to procure admission to this Paradise? Nothing of the kind. A single man might find a bedroom, for Miss Roberts could make even a sloping garret look comfortable; but for the accommodation of a family, time, and prearrangement, and serious negotiation, were required. Thrones have been open to competition with fewer candidates for their possession; and a secretary of state has been obliged to be content, at the George, with accommodation for a single night at which his valet would have mutinied.*

Nor is the overwhelming influx confined to such houses as this. It is the same everywhere. Look at Conway. No one will suppose that there is any peculiar attraction in the hotels at Conway; yet even there, to secure a shelter for the night, it was necessary to write beforehand, and, in the course of the evening, a pound was ineffectually offered for a single bed. Had I known as much as I did when I awoke, it should have been a bargain.

Near Conway is Llandudno (Anglicè Landydno), a place that has sprung up on the Welsh coast within the last few years. As it will be some months yet before it will be connected with railway communication, it is at present approached by a bad hilly road, in omnibuses, apparently carrying the Manchester contingent of "twenty-one inside and twentythree out." They go at a reckless pace; and it is curious to see the passengers laughing as they rock about, in perfect unconsciousness of their danger. They are told that there never was an upset but once; and then, owing to the skill of the driver, no one was much hurt. Do not believe it, my friends. If we are to credit newspaper report (and who ever doubts it?) there were six upsets this season; and I have myself heard authentic anecdotes of smashed faces and broken limbs. Here, again, unless you had written, it was hopeless to expect accommodation : and you would not always find it even then. A young gentleman who was about to make his wedding excursion, engaged apartments at one of the hotels. Before his arrival they were given to a larger party who were likely to be more profitable. When he drove up with his blushing bride, he was told that there must be some mistake-but there was certainly no accommodation. He tried in all directions; every place was full; not a bed anywhere; and it is generally asserted (though I do not vouch for the fact) that the first night of his honeymoon was passed in a bathing-machine.f I have no wish to say anything against Landydno. It is finely situated in a bay, with a beautiful sea-view; it has two grand hotels and a terrace; lodging-houses of all kinds have sprung up as

* When Lady was shown, on this occasion, to a chamber where half a dozen servants usually slept, each on his separate trestle, "At any rate," she good-humouredly observed, "if there is no other apartment, we shall have our choice of beds." But, for such a guest, the wand of the Welsh enchantress soon converted it into something habitable. She would have done the same for a philosophershe has a room devoted to their portraits-but she would not have done it for one of the merely wealthy.

† One of the luckiest extrications from a difficulty of this kind was at Manchester, during the recent exhibition. A party had been driven from house to house, for upwards of an hour, without finding a resting place, when their cabman-who was in an obvious state of advanced intoxication-recommended them to try a Temperance Hotel. They followed his advice; and had no reason to regret their having been taken to a Temperance Hotel by a drunken cabman.

quickly as the most prolific of the British Fungi; and it is a capital place for pickling babies, or breaking the necks of unruly boys-for the cliffs are abrupt and lofty; but, till the chances are in my favour of getting there alive, and finding a bed upon my arrival, I shall be content to defer a renewal of my visit.

Amongst the evil consequences of every place being thus crowded with guests, is the increase at the hotels of another description of guests-if not of permanent inhabitants. In the elegant pages of the New Monthly, it is a subject upon which I scarcely know how to express myself, or how to approach it. On one occasion I was disturbed in the middle of the night by an altercation in a male and female voice at the door of a neighbouring bedroom. "In about an hour and a half," said the gentleman, "I had to strike a light; and, on the corner of the pillow, I sawHere (as the reporters say of noble lords) he became inaudible; but what he had seen, and why he had called the poor chambermaid from her precarious slumbers at "the solemn hour when night and morning meet," must be pretty obvious. Whatever had been his tormentors, it was clear that they had murdered sleep. Of myself, under such circumstances, I say nothing. Yet this was a house which I had known, for many more years than I wish to mention, as a first-rate hotel. But it was not frequented then as it is frequented now. In those days "the county families" were its chief supporters; and posting was one of its sources of profit.

If railways, however, have poured the miscellaneous crowd of moneymakers into our watering-places, and have put travelling into a poor man's power, I doubt whether they have added much to his enjoyments. Except a funeral procession, I know nothing more lugubrious than the return of an excursion train. What a picture of discomfort! Too much exhausted to look at anything, see the wearied husband and the mudstained wife, and their paddling children-following them like “panting Time" in a prologue-(as Mrs. Malaprop would say)-all plodding their melancholy way to the station; and what quarrelling, strife, and suffocation as they push themselves into the carriages! I am not writing at random; the suffocation must literally be counted amongst the incidents; it is no exaggeration; for the other day a child was so closely packed that, on arriving at the terminus, it was taken out dead. A pleasant end to a pleasure trip!" Our wee Tommy" (as his mother observed) was as flat as a fluke." Was there a man amongst them, think you, that did not bless himself at being safe home again; or else fly to a beer-shop, to be revenged on the drink for the disappointments of the day? This is not pleasure: it is mere novelty and excitement, the restlessness of an age of progress. A few miles from their home on a summer afternoon would have been more enjoyable.

66

To the class immediately above them the advantages are unmitigated. They had always money, but they wanted time. Even fast coaches were slow, to men who were carried two days' distance or more from their place of business. The ancient yellow and pair was worse, to say nothing of its inconvenience and expense. Now on railways they travel like lords; and they must have gone to some place far indeed, if they cannot breakfast at the sea-side and be at home in the course of the day: mismanagement and detentions notwithstanding. Nor is this their only

advantage. Formerly they could not exchange a letter in less than three or four days. With the electric telegraph they can give their directions as rapidly as from the stuffed chair to the high stool in their own counting-houses. The handles of a small machine are put in motion, and the order is silently conveyed as easily as it could have been spoken.

The affluent of another class have also, in a less degree, been benefited. As shareholders, they have been relieved of a good deal of their superfluous cash-which might possibly have been worse spent ; and (barring accidents) they sometimes find the speed convenient; though they still look back with regret to their recollections of the road, and to the days of their supremacy. By them railways are abhorred. They cannot help thinking of the comfort of quietly arriving at the door of a good hotel, and they contrast it with the nuisance of being unceremoniously let out of a railway carriage to encounter all the squalid contacts of a crowded platform.

Entering into their feelings, I do not write this in mere idleness. Though not marked (Private) it is intended as the preliminary announcement of a

POSTING AND POSTING HOUSE REVIVAL COMPANY.

Capital-as much as can be got from 20,000 shares of ten pounds each, liability limited; chairman, Lord Anthony Fitzneverchange; secretary, myself. The prospectuses will be issued in a few days. In the mean time applications for shares may be made to our publishers; and, like the concocters of many less honest schemes, I pledge myself that the dividend will be unheard of.

Much will have to be accomplished. All the appliances of posting will have to be re-established. Cattle that will go temperately and in a progressive direction must be provided; and boys between the ages of forty and seventy must be engaged. Lives dear to their country depend upon the issue. Can we contemplate without dismay that, only a few weeks since, a celebrated speaker, writer, and philanthropist, who has retained the late Duke of Wellington's long-felt aversion to railways, was nearly sacrificed to the changes they have produced. He attempted to post from Brighton to London. But the system was totally disorganised. Though he had engaged relays of horses, years of desuetude had unfitted them for their work; he was upset against a hedge and planted amongst the quicksets; but he did not take kindly to the soil, for he was within reach of the horses' heels, who kicked as if they had been galvanised, till the carriage which conveyed him was broken to pieces, and his limbs had nearly shared the same fate. At last he was extricated by two gipsies (you do not find them travelling by railways-they have generally a carriage of their own), and their names-if we knew them would go down to posterity as having preserved to society one of its most valuable members.

Where will all this end? Let the country go with us, and as a mode of travelling for the affluent, Railways shall be superseded.

LIVINGSTONE'S MISSIONARY TRAVELS IN SOUTH AFRICA.*

DR. LIVINGSTONE is one of those men who deserve well of their country. During a residence of sixteen years in Southern Africa, he has never ceased to exert himself in extending geographical knowledge and an intimacy with the resources of the country. It is needless to recur here to the incidents connected with his mission in the Bakwain country, involving, as it did, the permanent injury of his arm by a lion; or to the account of the Boers and Bushmen, or of the so-called great Kalahari Desert, known to us from preceding writers. Nor to readers of the New Monthly Magazine is it necessary to go back to the discovery of Lake Ngami. It is, in the first place, to Dr. Livingstone's travels in the country of the Makololo, on the rivers Leeambye and Leeba, the Upper and Central Zambesi, and across the hill region that separates the sources of those rivers from those of the Zaire or Congo, and of the Coanza, thus connecting Lake Ngami and Central South Africa with the well-known port of Loanda, that we have to look for that which is at once new, and of paramount interest and importance. There is next the crowning expedition of all-the return by the same country, but by a devious route, the descent down the same great central water-valley of the Upper and Central Zambesi to the valley of the Lower Zambesi, and by that great stream to the Eastern Ocean; thus opening a new and available route into Central South Africa, crossing the continent amid the intertropical districts, and for the first time connecting one coast with the other. Truly, we have reason to be proud of our countrymen. Excepting the Germans, as lately evidenced in the labours of Drs. Barth and Överweg, what nation approaches us, even at a distance, in the zeal, the enthusiasm, and the endurance of our geographical explorers? Whether it is in the Polar Seas, in arid Central Australia, or in Africa, redolent of fever, wild animals, and almost equally wild natives, the British are, and have ever been, with exceptions so few and rare as almost the further to attest the fact, the pioneers of discovery and civilisation. All honour to those who take a lead in such ennobling labours! In Dr. Livingstone's case, the lustre of his discoveries is enhanced by their positive importance. The openings to civilisation, and the capabilities and resources of the new countries explored, have been found to be very considerable. Already, we are told, the secretary for foreign affairs is using his influence with the Portuguese government to secure the free navigation of the Zambesi, and Dr. Livingstone is to proceed to Lisbon, with the strongest recommendations both to the king and government, to secure that happy result, as also other facilities for commercial intercourse with the interior of Africa. The British Association has also been urging upon government the importance of sending a vessel to survey the entrance to the same river, and to ascend its stream as far as practicable to navigation, on the

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; including a Sketch of Sixteen Years' Residence in the Interior of Africa, and a Journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda on the West Coast; thence across the Continent, down the river Zambesi, to the Eastern Ocean. By David Livingstone, LL.D., D.C.L., &c. John Murray.

So there are some

ground of interest both to science and to commerce. reasons to hope that the important discoveries of Dr. Livingstone will not, like some others, as the opening of the Niger and the survey of the Euphrates, be lost to existing ages from the mere want of spirit and energy enough to put them to account. We must avow, however, that with our knowledge of the past our hopes are but faint. All great progress abroad, colonial or otherwise, has begun in private enterprise, and been carried out for a time without governmental aid. India itself is a notorious example.

Dr. Livingstone's advanced post was Kolobeng, situate at the sources of the Limpopo, in the country of the Bechuanas, and on the frontier of the great Kalahari Desert. After a second journey to Lake Ngami, made from thence in April, 1850, with Mrs. Livingstone and their three children, and on which occasion they were in time to relieve a party of English travellers, one of whom, Mr. A. Rider, perished of the local fever, and which journey was itself put a stop to by both children and servants being laid low with fever, Dr. Livingstone started a third time for the north in company with Mr. Oswell, of whose prowess as an elephant shooter, and his manly generosity to the missionary's family, the doctor speaks in high terms. On this, the third expedition, guided by a Bushman of the name of Shobo, the two travellers reached the country of the Makololo, without visiting the Lower Zouga or Lake Ngami. The country they traversed, which supported a vegetation of fine, sweet, short grass, and mopane and baobab-trees, was also diversified by salt pans, some of which were very extensive. They were obliged, however, for the sake of water, to turn off to the Mababe, where they found human beings, and that great curse of South Africa, the tsetse (Glossina morsitans), which was a perfect pest to our travellers, neither ox, horse, nor dog ever surviving its bite. The less formidable but annoying mosquito abounded in the same valley.

Arrived at the country of the Makololo, our travellers descended the Chobe, or Western Zambesi, in canoes to the residence of Sebituane, the chief of the Makololo. The doctor gives some account of the career of this remarkable specimen of an African chieftain, who unfortunately perished from the effects of an old wound whilst our countrymen were with him. When they arrived, he said to them, "Your cattle are all bitten by the tsetse, and will certainly die; but never mind, I have oxen, and will give you as many as you need." Sebituane was succeeded by his daughter Ma-mochisane, who left the travellers at liberty to visit any part of the country they chose. Accordingly, they proceeded one hundred and thirty miles north-east to Sesheke, and in the end of June, 1851, were rewarded by the discovery of the Central Zambesi. This was a most important point, for that river was not previously known to exist there at all. The Portuguese maps all represent it as rising far to the east of where they were; and if ever anything like a chain of trading stations had existed across the country, as has been supposed by some stay-athome geographers, between the latitude 12 deg. and 18 deg. south, this magnificent portion of the river must have been known before. Our travellers saw it at the end of the dry season, at the time when the river is about at its lowest, and yet there was a breadth of from three hundred to six hundred yards of deep flowing water. At the period of its annual