THE CITY OF RUM.

FOURTEEN leagues from the city of Rum! I am uncommonly glad that it is fourteen, and not four: I should be yet more pleased if it were four-andtwenty, instead of fourteen. Where am I? Whither am I going? Where is Rum? Where? What? Why? Whence? Whither? Who? Which? Wherefore?— Will you have patience? I shall tell everything in time, except my object in writing this history. If that does not discover itself, it will remain for ever a something lost to the world, and locked in my own breast.

How I ever arrived at Rum is a wonder to myself, but the fact that I did get there is certain, because I spent six weeks and an hour in the city, and am still living; which is also a matter of wonder to myself, considering the pass which things have come to at Rum. It is also a fact that I have left the city of Rum, for I am fourteen leagues from it; though as to the exact distance I have only the word of the post-boy, who charges by mileage. Of course the point of my story relates to the six weeks and

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one hour which I spent in the city of Rum ; and it is to concentrate the reader's attention on this, that I have cut off my journey to, and departure from, the place, and left the period of my stay there utterly and altogether isolated; so that it can easily be regarded by itself.

I arrived at Rum in a fog: it was the third day of the fog, and they don't often extend beyond a week or ten days. At the date of my arrival, a sub-committee was sitting upon the question whether it would be advisable to introduce gas lights into the streets of Rum. I wish they had decided in the affirmative before my visit there; but I found the committee had not been appointed a decade, so you may guess that their decision was a very long way off. It was shockingly dark I waited a couple of hours or so for a junk (a vehicle more objectionable than a four-wheel cab in London). The driver said, as a matter of course, 'Fever Hospital, I s'pose, sir?' When I mentioned the name of my inn, he muttered, 'Not yet: ' nevertheless he drove me to the house I named.

When the fog cleared off, some few days after my arrival, I noticed two things :

Ist. That there were no old people to be seen. 2nd. That the streets were full of sugarcandies. Rum must be a wonderfully populous city. When I escaped they were burying their dead by hundreds daily, in pits outside the town walls.