A FLIGHT TO MEXICO.

CHAPTER I.

OUTWARD BOUND.

We all know the difference between writing because we want to say something, and writing because we have something to say; and if I have taken up my pen half a score of times under what I have thought to be the latter impulse, I have laid it down again as often under the misgiving that it might be really the former.

Yet once more I find it in my hand with an intention of now keeping it there; for, as I sit by my winter's fireside in London, roosting again, as it were, upon my English branch, after returning from my last flight abroad, which was this time to Mexico, I find these most recent recollections combining with many of those of former years, and so crowding on my thoughts that I am continually falling back into

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contemplation of the past to the interruption of the present.

If, therefore, it be only with the view of unburdening my mind of latent memories, I feel compelled to sit down and put some few of them into visible form, even if I write only to myself, for want of a better correspondent, and, peradventure, for want of readers. For wherever one goes now, so many have been before, and so many have written so much about so many things, that one may well feel discouraged from attempting to find notice in the crowd.

Yet, again, some variety may be found in a new pen, though it does not treat of a new subject, just as a new artist may attract attention by a new mode of treating an old scene. Moreover, there is always a large reserve force of readers who have not even seen many of those books which that mythical existence, everybody," is said to have long since read.

Of conversations and correspondence it certainly is true, that they may be found very entertaining when held upon the same subject with different persons. A popular lecturer, who worked through a whole season, repeating the same exhibition every day, explained his being able to do so because he every day had a different audience. And thus it may be in the reading of different books; in the writing of which, by the way, there is always this advantage over conversations and correspondence, that while you cannot always get people to listen

to your talk and to answer your letters, you, at all events, can enjoy the independent right to amuse yourself with composition in print, if only you will pay for your entertainment-content to bow to the perhaps unmerited coldness of both publisher and public.

Still, whatever I may write, I shall do my best to write as if it were to be read by the public, for I should drop a palsied pen at once under the bare suggestion of working for mere "family circles," or, proh pudor, "family opinions"! Yet there have been found many good people who have taken much trouble with nothing more than these very virtuous domestic aims in view, and have, even under this mild inspiration, written tragedies, though with the doubtless unnecessary reservation that they were not to be acted.

Everybody who has moved about at all ought to have gathered some varied store for memory to dwell upon, even if he be unable (as so many who pass for very superior people are) to say much about his experiences; and many a vacant and lonely hour he should be able to beguile by calling up past scenes of life to life again. Hençe arises one of the great benefits of travelling. "In the mind's eye" you can revisit so many scenes, and recall so many incidents and persons, and, thus escape so many irksome and monotonous hours in which the empty brain would otherwise be working upon and irritating itself, as