If you shut yourself up for some fifty hours or so in a mail-coach,
that keeps wheeling along at the rate of ten miles an hour, and
changes horses in half a minute, certainly, for obvious reasons, the
less you eat and drink the better; and perhaps a few hundred daily
drops of laudanum, or equivalent grains of opium, would be advisable,
so that the transit from London to Edinburgh might be performed in a
phantasma. But a free agent ought to live well on his travels--some
degrees better, without doubt, than when at home. People seldom live
very well at home. There is always something requiring to be eaten up,
that it may not be lost, which destroys the soothing and satisfactory
symmetry of an unexceptionable dinner. We have detected the same duck
through many unprincipled disguises, playing a different part in the
farce of domestic economy, with a versatility hardly to have been
expected in one of the most generally despised of the web-footed
tribe. When travelling at one's own sweet will, one feeds at a
different inn every meal; and, except when the coincidence of
circumstances is against you, there is an agreeable variety both
in the natural and artificial disposition of the dishes.

_Blackwood's Magazine_.

* * * * *


ENGLISH FRUITS.

(_Continued from page 231_.)