anxious and bewildered exiles, in a reassuring and consoling
embrace which leaves all their hands--they are Briarean--free for
the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust yourself
implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not
trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and
Northwestern, for then you will have to change four times on the
way and at every junction personally see that your baggage is
unladen and started anew to its destination.


* * * * *




SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER


I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in
compliance with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where
there is perhaps no other reason for his going. He will there,
for one thing, find the supreme type of the railroad hotel which
in England so promptly shelters and so kindly soothes the
fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than at Liverpool, we
are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel, which is
indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an
American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or
even a ticking, clock in the transom above one's bedroom door;
but the like type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad
centre or terminal in England, and it is never to be found quite