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Look at our silent railway and horse-cars, steamboat-cabins, hotel-tables, in short, all our public places where people are thrown together incidentally, and where good-will and the habit of speaking combined would create an atmosphere of human vitality, quite unlike what we see now. But it is not of so much consequence, after all, whether people speak in these public places or not.

It is said that a list of the summer vegetables which are exhibited on New-York hotel-tables being shown to a French artiste, he declared that to serve such a dinner properly would take till midnight. A traveler can not but be struck with our national plenteousness, on returning from a Continental tour, and going directly from the ship to a New-York hotel, in the bounteous season of autumn.

As eaten upon hotel-tables at Buffalo or Chicago, it is a poor and tasteless fish. But, as found at the old French boarding-houses at Mackinac or the Sault, or, better still, cooked fresh from the icy waters on the rocky shores of Superior, it is, to our thinking, the best fish that swims, better than the true salmon or brook-trout.

But the gun and the fishing-rod are useless in many towns, from the disappearance of all worthy objects for their exercise. The birds are wild and shy; the trout have been coculus-indicused out of the mountain-brooks to supply metropolitan hotel-tables and Delmonican larders. Let us go after more attainable things. And first, being a true nemophilist, I protest against botany.