half-awakened from their berths.

On the present occasion we met with a somewhat similar experience. Leaving Basle in the hope and expectation of reaching Milan that night, at Lucerne we were informed that the St. Gothard was blocked by a train which had gone off the line. So in that beautiful but cold and expensive town we must remain for fourand-twenty hours.

Once I climbed the St. Gothard, now over thirty years ago, when a brother and I walked from Fluellen to the top of the pass with the purpose of bidding farewell to another brother who was travelling across it by coach upon his way to India. In those far-off days there was no railway, and the tunnel was not even completed. I recollect little of the trudge except that I grew footsore, and that my brother and senior by a year or two sang songs to me to keep up my spirits. About half-way up the pass we slept at some village on the road. Here the innkeeper had a pretty servant who -strange entertainment-took us to a charnel-house

attached to the church, where amongst many others she pointed out a shining skull which she informed us was that of her own father. This skull and its polished appearance I remember well; also some other incidents connected with the arrival and departure of the coach upon the summit.

Of the scenery, however, I recall little or nothing-I do not think that views have great attractions for youth, at any rate they had few for me. When I was a "soaring human boy" my father took me up the Rhine by boat with the hope and expectation that my mind would be improved in contemplating its lovely and historic banks. Wearying of this feast, very soon I slipped down to the cabin to enjoy one more congenial, that of "Robinson Crusoe," in a Tauchnitz edition. But some family traitor betrayed me, and protesting, even with tears, that "I hated views," I was dragged to the deck again. "I have paid six thalers," shouted my justly indignant parent, as he hauled me up the steamer stairs, "for you to study the Rhine scenery, and whether you like it or not, young man, study it you shall!" That was-eheu fugaces labuntur anni!-in or about 1867.

To return to the year 1900, so it came about that to all intents and purposes, the St. Gothard was to me a new experience. Therefore I was the more disappointed when on steaming out of Lucerne station we found ourselves in the midst of a raging snowstorm, so fierce and thick indeed that I began to fear that for a second time we should be stopped in our attempt to cross the Alps.

Yet that snow had its compensations, for in it the observer understood, better perhaps than he might otherwise have done, the vastness of the panorama which lay outstretched beneath him. First, all seen through that veil of flying flakes, appear forests of firs growing tier above tier upon the face of a precipice so steep that almost it might be a titanic wall. Then the pines vanish and are replaced by thousands of delicate birch