DRIFT-WOOD.
THE TRAVELLERS.
May brings the travelling season. Thanks to steam and Cook, we can all find time for a trip to Florida or Labrador, if not to Lapland and Thibet. Travel is a pastime of both sexes, all ages, all sorts and conditions of men. Lord Bateman was a noble lord, a noble lord he was of high degree; and, adds the ballad, "he determined to go abroad, strange countries for to see." Cheek by jowl with Lord Bateman, in the railroad car, is Samuel Shears, Esq., his lordship's tailor, on the same errand.
"Pa, I think we ought to go to Paris," says matronly Mrs. Brood.
"Why do you think that, my dear?" asks paterfamilias.
"Because I do," rejoins the lady, wheeling in a circle of small radius. Impressed by that logic, Brood has his trunks mended, and embarks his family on the first available steamer.
Mrs. B's spring of action is that the Breeds have started, or that the McBrides went last year. Fashion pries us out of our comfortable domesticity, our cozy home-keeping ruts, which we exchange for the miseries of inns and the perils of voyaging; precisely as custom, gathering at length the force of law, "moves" a hundred thousand hapless New Yorkers, more or less, every May, with smash of household goods, cost, loss, hurry, flurry, and worry—they exchange houses as in the children's game everybody changes "chairs" or "corners" to see who will get the worst of it. This is a species of May travelling with all its curses and none of its compensations.
Presently our European voyagers will be sending home the tale of their misadventures. They fell among the London servants—soft and sweet to the face, perfect devils behind your back; stealing all your provisions under pretence of perquisites, and drinking enough beer in a week to last an American a year; whereas, if you yourself so much as send for a glass of ice-water at the hotel, the butler grumbles at the messenger, "Those Americans lap water like dogs!" At Paris our pilgrims fall a prey to landlords who charge the price of new furniture for every microscopic scratch on a chair, besides cheating them out of a thousand francs extra rent, as a parting token, on the ground that the laws require a certain notice of quitting.