I wanted to argue with the driver in favour of a reduction, on account of the economy effected in the matter of shoes. The case seemed very clear. I had hired a horse with four shoes. We had started with four shoes, and we arrived with three, a saving to the proprietor of twenty-five per cent., in which the fare had a right to participate. But it was no use talking. "The Boss" had my three dollars paid in advance, and if we had reached the hotel with only one shoe, as would probably have happened had it been a few blocks farther off, or if we had never arrived at all, he would have regarded the financial incident as closed.

This same peremptoriness in the matter of securing payment is strongly marked in the Customs Department. America is a free country, and when a man is egregiously overcharged for Customs duty he is at liberty to "protest." Nothing can exceed the earnestness with which a New York Customs House officer invites the angered traveller to "pay under protest." A fellow-voyager on the Britannic had on the outward voyage played poker till, on arriving in the Mersey, he found himself, after many vicissitudes, the winner of eight pounds. After the manner in which equally pious men of old used to build a

church or endow a shrine after a prolonged bout of wickedness, our young friend, finding in an old furniture shop in Durham a piece of carved wood, certified by the second-hand furniture man to have formerly been a part of the altar of the cathedral, bought it with intent to present it to his parish church. When others ruefully counted up the cost of facing the Customs officials with their importations, the reformed poker-player complacently eyed the case containing his altarpiece.

"That's real sixteenth-century work," he said. "It goes through as an antiquity, duty free."

I met him in the Customs shed two hours later. "What's the matter?" I asked, noticing his flushed faced and angry mien; "has the antiquity come out broken?"

"Antiquity be darned," he answered, with painful profanity. "Twenty dollars duty,' says the fellow to me when I showed him the invoice. 'Sixteenth-century work,' says I, goes through as an antiquity.' 'You bet it don't,' says he. 'Antiquities don't begin till fourteenth century. Twenty dollars duty, but you can pay under protest.' So I had to pay for a mean matter of two centuries. If I'd only known the regulation, I guess that

altar would have been made two centuries earlier."

Still he had had the satisfaction of paying under protest, a luxury which, unlike some others, is not of a fleeting character. The manager of the leading English Insurance Company in the United States tells me that a similar joy has lingered with him for six years. There is published here, for the use of insurance managers, a wonderful series of maps, showing at a glance the height, breadth, depth, and form of construction of every house and public building in the principal towns. The English directors having heard of this asked for the loan of one of the maps. Being returned in due course, the Custom House officers at New York pounced upon it, and in spite of clear evidence that it was in all respects of American manufacture, heavily taxed it. Payment of duty was made under protest, and upon communication with the Treasury repayment was promised. But it has never come, and there remains only the subtle satisfaction of having lodged the protest.

Mention of this insurance map, a monument of patience and labour, recalls another evidence of the completeness with which Americans carry a project through. Foremost among the drawbacks of holiday time

with the British householder is the anxiety as to what will become of his house whilst he is away. The New Yorker is relieved of this care and of some other domestic ones by a regularly constituted company. His fairy godmother, connecting his abode by telegraph wires with her own central domain, will upon the ringing of a bell send a messenger prepared, like the British marine, to go anywhere and do anything. A second signal will, as if by magic, bring a carriage to the door; a third will bring a policeman; a fourth sounds a fire alarm; and I do not doubt that there are other signals that will call anything or anybody likely to be required in any wellregulated household. When the householder goes away to Newport, Longbranch, or other holiday resort, the godmother takes entire charge of the house, fastens windows and doors, connecting them with her own rooms, where, upon the slightest attempt to enter the closed house, a bell rings, and by the time that the pleased burglar has settled down to his work the police arrive.

But a house shut up for a month in summer time would grow insufferably musty. The fairy godmother thinks of this, and once a week sends down, has all the windows thrown open, and thoroughly airs the house.

It is gratifying to know that the godmother makes a handsome income out of this beneficial enterprise. When one thinks of the houses in London left tenantless for five or six months in the year, with the attendant expenses of housekeeping, and the constant fear of malpractices from without and within, one wonders whether there are no terms of a strictly commercial character upon which the fairy godmother could be induced to care for London as she does for New York.

Owing to convenient contiguity to a rich stone quarry, it has come to pass that New York is one of the sombrest-looking cities in the world. The dream of the rich New Yorker, realized in the case of Mr. Vanderbilt, is to live in a brown stone-fronted house-that is to say, to show a bold veneer of brown stone to the world that passes along the main street, putting off your neighbours at the back with ordinary brick. No words can adequately convey a notion of the depressing shade of a New York brown stone house. It is something of the colour of chocolate without the red tint which relieves it from absolute dullness. It gives the passer-by the idea that here is a house once strong and healthy, now sickening with a vague disease. It is impossible to conceive any colour on the palette