curate ever got at the door of a bishop’s palace, the most icy reception that a country cousin ever received at the city mansion of a mushroom millionaire, is agreeably tepid, compared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you to the more or less elevated circle of his inverted Inferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on his dog’s-eared register.  I have less hesitation in unburdening myself of this uncomfortable statement, as on this particular trip I met with more than one exception to the rule.  Officials become brutalized, I suppose, as a matter of course.  One cannot expect an office clerk to embrace tenderly every stranger who comes in with a carpet-bag, or a telegraph operator to burst into tears over every unpleasant message he receives for transmission.  Still, humanity is not always totally extinguished in these persons.  I discovered a youth in a telegraph office of the Continental Hotel, in Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in conversation, and as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as if I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not made.

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, into the cars with sliding panels and fixed windows, so that in summer the whole side of the car maybe made transparent.  New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State.  Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered mud of a battle-field.  Peach-trees are common, and champagne-orchards.  Canal-boats, drawn by mules, swim by, feeling their way along like blind men led by dogs.  I had a mighty passion come over me to be the captain of one,—­to glide back and forward upon a sea never roughened by storms,—­to float where I could not sink,—­to navigate where there is no shipwreck,—­to lie languidly on the deck and govern the huge craft by a word or the movement of a finger:  there was something of railroad intoxication in the fancy:  but who has not often envied a cobbler in his stall?

The boys cry the “N’-York Heddle,” instead of “Herald”; I remember that years ago in Philadelphia; we must be getting near the farther end of the dumb-bell suburb.  A bridge has been swept away by a rise of the waters, so we must approach Philadelphia by the river.  Her physiognomy is not distinguished; nez camus, as a Frenchman would say; no illustrious steeple, no imposing tower; the water-edge of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a vulgar rich woman’s dress that trails on the sidewalk.  The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, elephantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as they rise, like the walls of a hock-glass.

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street where the Captain would be heard of, if anywhere in this region.  His lieutenant-colonel was there, gravely wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a son of the house, was there, injured in a similar way; another soldier, brother of the last, was there, prostrate with fever.  A fourth bed was waiting ready for the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, though inquiries had been made in the towns from and through which the father had brought his two sons and the lieutenant-colonel.  And so my search is, like a “Ledger” story, to be continued.