misgiving as to the durability of the frail-looking iron pins at each end of this yard of canvas, which fitted into corresponding eyelet holes in the trunks. I know the uneasiness of mattresses stuffed with chopped grass, and the lumpiness of those filled by amateur hands with wool—au naturel. Odours also are familiar unto me, the most objectionable being, perhaps, that arising from a feather bed in a Scotch inn, and from a seaweed mattress in an Irish hotel, in which I should imagine many curious specimens of marine zoology had been entombed by mistake.
But there is one thing I want to say most emphatically, and that is that I have met with greater dirt and discomfort, worse furniture, more comfortless beds (I will say nothing of the vileness of the food!), and a more general air of primitive barbarism in inns and lodgings in out-of-the-way places in Great Britain and Ireland, than I have ever come across in any colony. I know half-a-dozen places visited by heaps of tourists every year, within half-a-dozen hours' journey of London, which are far behind, in general comfort and convenience, most of the roadside inns either in New Zealand or Natal. It is very inexplicable why it should be so, but it is a fact. It is marvellous that there should often be such dirt and discomfort and general shabbiness and dinginess under circum-
