MY TRAVELS. CHAPTER I. PREPARATIONS FOR A JOURNEY. I AM a married man-I married in a hurry. I did everything in a hurry, and my wife has frequently said, with some expression of hope in her countenance, that I should die in a hurry; but here I am, hale and hearty, having outlived a sickly season in Jamaica, and the French Revolution of 1848. There never was much poetry in my composition, or of my composition. I made love, as a hungry man dresses for dinner; I VOL. I. B was excessively glad when I had finished my toilette, and made my offer; and when I found the nuptial chairs placed round the matrimonial board, I rejoiced that I had no longer even to imagine sentiment in the slightest degree necessary for the ceremony of stringing together two human beings for the rest of the natural life of either one of them. Time passed onwards—we went through the usual highway of life, jumbling in the ruts of discord and then mooning along the uninteresting road of macadamized quietude, until my daughter (I never had but one child, Allah be praised! for children are great bores,) was on or near about of age; and then, as she had exhausted the modern Babylon, London, and grown wearied of Paris, and half blazeed with every thing and every body-it was resolved that we should travel. My wife is a pretty-faced woman enough, with large dark eyes. Sentimental humbugs of poets would compare them to those of the wild gazelle or roe; they were nothing but eyes, large, black, and clear; her nose had a devotional inclination towards heaven; her mouth was small and pretty, and her feet and hands gave the bootmaker and the glover such trouble to fit her, that they charged her more than a woman with a mud-crushing foot or a scullery-maid's hands. Everything is by comparison. I was a giant in Mexico; and on my asking a shoemaker for a pair of readymade shoes, I was answered, "that they never kept articles large enough for elephants:" the man had no sentiment, and we became great friends. As for my daughter, she was fair and comely enough, with a horror of a freckle, and who covered her face with veils and uglies, until the most piercing eye could never have ascertained if she were twenty or sixty. She had as many double gossamers as would have covered a small parish-her pride was in her paleness; the more she resembled a Hertfordshire white, as those vulgar farmers denominate a certain turnip, the more she was in admiration of her delicate complexion : to grow fat, was to grow vulgar; and the carnation tinge in the cheek of youth-that peachblossom of beauty-was an advance towards plebeian ruddiness of glaring health. She had the curse of sentimentalism and poetry; every thing was magnified by her imagination into loveliness and ecstacy; the commonest donkey was promoted to the mule, and a high |