On Sunday evening we arrive at Guirgevo,
but it is too late and too dark to go on shore,
so we pass the time watching the new arrivals
and the extraordinary crowd of flies which
assemble about the tea-table. There is a
tumbling or performing fly, who rushes forward
a few steps, and then turns head over heels a
complete summersault, entertaining himself this
hot stifling evening with a series of mountebank
tricks curious to witness. There is a swimming-
fly, who jumps a header into our lemonade, and
seems to like it. On Monday we pass Widin,
famous in history, and arrive at Orsova at ten
o'clock on Tuesday morning. We are detained
there a most unreasonable time, and quite lose
the day, and, consequently, thirty-six hours
more before we get to Vienna. For the first
time in my life, on this occasion I had my
baggage closely examined in Austria. I do not
know why. I had only one small carpet-bag,
and I was going to London. But the custom-
house officer, a dull stolid fellow, seemed to feel
a kind of sleepy philosophical interest in the
contents of that bag, or perhaps was seized with
a fit of absence of mind while examining it, for
he looked into and fingered and poked about the
few trumperies I had with me in a manner quite
surprising to see.

I observe that there is a brisk little business
in exchanging foreign gold at Orsova, carried on
to the very considerable advantage of somebody.
A money-changer of more moderate views would
have a fine opening there.

It is a thankless task to find fault, but it
would not be frank towards the public to
conceal that not only a great deal of time is wasted
generally at Orsova owing to faulty arrangements
somewhere. But also in the dry season, when
low water renders the Iron Gates impassable,
sufficient attention is not paid to the comforts
or necessities of the numerous travellers who
throng this great European highway. It is no
joke for delicate ladies and young children to
remain from five o'clock on a raw morning till
three in the afternoon without anything to eat,
because the commissariat officer has neglected
to provide provisions. It is no joke for feeble
invalids to see one of their last chances of life
diminished by being kept for ten hours bumping
about in little wooden springless carts, because
the company do not provide proper accommodation
to transport them from one steamer to
the other. Among so much that is pleasant,
however, we must hasten to forget a little
discomfort, merely expressing a wish that the
authorities at Vienna will examine into this
grievance and soon provide a remedy.

THE GREEN LIGHT.

"I CANNOT say much in favour of the place,
but such as it is, it is heartily at your service."
So saying, the secretary shook me cordially by
the hand, jerked out his watch, and after a hasty
glance at it, pleaded an engagement, and went
out. A clerk was left behind to fill up my
appointment, ready for the signature of the
governor of North Carolina. The latter young
gentleman, one of those long-haired youths whom
New England sends to fill subordinate posts in
the South, had a most comical expression on his
shrewd face. He rolled his eyes over the document,
pinched up his thin lips into an expressive
leer, and at last exploded into a titter. I was
not offended. I knew the Americans, especially
the Northerners, too well to expect at their
hands the same demure politeness which would
have been rendered by a European official. And
I knew, too, that Yankees seldom laugh without
a cause, and that their opinions are
commonly worth listening to.

"You seem amused," said I. " Pray tell me
whether at my desire to obtain the situation, or
at my succeeding in my endeavours?"

The clerk laid down his pen, turned his
twinkling eyes full on me, and answered:

"The reason I larfed, mister, was jest this:
you folks from the old country do the queerest
things, right out, you do. We native-born
Americans, we air that plastic and spry, we can tackle
to most; and this child has drove niggers, kept
books aboard a Ohio steamer, preached to a
congregation in Wisconsin, and sold notions to
Canada. But what you won't catch a New
Englander doing, in one while, is bein' keeper of the
Cape Hatteras lighthouse."

"Why so?" I asked, good-humouredly. " The
situation is, no doubt, a little dull, and the salary
is not high—"

"Six hundred and twenty-five dollars, fifty
cents, and a liberal allowance for wood and oil;
not so bad, nouther, for light employ,"
parenthetically remarked the clerk.

"But still," I went on, " there are advantages
in the situation. It is not an unhealthy
spot, it is cheap and quiet, and as for temptation
to expense——"

"As for them, mister, Robinson Crusoe was a
Broadway lounger, compared with what you'll be.
Snakes! why, a 'possum up a tulip-tree is in the
world, when you come to reckon him with the
keeper of that lighthouse. Since I've been here,
eleven months or there away, there's been three
fresh keepers appointed. One cut his throat. He
was a German; one died of delirium tremendous;
and the third, an Irish fellow, was drowned, or
drowned himself. To hear the secretary
palavering you as he did, about naturalisation, and
that—when we should have to get a self-acting
light, I guess, if we couldn't hire a foreigner to
kindle it."

I will own that these remarks of the young
clerk's gave me more than one melancholy hour,
and made me almost doubt whether my own
acceptance of so ill-starred and lonely a post
were a wise one. But an old English adage
declares that a certain class of persons must
not be choosers, and my purse was lank
enough to place me in the unlucky category.
I had come out to America with high hopes,
and those hopes had been lamentably baffled.
The fortune I was to have made with brush and
with the end of a burnt stick. The floors were
of rough planks, stained in many places with