"Bless me, so they are!" exclaimed Mrs. Gazza, scarcely knowing whether to trust her own eyes; "and at a very steady pace too, and all without a single thing to drag them. Look, Miss Dwyer, my chariot is running away without any horses before it! -How is this, Mr. Smith? My chariot is not a steam-chariot, and till to-day I never saw it go alone."

Mr. Smith simpered with a complacent smile, on observing the wonder of his friends at an establishment in which he was a shareholder.

"Oh, it is nothing at all!" he observed, with a nonchalance which savoured very much of vanity. "It is nothing, compared to what you will see by and bye. We found that horses were a great inconvenience in Vitrea, and so we have contrived to do very nearly without them. The whole surface of the ground, on which we are now treading, is hollowed out, and filled with machinery, which is all worked by immense steam engines: there are fifty steam-engines employed to move the different conveyances of Vitrea, besides the great one, which does the dancing at the balls in the Assembly House."

"What! - dancing by steam?" ejaculated Miss Dwyer.

"Yes, - dancing by steam!" he coolly replied; "but that you will see hereafter, and therefore I need not explain it to you now. But the fifty engines work all the conveyances. Your chariot, Mrs. Gazza, for instance, was just put upon one of the slides, which run through all the streets, and the subterranean machinery alone will carry it wherever it is required to go."

"That is very convenient," observed Miss Dwyer; "but at the same time it must be very expensive. The coals alone requisite to work so many steam-engines must cause an immense expenditure."

"Not at all," answered Mr. Smith, - " since we don't use coal..."

"Dear me!" observed Mr. Gazza with delight, "I should never have thought of applying a few hot-wells to so ingenious a purpose. I think that the ancients are very reprehensible, that they did not turn their Ætna, their Vesuvius, and above all, their Hecla, to better account. - Well, it is a comfort that we shall have no trouble in procuring horses to pay our visits with: we have only to put my old chariot on one of the slides, and we can then be wafted wherever we please..."

"But," asked the timorous divinity, "it won't run way with us, as soon as we have seated ourselves?" "Oh, no! never fear. It knows its master, and will wait to take him also."

Mr. Smith handed the ladies in, and then placed himself on the opposite seat, with his back to the horses. With a cane which he held in his hand, he tapped a very peculiar sort of devil's-tattoo upon the earth, and the car, as if it knew what was meant, immediately started off at the signal. It neither went very quick nor very slow, but kept up an agreeable even pace, till it stopped, apparently of its own accord, at the door of Mrs. Gazza's lodgings.