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SOUTH AMERICAN DINNER.

A recent traveller thus describes a dinner party at Mendoza:—­The day of days arrived; the carriage was flying about the town with a couple of mules, to bring all the ladies to dinner, in order to meet the foreign gentlemen.  We were all seated higgledy-piggledy at table, dish after dish came in; every one helped themselves, no carving was required, being all made dishes.  The master of the house was walking round the room with his coat off, very comfortably smoking his cigar, and between every fresh dish, of which there were some thirty or forty, the ladies amused themselves with eating olives soaked in oil, and the colonel, (one of the military pedlars), to prove that he understood foreign manners and customs, got the ladies one after another to ask the foreign gentlemen to drink wine with them, which was no small ordeal for us to run through.  After these half hundred dishes, came the sweets; then the gentlemen’s flints and steels were going, the room soon filled with smoke, and the ladies retired to dress for the ball.

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EARLY HOURS.

We learn that Mr. Cobbett dines at twelve o’clock on suppawn and butcher’s meat, that he sups on bread and milk at six, that he goes to bed at nine, that he rises every morning of his life at four; that before ten o’clock he has finished his writing for the day, and, that though no man has written more than he has, that he never knew any one who enjoyed more leisure than he does, and has done.  “Now is there a man on earth who sits at a table, on an average, so many hours in the day as I do?  I do not believe that there is:  and I say it, not with pride, but with gratitude, that I do not believe that the whole world contains a man who is more constantly blessed with health than I am.  In winter I go to bed at nine, and I rise, if I do not oversleep myself, at four, or between four and five.  I have always a clear head; I am ready to take the pen, or begin dictating, the moment I have lighted the fire, or it has been lighted for me, and, generally speaking, I am seldom more than five minutes in bed before I am asleep.”

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AN IRISH VILLAGE INN.

The form and plan in all parts of the country are pretty nearly the same, though the furniture varies; the hospitable door (inns are proverbially hospitable) stands always open, but the guests are sheltered from the thorough air by a screen, composed like the rest of the mansion, of mud; the partition walls which separate it from the adjoining rooms reach no higher than the spring of the roof, so that warmth and air, not to mention the grunting of pigs, and other domestic sounds, are equally diffused through all parts of